201–209 of 209 posts
I get so frustrated by these games. Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format, and there should be no postsale restrictions on any item beyond what is implied by copyright.
> Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say, 1 billion USD.
How about eliminating libraries and provide vouchers for Kindle Unlimited for the poor? Work with Amazon to create some kind of Amazon library using Kindle as the platform. People with money don’t need public libraries — you can buy pretty much anything easily. People spend $18 on a McDonalds meal, $9.99 for an ebook is nothing. Big city libraries are mostly homeless shelters at this point. I’m not going to a public…
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That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches. There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certa…
> A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy , it's the ori…
Taking intellectual property out of a conversation about intellectual property has predictably strange and totally irrelevant results. Why is that surprising?
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You should reread their post, libraries usage is incidental to what they’re talking about. Their point, that first sale should apply to ebooks, requires a fundamentally different approach to DRM. If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? Consider the case that I might have it on multiple different devices which aren’t connected to the intern…
> If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? They can't, which is the same as it is now. DRM is a farce and everything is on The Pirate Bay. Which is why restricting libraries like this is ridiculous -- anybody who doesn't care to follow the law doesn't need to get a copy from a library, they can just download it from a piracy site. The reaso…
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What about people who cannot afford a Kindle, or cannot afford to buy e-books?
A new Kindle runs less than $100 in the US (it's largely subsidised by Amazon, they want you to buy books). You can find used models for as little as $20 on Craigslist currently. Other eBook readers from firms such as Kobo or Onyx start at about $100 to $200, and again may be found used for a small fraction of that price. That's still a hurdle, but roughly the cost of a new trade-paper volume with the capability to h…
I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.
My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.
You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.
Time-limited and self-destructing book copies, as for any (digital) media, is nothing short of a cultural atrocity that only philistines could have come up with. The word "scam" is more than apt for this latest effort by the publishing industry to milk the maximum amount of profit out of something without putting in any additional work or providing any additional value in return. Asking money for doing literally nothing -- I don't think that calling that a scam goes too far. This from an industry who, like many others, keeps claiming that they are acting in the name of protecting the creatives, while having a long and flowery history of fleecing and bleeding dry those very artists.
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> Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical. It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.
Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation depending on both the reader and the publishere/author. An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely. For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a novel written by a niche author? probably not the right thing to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should reread their post, libraries usage is incidental to what they’re talking about. Their point, that first sale should apply to ebooks, requires a fundamentally different approach to DRM. If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? Consider the case that I might have it on multiple different devices which aren’t connected to the intern…
> If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? They can't, which is the same as it is now. DRM is a farce and everything is on The Pirate Bay. Which is why restricting libraries like this is ridiculous -- anybody who doesn't care to follow the law doesn't need to get a copy from a library, they can just download it from a piracy site. The reaso…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should reread their post, libraries usage is incidental to what they’re talking about. Their point, that first sale should apply to ebooks, requires a fundamentally different approach to DRM. If I own my content and can put it on any device I want, how can the seller be sure I’m only using one copy at a time? Consider the case that I might have it on multiple different devices which aren’t connected to the intern…
I'm not sure if the librarians in the article meant this but that's beside the point. The publishers can enforce a DRM on their side such that only one reader gets it at a time and adjust the contracts with the libraries accordingly, no need for fancy quantum stuff for client-side DRM.