I know someone who wrote a (technical) book and how hard it is to get sales in the age of easy internet piracy.

I understand the desire to use the books as you please, but please remember that buying the book and downloading a pirated copy for your own use are not mutually exclusive choices.

You can still purchase the book to support the author even if you're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.

I think this is the problem that should be addressed.

Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).

Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.

I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.

"Bookcamp", anyone?

Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.

Giving money so a good thing you enjoy can continue existing really isn't a concept that's completely out there for most people. There's a thriving ecosystem of platforms for funding/tipping/donating.

There was a time I could go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, and a couple of independent bookstores. Now I can go to Barnes and Noble and the remaining independent store.

Seems like there should be some sort of new coop structure where a writer can engage with editors, graphics people, and marketers on a fee for service or sales percentage basis. Without the agent/publisher gatekeepers.

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.

At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.

In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.

One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.

It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.

Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.

Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.

And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.

I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?

The library ebook lending solutions tend not to avoid the DRM problem either.

Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.

What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.

Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.

Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.

I, too, do not buy ebooks that I cannot strip the DRM from. I would face a dilemma were I to have need of a book that I cannot get as either a physical copy or a DRM-free electronic copy, but I have not faced that situation yet.

I have spent over $2000 this year on books.

- Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity

- Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.

Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.

Because it's a Tor policy? Brandon Sanderson's ebooks are DRM-free because his publisher is Tor.

But it's also useful to point out that it isn't just Tor. Baen, best known for military scifi, has had a DRM-free policy for slightly longer than Tor. (Not just that, but the Baen Free Library is a really cool approach to ebooks as well, with DRM free copies of some of their most out-of-print/hard-to-print books and also the first book or two in nearly every series that they publish for a "try before you buy". Some of their hardcovers have even included CDs of sections of the Baen Free Library over the years.)

Baen did it first but Tor did it louder in that Tor's parent Macmillan went to bat for Tor and few other brands in a big lawsuit with Amazon that Amazon was applying their DRM whether the publisher wanted that or not because it was a lock-in moat for Amazon, which led to why there is now a required "This book is DRM free at the request of the publisher" acknowledgment on kindle copies of most Tor books (and a few other publishers).

I personally know people that pirate everything and PAY FOR PIRATING SERVICES. This blows my mind even more! I know that globally it's probably still cheaper to pay for those services rather than paying for 4 different streaming services each month, but god, if I go pirate than I would go for 0$/month expenses.

A) the content creator, owner of the IP

B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc

C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid subscription. Their added value is making it easier to access content copied by B.

D) final users, they can choose to consume content from A, B or C.

My point was that D paying for C are... weird, in my opinion.

Edit: technically there is a 5th group, like C but that do it for free, running forums etc at most hosting some banner to pay the hosting cost and not much more.

Hard disagree, lot of video game will give you a better hours of entertainment per dollars ratio.

Lot of sport will do the same, as will board games and roleplaying games. Lot of hobbies are cheaper than books.

When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'll drop the $30 on the unnecessarily large hardcover with the thick paper that fluffs it up.

I have only ever purchased one eBook though, and it was an awful experience. I had to crack the DRM so I could read it on the same app I read all my other books on.

When I buy a physical book, I can put it on my shelf and share it with anyone I want. I can't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'm going to just go find a copy online.

I basically refuse to buy physical modern fiction due to the publishing industry making every physical copy as large as possible. I have old mass-market paperbacks that have twice the density per page, thinner pages, and overall more portable than the massive soft-covers with giant print that they sell today. They're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F Berliner. From the outside, the two books have nearly the same dimensions. The latter weighs almost twice as much, has nearly 300 more pages, and the page density is nearly a third tighter. Why should both these books take up the same amount of space on my shelf? Why do publishers think they're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.

Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it's a distribution problem.

Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.

There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.

For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.

I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you're done.

We also started celebrating Jolabokaflod a few years back, which is an Icelandic post-war tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve and reading them. This is a lot of fun, and it's a great excuse to hit the book store.

One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch this exploit or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).

(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)

For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)

For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on

Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.

Thanks to Apple

>many video games are also sold without digital restrictions

Thanks to GoG and (to a lesser extent) Steam

The point you are responding to is at least partially true. Re-read it and see. Your brutal "No" only serves to discredit your own (partially true) argument.

I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).

Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.

Their loss, not mine.

This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.

I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.

I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.

Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.

Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.

https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ

Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.

I haven't done that in a while though, so I'm not sure if they closed that loophole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_Kindle_Scanner

https://vimeo.com/73675285

At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.

There are also plenty of good free books from indie authors like me (www.rodyne.com) that don't make it to Amazon. I also normally check out smashwords (www.smashwords.com) for their free books or sales, and download about 30 books - about 5 are usually worth keeping, which is about in line with Kindle books I pay for. Also worth signing up for your local library for the best-sellers, they often have partnerships to allow you to loan ebooks.

Because I did that on two books maybe 1-2 weeks ago without issue. I might be on an old version of the desktop app.

Edit: apparently it's for titles April 2025 or later