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List of DRM-Free Bookshops

libreture.com

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Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#81

Post by southernplaces7 »

tene80i wrote: post #68
southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

My motivation? I'd think it's pretty clear. I'm offering (for those few who don't know) an options for obtaining books DRM-free and free in a landscape that has become positively shitty to any standard notion of owning the things you bought to supposedly own them. If Amazon and others want to do this, then I have no obligation to respect their DRM, and if authors want to sell their books through such a rigged format, I also shouldn't feel guilty about respecting rules against piracy.

All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.

I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#82

Post by iggldiggl »

Mindwipe wrote: post #78
didntcheck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd p…

Size is absolutely a factor in that most ebooks can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't.

> can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't

The average pop song at average bitrates would fit that limit, though, too, even with less room to spare.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#83

Post by tene80i »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #81
tene80i wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

My motivation? I'd think it's pretty clear. I'm offering (for those few who don't know) an options for obtaining books DRM-free and free in a landscape that has become positively shitty to any standard notion of owning the things you bought to supposedly own them. If Amazon and others want to do this, then I have no obligation to respect their DRM, and if authors want to sell their books through such a rigged format,…

I wasn’t browbeating. I was curious about your moral justification, and you’ve made that clear. You feel that anyone who publishes using DRM (whether they have any idea or not, or any choice or not) doesn’t deserve to be compensated for your enjoyment of their labour. You won’t boycott them or sacrifice anything, as a principled stand against this thing you object to. You’ll just read their books and not pay.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#84

Post by BrianHenryIE »

tene80i wrote: post #68
southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

I bought a book on Amazon recently and when it got delivered, I was too lazy to get off the couch to get it and I just downloaded it. Now I have the physical book and a copy that's convenient to open/reference whenever and wherever I am.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#85

Post by II2II »

Mindwipe wrote: post #75
hofrogs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal; Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.

Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them? This is an odd strawman to tilt at.

I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences.

LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?

The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?

I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#86

Post by robbiep »

trescenzi wrote: post #36
robbiep wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left my kindle in a train in Italy last week… am I boned?

You can find your serial number for your kindle in your Amazon account. Forget exactly where but it’s something like “manage content and devices. You don’t need the physical device.

Thanks. couple hundred clicks to go but successfully downloading the files

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#87

Post by tene80i »

BrianHenryIE wrote: post #84
tene80i wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

I bought a book on Amazon recently and when it got delivered, I was too lazy to get off the couch to get it and I just downloaded it. Now I have the physical book and a copy that's convenient to open/reference whenever and wherever I am.

Yes this approach is great. Everybody is being paid, and you have the freedom of multiple formats. No one is getting screwed, because no one expects people to buy books in multiple formats (except perhaps audiobooks, which are different because you also have the reader who deserves to be paid). It would be nice to see publishers embrace this sort of flexibility (e.g. with a download code printed in the book?), but the use case might be quite niche for most readers so it feels unlikely.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#88

Post by mdp2021 »

II2II wrote: post #85
Mindwipe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them? This is an odd strawman to tilt at.

I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences. LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an…

Critical points nailed. This current weird state of the world is missing the basic principles, which must be stressed. I find them trivial, but the social (and political) issue is, they are not to many actors.

There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#89

Post by gherard5555 »

tene80i wrote: post #67
gherard5555 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no fun allowed

Do you like being paid for your work? Why deprive others of the fun of getting it for free?

You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#90

Post by greenie_beans »

plorg wrote: post #5

After the recent press for Bookshop.org I saw an author I like had a new book and thought I'd try out the service - I am okay with paying slightly more for a book if the money is going to someone other than Amazon. But I should have looked twice, because Bookshop ebooks are not DRM free unless the publisher explicitly opts for it, and DRM encumbered books can only be read on their website or in their app. I know that…

it's not bookshop.org's fault. blame the publishers
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