291–300 of 560 posts
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I don't think I follow. There's no recommendation engine in AA, right? Do you download a bunch of books from AA, read them, then if you happened to like one enough, you will buy it from a local bookstore?
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That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything beca…
The default is to not buy something . People don't like loosing money. If you can get something without loosing money, it's super easy to rationalize why you you're skipping the loose money part. People tend to make decisions which are in their financial interest.
I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY…
I'm exactly the same. I tend to get the first book of any series that interests me and read a third before I decide whether to buy it or not. I do buy about 3-4 books a month (mostly epub drm free preferred) plus about 10 european graphic novels (paper books only) a month so I'm a heavy consumer I think.
I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p
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> Authors and rights holders are supposed to just take it? If it's judged as fair use, then yes. And then it's not flouting anything. Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim. For example, nonfiction authors already "just take it" when reviews describe the main points of their book without paying t…
>the whole point of fair use is to benefit society I'll stop you right there - I really don't think that applies at all. Does 'society' really benefit when the whole thing is a funnel for enormous amounts of wealth to go to already-gigantic companies like Microsoft?
I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY…
On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
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> Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media t…
I would not buy a book after downloading it from Anna's archive. But that's the wrong question in my opinion. You should be asking why aren't most books available in a DRM free format? The main reason to download "pirated" books is that they get rid of all annoying barriers that exist in "legitimate" copies. It's a better product .
Also, they provide a torrents list that anyone can seed and be part of the long-term preservation. https://annas-archive.org/torrents
I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.
I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.
The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
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Satoshi's pride: * ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship * lists with a single item still count as lists
> ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard
I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY…
> Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media t…
The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.
The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.
For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.