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bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion still up on TOR. fuck them i aint paying for my textbooks. never had a book bill higher than $50 and not about to start now.
Textbook prices are outrageous, I am not paying for a £60 textbook that I will only use for the question banks
Boy, wouldn't that be nice. A standard calculus book costs $200 in America. Or, £178 (RIP pounds)
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If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.
No, the impact is different. The library doesn't pay for the ebook just once. When the library buys the ebook, they're allowed to lend it a certain number of times before they have to buy the book again. Or they pay for a number of lends per day and payments for the books checked out are distributed to the appropriate publishers. The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less di…
Indeed. The publisher charges universities etc. a one time lump sum to purchase N copies of a book. The author gets next to nothing.
Source: am an author of technical books. Royalties will buy me a few cardboard boxes.
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As the previous commenter has already said, the author has been paid already in the first case. That's a material difference.
It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, criminalizing merely observing something and independently reproducing it with your own private materials for your own non-commercial use. IMO it shakes to the core free market, capitalist, and founding principles of our nation.
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My wife has a Kindle, we wanted to buy an ebook to support the author but didn't want to go through Amazon anymore because it's Amazon. So we tried buying from Kobo and surprise surprise, they only work with their ereaders because of their shitty DRM! So now Kobo has permanently lost us as a customer too. Great job there folks!
Kobo doesn’t force books to use DRM, for example: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-way-of-kings-1 Tor Publishing Group Release Date: August 31, 2010 Imprint: Tor Books ISBN: 9781429992800 Language: English Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free) But if you’re only browsing the books that choose not to use it, it’s certainly a smaller selection
Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to explicitly search for DRM-free titles, but the description for these usually has a sentence like "made available DRM-free at the publisher's request", or is lacking the reference to "use limited to x devices simultaneously".
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As the previous commenter has already said, the author has been paid already in the first case. That's a material difference.
It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, criminalizing merely observing something and independently reproducing it with your own private materials for your own non-commercial use. IMO it shakes to the core free market, capitalist, and founding principles of our nation.
As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.
I think people who know it's stealing, but are willing to download books anyway because of their personal risk/reward calculation (or perhaps they dislike the author and don't mind stealing from him!), have an intact moral compass: They know right from wrong.
I wonder about people who try to rationalize the crime of book-stealing away. Do they know right from wrong?
I won't judge people who decide to steal books, but I don't like those who try to argue it's not theft.
As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.
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If a book (even an ebook) is in the library, it's already bought and paid for so the author gets whatever compensation they get as if it is a normal sale. I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are, but, by using libraries, you are supporting the arts, whether you liked the book or not, and this is not a silly distinction.
So essentially, we have a system where a public entity (public libraries) is compensating authors for creating works that are popular. But going through a middle man (the publisher, and possibly one or more distributors) that takes a considerable cut. In the digital age, why not cut out the middle man? Have a publicly funded e-library that pays authors directly based on how often their content is downloaded.
You can't just arbitrarily decide that only one party "deserves" to make money from the book, and doing so would probably lead to a lawsuit.
Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…
Well damn, I guess I’ve gotta figure out how to get 30+TB of storage. Does anybody have any suggestions for doing that as cheaply as possible?
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I wouldn't mind so much if the books that do use their DRM were able to work with other ereaders, but they aren't because this technology is garbage.
Main reason I mind is because DRM a) creates "artificial scarcity" of an effectively "infinitely" and freely duplicate-able resource (digital bits of data) mostly to fulfill the bottomless greed-hole of corporate entities (rather than to enrich the original creator for their part in it), and b) (and this is the main reason I hate DRM) because it gives some bottomless pit of greed corporate entity the ability to arbit…
The music industry was the same, initially – and maybe MP3s would still be sold with DRM by default if it wasn't for Steve Jobs and the iTunes store back in the day.
There's hope, though: With very few exceptions, German e-books are also sold without DRM these days.