Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#31

Post by _jal » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

I've been very poor (more than once), and I'm currently quite comfortable. I've always read a lot, and would be in a very different place if I hadn't. Using libraries has been a big part of that, but they are of course much less useful for cutting-edge tech topics. I'm limiting this to those, in situations where you think absorbing the book will improve your chops.

You should buy the book, because this makes both you and the author better off.

But if you can't, you should read it anyway, because at least one of you is benefiting. You can buy the book later when you're in a better place, or at least pay it forward in some other way.

The only thing worse than not getting paid for your work is your unpaid work not being used at all.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#32

Post by AnonC » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

I stopped buying books when I realized that I don’t really read most of them (blame short attention span). So I pirate a lot of books, which also, for the most part, remain unread. If I read a book and really like it, then I’d look at buying a DRM free ebook copy of it. I also buy ebooks when they’re on sale at a low price.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#33

Post by sampo » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

jamiek88 wrote: post #10

supernova87a wrote: post #5

I can sympathize with the desire to see your favorite books put online for more people to read. I for example, am a big fan of the book "Waves & Beaches" by Willard Bascom, a long out-of-print book on the physics, dynamics of the ocean (and the spirit of longing to understand the nature of the sea), but which always only could be found for >$30 on Ebay or something like that. I finally bought a copy (out of nostalgia…

Upload to libgen is the best way to share things like that. I'm not goint to upload the latest JK King Grisham page turner but an obscure gardening book where the author is long dead? Yes that is getting uploaded. For the culture.

"Waves and Beaches" (1964 edition) is already in libgen.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#34

Post by clumsysmurf » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

vector_spaces wrote: post #17

Safari Books Online (I think recently rebranded as O'Reilly Online) is a pretty decent value -- about $49 USD a month for access to most O'Reilly, PragProg, Manning, and quite a few other non-programmer focused publishing houses like Academic Press. Between that subscription, my scribd subscription (which has plenty of unauthorized titles in addition to its authorized titles), and PDFs I'm able to find elsewhere, I'm…

I have Safari, and find it to be a poor value. Here are a few reasons

(1) you can't read books in your browser while offline (2) many publishers don't contribute to Safari (Springer, MIT Press, etc) (3) publishers that are technically on Safari don't publish their whole catalog (Wiley) (4) Publishers that are on Safari, and do publish their whole catalog, may take months, a year even to put their books online (Wrox). (5) A lot of the books in the catalog are from Packt, which I consider noise.

So, while I do have Safari, I use it as a last resort and buy the DRM-free PDFs from publishers that have then (Manning, Prag Prog, etc) even if they are in Safari.

This past week, my account got corrupted. I lost about one years worth of Playlists that I put much effort into curating. All gone. Support was able to get me a CSV file of a known good state, but its going to be a PITA to manually recreate everything again. I might not bother.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#35

Post by Iv » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 4:14 AM UTC

This title just wants me to still throw a useless stone in an already lost battle: "book piracy" used to mean "Steal a book content and sell it putting you as the author". That's the original meaning of the word.

Copyright-infriging a book does not sound as serious as "piracy" or "theft" but these two words are actually misused.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#36

Post by boksboksboks » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

breck wrote: post #19

sillysaurusx wrote: post #6

Book piracy is a big reason I've been able to learn as much as I know about ML. I don't know how to feel about it. All I know is that I'm more effective than I would've been if I had to pay for the books, since I wouldn't have read anything. It's common on HN to pretend that everyone here is an affluent programmer working for FAANG with $500k/yr in stock vesting. In reality, I've spoken to many who are more along the…

> I don't know how to feel about it. Don't feel bad at all. Intellectual Monopoly laws are morally wrong (and I would argue counterproductive if the goal is progress of the arts and sciences and/or economic growth). I hope that when the generation that grew up with the web is making the laws we'll get rid of these abysmal systems. The author of the comment you referencing is wrong. Copying a book that has been releas…

So how would you better compensate writers for the product of their knowledge and labor? IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#37

Post by kick » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 6:20 AM UTC

sampo wrote: post #33

jamiek88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upload to libgen is the best way to share things like that. I'm not goint to upload the latest JK King Grisham page turner but an obscure gardening book where the author is long dead? Yes that is getting uploaded. For the culture.

"Waves and Beaches" (1964 edition) is already in libgen.

No OCR.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#38

Post by paggle » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

I downloaded several thousand ebooks and read about 10 of them. I’ve also bought more ebooks than I’ve pirated and read, and the ones that I didn’t read barely even happened... just a transfer of bits from one drive to another.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#39

Post by input_sh » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

Simon_says wrote: post #30

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher battery life? The Kindle battery lasts much longer than a phone with the backlight off and in airplane mode. But again, even if a phone could be used as an ereader, my point is that for most people it is likely not. Even for bibliophiles, they might not get so much reading done on a phone due to the distractions that phones bring.

I meant battery life is now longer on phones than it used to be on phones, assuming you're using it as an ebook reader, which means no radios.

That still can't be compared to an average eReader, whose battery lasts for weeks.

I charge mine every two or three weeks (about an hour of usage per day).

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#40

Post by copperx » Sat, Dec 14, 2019, 7:39 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #6

Book piracy is a big reason I've been able to learn as much as I know about ML. I don't know how to feel about it. All I know is that I'm more effective than I would've been if I had to pay for the books, since I wouldn't have read anything. It's common on HN to pretend that everyone here is an affluent programmer working for FAANG with $500k/yr in stock vesting. In reality, I've spoken to many who are more along the…

"Buy or pirate" is a false dichotomy when there are good public and University libraries available; which is true for most big cities in the US. They will not stock the latest tech books, but you can easily get them through an interlibrary loan.