This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.

I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.

I download epubs from zlib but then they're on my phone and transferring them to my Kobo is arduous. This makes it easy.

If you mean stripping drm I used Calibre for that but mostly I just avoid buying books with drm where possible.

https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin

I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed.

Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This has led to buying way more than I would have.

Anyway, I appreciate this doesn't apply if you live somewhere that these books can't be purchased. But everyone praising these sorts of sites tends to look at them from only a positive perspective.

I remember opening "thinking fast and slow" and noticing the weird paging. After checking the official version's page count and seeing how the version in my hand doesn't match, my best guess was that someone had printed a pirated epub version.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect.

Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a last resort.

(Archiving culture alone is not the same as also enabling universal access to the culture and knowledge one is acting as custodian for and serving to global citizens)

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - September 2024 (793 comments)

https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation

Totally unrelated: Dweb camp 2026 is coming up for those interested: https://dwebcamp.org/

(no affiliation with any person or entity mentioned in this comment)

I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.

I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?

Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.

If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)

100+ year copyrights only help the descendants of the people that have already become extraordinarily wealthy. Cutting off at 2 decades would have close to 0 effect on the huge majority of creatives, while benefitting society immensely. JK Rowling would still be a billionaire, and small authors would be fine too.

While the current copyright length indeed seems excessive, looking at the most successful and determining fairness seems very untoward. As it stands now, an author could build up a library of their writings, and perhaps even sell it for their retirement, as it has value.

Is that what is happening often for indie novelists? I don't know, but to others in this thread know?

I know you were just musing, but I really dislike this "let's create a hyper-invasive tax framework, so that anyone who etches out a little wealth has it capped" concept. There's no wealth to redistribute, not in the way people think. Money isn't real. It's just an indicator of things. In some cases, it's an indicator that someone owns a lot of stock in a company that could be worth 1/20th of its value tomorrow, after a crash, and further is valued at hundreds or thousands of times the actual value of the company today.

In such cases, it's often an indicator of capacity to steer the economy, not of any tangible wealth.

But people need something to strive for. Wealth is one of those things. In a free market economy, wealth is the reward for job well done. It does make people hustle. It's not perfect, but we've seen how poorly and incapable any centrally planned economy seems to be.

As a Canadian, I do believe the government should be involved in certain things. I have a post office, schools, police stations, fire department, food inspections, and so no on that the government is involved in, so I think health care makes sense too. Yet I absolutely do not believe the government should be planning most sectors of the economy, nor should it be meddling too deeply in the wealth ratios of its citizens.

To put this in that context, would you want to have the current US administration determine how every sector of the economy works, and how people are paid, etc, etc, eg central planning? Can you imagine?

Of course there is nuance. Of course there are exceptions. But overall management of individual wealth seems very invasive to me.

If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.

The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.

There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.

As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.

In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.

In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.

This discussion is intellectually dishonest. Either some people here genuinely dont understand the concepts of kindness and gratitude, or they do understand them and are just choosing to spread falsehoods anyway.

Just because my beer pub isnt going out of business because you took some free beers doesnt make it ethical for you to exploit my kindness and use those free beers to build your own competing beer pub.

If people are still confused: that setup is not sharing knowledge. It is stealing with nicer branding to help you and your friends sleep at night.

What matter at the end of the day is not what the document pretend about who possess what, but how people feel in their life, what they can access to, and what they are bared to access for which actual reason.

It can't even be purely narrowed on what human people feel like. We all know our species is dependent on many physical phenomena and other species which owe nothing to us.

You can question ownership in the abstract, and I am not even against that conversation. But that does not answer the actual point here. We still live in a world where food, rent, healthcare, clothing, hygiene, servers, tools, and time all cost money.

So if someone gives something away out of kindness, access, public benefit, or community spirit, that does not automatically mean everyone else is entitled to industrialize that kindness for their own business.

Open source is not a mystical anti-property pact.

Open source is not a contract where people are expected to provide endless unpaid labour for others to build businesses on top of. At some point this stops being a discussion about sharing knowledge and becomes a way to justify taking advantage of people’s work.

I just don't like these replies, if this was sarcasm, it might not have worked for me. I just find these social comparisons deeply unserious when the discussions are against theft or harm done to actual people with actual human needs.

We, as "anyone online able to read this", certainly are pushed by social pressure to consider world through that kind of lenses. Not sure money mean anything for any animist tribe isolated in Amazonia.

We can even consider costs, without talking about money. We can for example deem attention span, ecological impact, human relationship, emotional burden. So many things that money tend to weight zero in its process to flatten judgements to dull "well ordered" scalars.

Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.

I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.

Open source licenses are almost entirely unrelated. They're strictly a hack around the copyright system, and not only that, they literally do nothing other than grant you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. Talking about open source is mostly a distraction. When people say knowledge is free they almost always mean access to knowledge. Open source grants people access and more.

People are not mad that they can't just steal things, they're mad that access to things is tied behind massive gatekeepers (essentially indefinitely...) that essentially exist to continue to enrich themselves while somehow almost none of the money makes it back to the authors, and is sometimes completely untethered from where the money comes from that funds the works to begin with. You can't just freely navigate, search through and consume information, it's all tied up behind various pay walls and monetization schemes while authors starve anyways.

We could have a more equitable and reasonable system that allows broad access to knowledge while providing some approach to monetization that is reasonable for both people seeking it out and people consuming it. There's little point in trying to enumerate the number of ways it could be done. We already have a system for taxes, we already have seen commercial schemes like Spotify, you could slice it thousands of different ways. Plenty of pros and cons. I'm just saying it could be done and we know it could be done.

But it can never work if all media and knowledge dominated by rent seeking gatekeepers standing in the middle whose primary purpose will always be to enrich themselves first and foremost. They will always want to get more and give less, because that is more or less their fiduciary duty.

Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.

But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.

Paradox of tolerance: to maintain a tolerant society one must be intolerant of intolerance.

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

Your proposal: to make information free one must restrict how information can be used.

The biggest hole in your argument is just the MIT and BSD licenses. Sure what you say might apply to the GPL and other copyleft licenses - but MIT/BSD are as close to no-strings attached as can be achieved in our current legal framework.

So, clearly plenty of people are happy to freely give up ownership of their works. But others value keeping the code out in the open - not zero restrictions.

This is analogous to the paradox of tolerance, because they both rely on eliminating the variability in what people want when it comes to free knowledge or a tolerant society, and they both rely on using words to create a false dichotomy: tolerant vs intolerant, free vs restrictive. A tolerant society is still tolerant event if it is “intolerant” of murder - just because i used an antonym doesn’t mean those are the same exact concepts being negated.

To be considered open source software, the license cannot impose any restrictions on how the software is used. You are free to use the software for whatever purpose you want.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt (see History section)

For most physical objects and concepts, distribution isn’t a subset of use. e.g. the post office. You can be a user, but you have no ability to distribute the post office - because that’s not a thing that is possible or makes sense. In that case distribution is not a subset of use. Other examples: most saas, e.g. gmail. Good luck distributing gmail.

That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful, instead of the profit of the multinational leeches that do not need to adhere to laws, borders or taxes.

If a zillion dollar corporations (Meta and the likes) can torrent Annas Archive and decimate the copyrights I see it a moral imperative for the people to do the same and spare the pennies that would profit the publishing / media / ... industries to support the authors directly, instead of the trickle up method, where majority goes in to the hands of the dystopican narcissist zillionaire.

I am dependend on government not giving subsidies to my competition. I am dependend on them not to raise taxes. I even depend on them for keeping the infrastrukture alive. If I cant trust the state I life in, it is time to move to a different state.

To me it makes you more dependent on the other people in your society - only if you don't earn more than the BI of course.

That is true under Western Capitalism too, you're already dependent on your society, unless you filter and pump your own water; grow your own food; generate your own power; make your own devices; school your own children; do your own healthcare, etc.

For those reliant on BI, instead of greed being the moderator through which your income is determined, it is determined through the democratic processes of state.

Now, if your have an oligarchic dictatorship like USA and Russia, sure you'd need to be particularly worried if you were relying on BI. If you've got a strong democracy (probably true of any country with state-run services that are competitively priced) then BI should work if there's enough total income that it can be redistributed.

I think there are problems with BI though.

>> That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful

I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

BI is about letting people do whatever they like especially if it is meaningless. BI implies an economy (you have to spend the Income on something) so meaningful will always be richly rewarded.

Incidentally publishers exist to act as curators and filters. The value they add is real. There's no shortage of self-published stuff on say Amazon, but 99% of it is drivel. I go into a bookshop to find the 1% that at least someone thinks is worth reading.

Similarly, there are a number of things that would be incredibly meaningful to all of society (eradication of disease, nuclear fusion, etc) that we choose to deprioritise to instead eat fois gras and fight.

Sorry to jump down your throat on this, we're on the same side, I think BI is inevitable and worthwhile. But it's worth pointing out that BI enables more than just the meaningless things.

We are already spending massive amounts of money on disease, fusion and so on. There's no issue there, and BI doesn't move that needle.

At the moment society (especially in the US) operates on a "add value or starve" basis. (That's an over simplification, but the underlying "morality" us strong in that direction.)

BI moves the needle for those who are not "adding value" (in a materialistic sense.) Artists and Authors are free to spend their time creating works, of which a rounding error will have any value. Sure there's some unappreciated author out there cranking out literature, but there's also everyone else cranking out rubbish.

BI doesn't make 'big things' easier to do. Arguably it makes them harder. Rather it allows individuals to gain satisfaction from little things. Budding poets can write all day long. But if (great) poetry is currently ignored, do not expect much on that front.

I say this not to denigrate BI but rather because allowing the meaningless is precisely its goal. To miss that is to miss the point. It allows people to find worth and dignity without having to add value to society.

I think you’re getting pushback because of this choice of language. It’s not the only goal, but it is a key feature. BI supports choices of how to spend your time and enables freedoms.

I think this is wrong. It's not about value, it's about being submissive.

Cultural reasons are just a matter of spindoctoring/propaganda.

Nixon almost implemented a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Assistance_Plan

In Alaska there's already a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

BI by contrast values people over money. It recognises not just the social responsibility of the rich to the poor, but also the dignity of being human.

Some countries are further along that path than others. Health care, education, unemployment benefits, are all steps towards BI. The wealthy are taxed to pay for the poor. Ultimately the suppresses the excess, while raising the floor.

From a cultural point of view, the US has many steps to take before society is really for (real) BI.

Almost half of US federal tax payers pay 0 income tax.

That seems like a screwy but ultimately more than fair deal for the top 10%.

Especially when the alternative is pitchforks and torches.

> The percentage of workers belonging to a union (or total labor union "density") varies by country. In 2024 it was 9.4% in the United States, compared to 20.1% in 1983, the first year with data suitable for comparison.[2]: 1 [3] There were 14.3 million members in the U.S. in 2022, down from 17.7 million in 1983.[2][3] Union membership in the private sector has fallen to 6.0%, one fifth that of public sector workers, at 33.1% (2022).[2][3] From a global perspective, in 2016 the US had the fifth lowest labor union density of the 36 OECD member nations

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

Once meetings and documentation is working, decide on a small issue that you know that more people in the workplace are annoyed by and would be an easy fix for the organisation. Then you write to the relevant boss and present the demand. Either they fix it voluntarily, or you wait a while and then you write to them again and add a demand to have a meeting about the issue.

Escalate slowly and methodically, and when you get the win, lay low for a bit and use it to recruit. Make all decisions by consensus in the beginning, don't start with majority decisions until most or all of the workers in the department have joined. Always escalate slowly and gradually, until you have the power to shut the entire organisation down on a short notice.

Act in a way that makes your union predictable to the bosses. Corporate management is easily confused and you'll prefer them to negotiate over lashing out wildly. When people are inevitably fired, keep in contact with them, both personally and through routines you establish in the union. Some people are unsuited for negotiation, documentation and so on but are good at doing phone calls and checking up on previous members and reporting back.

Focus entirely on things that are important to make the daily work less dangerous, more convenient, more rewarding. Small steps, low hanging fruit first, only one issue at a time. When you have a success, send a note about it to some local labour friendly organisation or publication.

Don't waste time on identity politics, everyone in the workplace who isn't a boss is a worker regardless of what they do or how they're compensated, the union does not need a name or bank account until you have federated with quite a large amount of people. You don't need to register some association to have meetings and make decisions, that's for when you have like a few hundred people and want to throw parties and have conferences and things like renting a place requires you to register with some bureaucracy.

That would never happen, in the US. We have a strong “Why do they get special treatment?” thing going on.

I guess we know that Ph.D Research/Teaching Assistants tend to be worked to death, and paid peanuts.

The whiners would be OK with that.

> Cultural reasons are just a matter of spindoctoring/propaganda.

This is a mechanism that’s very narrow and creates notable distortions between financial and artistic value, just to keep the example specific enough.

I’m also going to take issue with this interpretation of “meaningful” - I’ve known several amazing crafters and artists who have had an incredibly hard time doing their craft simply because the demands of capitalism prevent them from putting the time and effort into honing those skills, finding a market, creating a portfolio, etc.

If anything, I think BI is just as likely to add meaningfully to society as it is to give people the option to do meaningless things.

It’s worth pointing out that violating a FOSS license is ALWAYS about denying users rights the upstream already gave them. Violating a FOSS license is stealing from your users.

In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification.

But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.

Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing.

For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.

If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?

we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free?

what exactly is the contradiction?

Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power.

It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same.

What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.

Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.

If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.

Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.

So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.

Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight.

> Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.

Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).

So it’s ok to take what they produced without paying for it? What a weird non sequitur.

Someday, some pro-piracy lunatic will come up with something vaguely coherent that isn’t just “me want, me get.”

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer

There are probably a few thousand of these in the entire United States. The market system heavily under-values writing as is, independent of piracy

Constant payment into perpetuity for the replication of digital information is just a form of rent-seeking. Except, unlike a landlord, you're not obligated to correct defects.

To put it into perspective: even *free* services can be completely inaccessible here if they require payment info for verification purposes.

Acquiring hard currency to spend online is truly a bureaucratic nightmare, and even if you manage it, the annual limit is strictly capped (at around $300).

Some of my published work is pirated heavily. That's not my main income source, so I just shrug and let it go. If anything, I'm probably happy that people are reading my work. Especially if it's people that can't afford it, I'm glad they enjoy my work -- those books got pretty high reader ratings, and it seems to me many readers are actually reading the pirated version.

But I do have friends that depend on this income source, and fighting piracy has become a part of their day job. It's not a fun thing to do, they'd rather spend time working on their next story, but they still have to do this everyday. I feel for them.