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What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

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Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#111

Post by Marsymars »

atmavatar wrote: post #110
Marsymars wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company. No, it's for fundamentally different reasons. Physical property rights exist to protect people. IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that…

> (copyright, that expire) For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire. Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation. Average US life expectancy is 79 years, hu…

Well, I'm not American, and the regulatory capture that you describe, and America's efforts to impose it on the world in order to benefit American corporations is detrimental to society at large.

But even if copyright takes a long time to expire, there's still a pile of culturally significant stuff coming into public domain every year. e.g. it's good that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are now in the public domain.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#112

Post by boznz »

the_af wrote: post #101
boznz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.

I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations. Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble. I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.

Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each year.

Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#113

Post by notatoad »

Amazon doesn’t care what you do, piracy isn’t a threat to Amazon, they just want to deliver the drm that the publishers demand in the easiest way possible. And they’ve made a fairly reasonable business decision that a customer who hasn’t bought a new kindle in ~15 years isn’t an important source of revenue worth supporting old devices for.

And yeah, it sucks. But it’s the ecosystem you bought into when you bought a kindle. This is what drm does. If you care about open systems, support them.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#114

Post by themadturk »

shimman wrote: post #43
Cider9986 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't cut out the publisher.

Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Maybe a random lieutenant of hell versus Lucifer's advisor here. You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.

Most publishers demand their ebooks be sold with DRM. This can be seen as an aspect of "evil."

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#115

Post by themadturk »

rickdeckard wrote: post #86
mmmlinux wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad, I remember when kindles came with a free 3g connection and web browser.

funny enough, just noticed on jailbreak that my kindle touch web-browser never lost its "beta" label, in all those years :)

Kobos have web browsers, and they have be in "beta" forever as well.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#116

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

shinycode wrote: post #40
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #4

> Well, from now on the workflow will be: > - Find the book I want on Amazon. > - Buy it. > - Find the same book on a torrent site. > - Download it. > - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable. Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem. Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the…

Actually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.

Sure, that sounds grand, but if setting up a little store is too much to ask, I'd settle for a consistent way to just send them money.

I'd love it if voluntary payment could be mobilized to the point where it's more profitable to authors than the shit treatment they're getting from Amazon. For many, piracy is about rejecting the problematic distribution mechanism, not stinginess. It would be great to have a way to provably put our money where our mouths are (provably, because making Amazon look bad is part of the fun).

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#117

Post by Aarostotle »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #105
Aarostotle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it. In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project. Surely you agre…

> Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root Intellectual property rights came about when The Church wanted to use them to prevent people from using printing presses to distribute the wrong kind of bible. They have nothing to do with property in the sense of something that you lose access to when it gets stolen.

It appears that you read the first clause of the first line, grepped your dogmas, and posted the first thing that came back.

My existing post already precludes your point.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#118

Post by Aarostotle »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #103
Aarostotle wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad. You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it. Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.

Where do you get inalienable from? Whatever rights to property you enjoy are granted by the consensus of the people around you. If you piss them off enough, they'll revoke those rights.

The idea that rights are inalienable is a fundamental moral principle of every modern free society. People can violate your rights. That doesn't mean that your rights go away. If someone steals your laptop, you do not lose your right to that property. If the people around you form a mob and burn down your house, they haven't revoked your rights, they have committed a moral crime against you — they've violated your rights.

I wonder if your question is facetious or ignorant, but I will answer you as though it is earnest: I get it from great thinkers such as John Locke, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. To the extent that you support any kind of civilizational progress, you have these thinkers and their ideas to thank.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#119

Post by the_af »

joe_mamba wrote: post #108
the_af wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors. I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?

You said it's easy to disrupt, as per the quote, and I showed you it really isn't easy to disrupt, because if it was, someone else would have attempted it already. Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.

No.

You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy".

Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a dumb cliche and also uncalled for, since I was merely writing my opinion, not challenging you or calling you out.

> and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.

The HN guidelines ask you to reply to the most charitable interpretation of a comment. Do you honestly think that's what you did with your millionaire comment?

> someone else would have attempted it already.

You don't know that it hasn't (or isn't being attempted), and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does. Like you said, especially now in the age of LLMs, and especially with Amazon become worse and worse.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#120

Post by the_af »

boznz wrote: post #112
the_af wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations. Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble. I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.

Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each…

True in principle, but I find in practice the Hugo and Nebula seldom disappoint me (in the sense of having wasted my time, not that every winner is a masterpiece). And these are not the only prizes (or genres), I just mentioned two. There are also magazines, reviews, etc. Sometimes following an author you like on Twitter or whatever helps see what they like.

Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.

In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...

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