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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

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491–500 of 560 posts

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#491
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it was shown that piracy increases sales for books. For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.

Even if that might be the case now, I doubt that holds if piracy becomes truly widespread. I would suspect A pirates book B and tells C about it, C buys book B is a lot more common than A pirates book B and likes it enough to buy it I have no data to support this, and while I have paid for things I could access for free, but I'm sufficiently pessimistic about human nature to think that's the norm.

"Despite the data, I continue to guess that in the future my hypothesis will be true."

Bold. Not inherently incorrect, but not optimally heuristic.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#492
post #352

remember guys, it's not pirating, it's gathering date from AI model training purposes. Perfectly legal.

That would be a valid argument if they weren’t redistributing the data verbatim.

"Valid"? In a legal sense? Moral?

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it then that they love doing? Is there a long-term thrill in being a piracy site? I don't think so. No truth in the angel story but they do say "it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".

> What is it then that they love doing? They're earning a fuck ton of money, that's what they're doing. Just like megaupload back in the days, they sell premium accounts for fast download speeds and no queue.

If you do good, and also make money doing it, are you somehow bad?

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#494

Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.

I'm sorry you feel that way and it's understandable to be frustrated by them allowing piracy of something you've worked so long on. That being said, do you know if their offering of your material has had a significant impact on your revenue or is it more the principal of the matter?

"I coulda been somebody! I coulda been a contender!"

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#496
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.

it works and is getting better. still no mainstream adoption though.

Cool. I might go back to it sometime some time! I really liked the routing protocol and the ease of setting up services for it.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#497
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless something changed recently, every title on Downpour is DRM free when bought (as opposed to rented). I've been using Downpour for more than a decade and own tons of books. Libro.fm is slightly newer and IMO has slightly nicer UX, but both websites have mostly the same (wide) selection of titles. I can't tell you why publishers make the decisions they do, but there's no trick here, if that's what you're asking.…

If only sales on downpour were possible outside the US. I just tried to buy a K. J. Parker. Does not sell to the EU. I haven't tested libro.fm because their ToS doesn't tell me if non-US sales are prohibited and I'm not going to make an account just to try.

Hmm, I'm in the US, but this page would seem to at least indicate libro.fm at least supports multiple countries? I don't know what the selection is like though. https://support.libro.fm/support/solutions/articles/48001183...

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#498
post #140

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…

Back when you couldn't buy most idSoftware games here I had to go out of my way to let an online buddy of mine with a non-German Steam account buy and gift the collection to me. So it does happen. And I even got quite some duplicates as I had managed to buy some, just not all of them.

> you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read

TBH personally I find that a much more convoluted reason. It might be an edge case of "I will watch this clip of horrible person to get the original source" but actively seeking out material for free just so that they get nothing, but I can consume it in whole? That sounds really rare to me.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#499

"Anna’s Archive itself has organized some of the largest scrapes: we acquired tens of millions of files from IA Controlled Digital Lending" Not really helping in the big picture, here, guys.

People have likely already been mirroring it quietly for years. IRL, "scanparties" used to be a thing if you were in the "bookz scene" around the turn of the century. (Where you and a small group of others go to a public library, hit the limits of your library cards and often clear out entire sections of shelves focused around a particular topic, meet someplace to scan/"cam" everything you borrowed as quickly as you…

I used to do that with blurays when I was uploading releases to TPB.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name Satoshi Nakamoto literally translates to "central intelligence."

Not according to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41449007

IMO The person making those claims has a very trollish comment history and I suspect they do not actually have deep knowledge of the Japanese language or culture, especially surrounding names and kanji.

The name "Satoshi" exists in kanji form in hundreds of different ways, and as you can imagine, the meanings for those are quite varied. One such common example, 智, does in fact mean intelligence, and can be read as "Satoshi", but there are other examples as well. You can search the ENAMDICT here: http://wwwjdic.biz/cgi-bin/wwwjdic

If you think about this name from the perspective of someone who probably isn't a Japanese expert, but is trying to come up with a believable-sounding name that has a semi-secret meaning like this, I think it makes perfect sense.

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