（评论）

（评论）
(comments)

原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141825

与物理书籍相比，由于认为缺乏所有权，许多人对“购买”许可的电子书感到不安。关注围绕数字收藏消失，服务变得过时以及租赁而不是拥有的感觉。虽然版权法禁止未经授权的复制和分发，但合理使用允许个人使用。但是，在许多司法管辖区，即使是出于备份目的，将DRM规避，甚至出于备份目的，在法律上也是值得怀疑的。出版商通常只收到一小部分电子书销售，而与物理副本相比，个人销售的价值降低了。行业转向许可而不是所有权的转变受到了偏爱完全拥有的消费者的抵制。有些人选择盗版DRM版本，而不是购买临时许可，优先考虑控制和寿命。尽管有担忧，但亚马逊通常会保留在用户库中购买的电子书，除非有意在其他帐户上删除或购买，否则通常可以通过客户支持来恢复。

（评论） 2025-02-22

（评论） 2024-09-06

（评论） 2024-09-11

（评论） 2024-08-05

原文

I've only bought a few ebooks but even then, I've immediately went and pirated them too to feel like I have something, even though it's only a few hundred kilobytes. I know it's a digital book and I know someone worked really hard on it but when I buy an book from Amazon or some other site which works this way, I feel like I'm buying... nothing. I sometimes buy physical books with the intention of keeping them for when I'm in the mood to read them, sometimes this might be months or even years. But with a digital book delivered with a licence I've always got a niggle in the back of my mind thinking about a digital collection dissappearing or the service becoming obsolete. In regards to non-drm ebooks, the lack of tangibility peeves me slightly but isn't so much an issue as I actually have something I can keep. But licenced ebooks are fugazi, ethereal nothingness existing on the whims of a mega corporation.

Another memorable - and scarily relevant - example was Disney changing the content of some purchased video content. I think it was a Star Wars spinoff, where a user noticed something amiss and the fix was retroactively edited into already-purchased content. That is _exactly_ the type of rewriting the past that 1984 warned us about.

This could be - or is - an ultimate form of gaslighting. If it's not on your hard drive, you can never be sure that what you're seeing today is what you saw yesteryear.

This seems like an isolated case where an illegitimate provider committed fraud in the early days of the program. Amazon refunded and surely readers were able to purchase a valid copy not much later.

Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?

> an illegitimate provider committed fraud

If an illegitimate provider commits fraud with a physical book, a megacorporation does not hire extra-legal mercenaries to break into my house, steal my copy, and leave cash equal to its price in its place.

But this is treated differently just because Amazon manufactured the Kindle (but no longer owns it - they sold it to you, it's not theirs anymore). I suppose if Amazon had built apartments, would we expect them to keep master keys to all the doors, so they can confiscate any of our possessions whose licensing has expired?

>If an illegitimate provider commits fraud with a physical book, a megacorporation does not hire extra-legal mercenaries to break into my house, steal my copy, and leave cash equal to its price in its place.

Except when they do. Hasbro/Wizards of the coast will send Pinkertons (old school corporate "security" firms of the break some kneecaps variety) after you if are inadvertently sent one of their products early by their distributor. They will barge into your home threaten you and take your things and leave not giving you compensation.

A Mr Luigi Mangione tried that recently it started a multi-state manhunt and shows every sign of being a sham trial and having predetermined sentence. They started with media events where swat team with drawn assault rifles frog march him into court with the NYC mayor in the lead and since been found to have been hiding evidence from his legal defense.

That is sort of my point, once a corporation gets big enough the law that constrain us little people dont apply anymore. You and I get caught torrenting a price of media for personal use and the MPAA, RIAA will bankrupt you just to make an example of you, Publishers will drive defendants to suicide (r.i.p. Arron swartz), Facebook torrents over 80 terabyte of media to feed to their pet ai they are training for commercial uses and they might get a slap on the wrist because they had a low upload ratio?

Corporations do what they want in this country laws be damned because all they get is fines and they have more money than God and will make even more by breaking the law than fallowing it.

The point wasn't that they sold something they weren't supposed to, but that they felt it reasonable to "un-sell" something after someone has received it.

It showed everyone that electronic purchases can be yoinked away at the first whiff of controversy. Unlike all the copycat, fraudulent crap they continue to sell in physical form to this day.

> legitimately purchased licenses

Don't confuse an illegitimately purchased license with a legitimately purchased illegitimate license.

This is the trouble with "licenses" instead of "items". If I purchase a bootleg book from a physical shop it's not getting clawed back later. The supplier might get in trouble, the physical shop might as well, but nothing is happening to the physical good that I purchased.

Still, this is an extreme, seemingly one-off outlier. There's nothing shady or below board about their actions. They made a mistake and made all parties whole.

There are plenty other reasons to argue against DRM, but I'd argue the chance this one weakens the argument.

It's not about shady or below board. It's about the fact that they can, at their choice, remove books from people that have paid for them. Since they have this power, and can (effectively) use it without repercussions, it's now just a question of under what circumstances are the people in charge willing to use it.

It's the same as when government agencies are given broad, sweeping powers with the explanation of "it makes it easier to do the right thing, and they won't use it to do the wrong thing". Only, the person that gets to decide what it gets used for can change. Then suddenly, they _are_ willing to use it for the wrong thing.

> made all parties whole

Not really. They went overboard. They reached into devices owned by their customers and deleted books without permission. That was absolutely outside of normal. Imagine amazon selling you a physical book and later sneaking into your house to take it back when they find out the seller had pirated them.

They didn't make all parties whole. Purchasers were deprived of access until making another purchase for which they had to expend at least some effort and time. And let's not talk about inflation and interest that mean the the price paid at purchase is not the same as the amount of additional money the buyer would have had at the time of the refund had they never made the purchase. Just returning the purchase price is far from makign a buyer whole. If I rob a bank and get caught and don't get to simply say oops and walk away scott free after returning the money.

> Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?

From customers point of view, these purchases were legitimate.

But the important point is that they did it in the past and only the right balance between bad PR and expected profits will prevent them from doing again.

Naver Webtoons does that, though I'm sure it doesn't fall into the category of selling ebooks and is probably well crafted on the legal side.

You buy in-app credits, you use them to access series and episodes and download them (you download them in a way that you cannot easily save/copy them). Access is typically revoked a few months later or upon series end, and the expiration of your access rights is not announced.

These kinds of practices are why everyone is wary of DRM & Co.

I don't know, is it? I mean, it's often not the convenient choice, but there is still choice. The choice to "license" cough access to an ebook is a valid one, if made with awareness for what exactly that means. I think most people miss that though, because they think that they bought something instead of rented it. Hell, it's usually not even much cheaper than getting the dead-tree version.

I have a paper book being shipped to me right now, and I'll have to wait a week. The only electronic version was the Kindle though, and fuck that noise.

What you’re buying is the right to consume someone’s hard work in quasi-perpetuity[1]. It’s not a tangible object, but it’s not nothing, either. That’s the essence of “intellectual property.”

Most HNers are employed building things that their customers will never have tangible representations of. It’s how life is today.

[1] technological or business limitations make promises of true perpetuity impossible as a practical matter today.

The difference is most of those things aren't built with tangible, perpetual representations in mind.

For literally all of the time that the written word has existed, if you bought a physical copy it was yours for whatever version of perpetuity you'd like to use.

Of course libraries exist, as do rentals, but it's clearly understood what the deal is with such services.

The specific issue i see here is that this is changing retroactively and without recourse, the ability to download a copy of the item you purchased, which was the deal at the time of purchase.

If you buy anything from now on, however, knowing the details of the sale, that's on you.

It is also hopefully going to result in people going back to libraries. If Amazon is telling you that you can never own an ebook, why pay for it at all? Just borrow it from the local library for free.

I feel like the average person isn't going to think through the implications, or won't care, and will continue buying Kindle books. I wish more people were on the same page (heh) as us here when it comes to licensing vs. ownership, but I just don't believe that's the case.

I never got this. Software is stored, bytes are a physicality, just more easily distributeable. They even have some measurable weight theoretically, with a similar attributed value like an artwork or book - that is subjective and hard to interpret.

It’s not the mass that matters. It’s the medium. You only own the medium, not the content.

This was true of physical media (books, phonographs, etc.) and is true of downloaded media. You might own a paper copy of your favorite book, but you don’t own its words, and the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself. If the book is destroyed in a fire, you must buy a new copy.

Similarly, you might own your Kindle, but you don’t own the content in it. You can read the content, but you can’t copy it.But there’s a minor advantage of a digital license: if your Kindle is destroyed in a fire, the publisher allows you to read-download the content to a new device.

> the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself.

In theory, the law only applies to distribution. Also, fair use and fair dealing exist in multiple jurisdictions, which includes personal-only usage. A company would have a hard time achieving a legal judgement against you for the mere act of copying a book. Distributing it? Sure.

Copyright law explicitly allows for backups, at least in the US, which is where most of the companies exhibiting this anti-ownership behavior are located and thus bound by US law, especially when the consumer is also US.

Owning a license means nothing when the other party to the license can revoke it at any time without further consideration.

Also, the right of first sale exists for physical copies. This means for a physical book you are actually allowed to distribute the content as long as you do not retain a copy yourself.

As someone who holds an IP certificate and JD diploma from a respected law school, I can tell you that most of what you’re saying is utterly false. There are some exceptions carved out by the Library of Congress to the DMCA, but I would advise you to educate yourself before posting further on the subject. You’re right that violation doesn’t necessarily lead to prosecution and liability—people break the law all the time without being prosecuted for it—but nevertheless, you risk getting yourself into hot water if you violate another’s rights.

Quite honestly and frankly, I don't consider the DMCA to be just law. Regardless of that view, personal backups are absolutely allowed under copyright law. The DMCA only criminalizes the cracking of "effective" access control, as far as I know.

It's one thing to believe a law to be unjust. It's another to make false claims about what the law is.

> Regardless of that view, personal backups are absolutely allowed under copyright law

Under which section of the Copyright Act? Under which court ruling?

Keep in mind that "fair use" is a legal doctrine that is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not an absolute shield a defendant can raise as an impenetrable defense. No court has ever held that a licensee can, without exception, make a copy of a protected work as a backup.

Where are you getting this bogus information from?

Personal backups are at least allowed for software, per 17 USC 117, and I'm not aware that the DMCA altered that, it only added the nonsense about "effective access control" which can legally be as weak as ROT13. Perhaps not for non-software media. Copyright has been broken for decades, however. It's tilted away from the average person and towards big moneyed copyright holders, who vacuum up every IP they can.

Oh, I don’t think that would actually happen. People violate the law all the time and nothing happens.

Regardless, people should be aware of what the law is. It’s a different choice to decide to violate the law and take one’s chances than it is to rest comfortably knowing that something is entirely within their rights.

Once the copyright expires, yes, the work falls into the public domain. But this fact is moot for the purpose of this discussion, because we're talking about (usually) relatively new copyrighted works that will be subject to protection for many, many years.

I don't mind temporary license if I trust in the business stability. Meaning either I have a minimum period guaranteed by law or the business is not changing the TOS for no reasons. I bought software on Apple's App Store and games on PlayStation Store and I'm fine that I only have a license tied to the existence of my account. But I have limited trust (no real reason) in Amazon regarding to Kindle.

I also think temporary licenses if they are marketed appropriately. This disclosure is a small step in the right direction, but I don't think it's enough yet.

Any words like "Buy", "Purchase", "Own", etc should be absolutely banned. They should be forced to to use verbs like "Rent". Saying you're purchasing a license is better than saying you're purchasing the book, but if it's not a perpetual license, they should be required to specify the duration (or, if indefinite but revocable, it should be so stated).

Things like:

- "Rent for 1 week"

- "$2.99 to borrow for a month"

- "Rent for as long as we decide to allow"

I also think if the marketing materials explicitly disagree with the terms within a clickwrap license agreement, the marketing materials should be binding.

I agree that words like "buy" are deceptive, but changing the language won't fix the underlying problem that it's getting harder and harder to actually buy certain things permanently.

Not necessarily. The clear language would help consumers determine what they are getting out of the transaction. Many could decide it is not worth it or would search for a better deal elsewhere (where they could buy the book, not just rent it). I'm sure Amazon would come up with new ways to combat this though.

Yeah, and so we should change the rules, not accept a weakening of the meaning of buy or make it more clear that you're renting. Companies already have an enforcement mechanism against copyright infringement. It's called the courts. They don't need DRM, they're just assholes. We need to place reasonable limitations on DRM use. They don't need to have DRM for the entire 50+ years of the copyright term. Putting a digital lock on something shouldn't mean YOU get to decide what the customer does with something and how they interact with it.

I think “purchase a license” is correct in the cases when the license is perpetual and transferable, such as with (I’m showing my age…) boxed-software.

…which is funny when large companies do it, because major software vendors expect they’ll only ever negotiate a non-perpetual, non-transferable license but in exchange they get major product updates for free so long as they pay-up (e.g. Microsoft’s “Software Assurance”) - whereas some companies find buying up liquidation-sales of ye olde boxed licenses is cheaper than SA (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/valuelicensing_micros... ).

I think the word purchase should be allowed if you’re acquiring a perpetual, irrevocable, transferable license.

If a license meets those three elements, and there’s some actual mechanism for being able to self-backup the software/media/etc, then I would be happy to allow them to use the word purchase or buy.

Kindle has been around for over a decade. And Amazon is huge. Why the distrust? Honest question. I'm trusting Steam with over 400 games. I don't read a lot of ebooks but I don't see why Amazon would redact something I've paid for.

Steal from one person (natural and otherwise) and you need to pay them back and get fined/locked up on top of it. Steal from thousands and can just give five bucks to each of them in a class action settlement.

Kindle readers are far from the best and completely locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak.

ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM.

I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.

Kindles support epub now.

"Locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak" is overselling it imo. You've always been able to (very easily) sideload DRM-free ebooks and read them on your kindle.

Since "reading ebooks" is ostensibly why you'd buy a Kindle in the first place, I'm not sure what more you need.

Kindles don't really support epub. If you copy an epub into your Kindle it cannot read it. If you use the "send to Kindle" app, it sends the epub to Amazon, which converts it to their proprietary format and ships it down to your Kindle.

What is it grandpa is capable of doing, if not plugging the kindle in the computer and dragging and dropping a file onto the "kindle" device that is now mounted in his file explorer?

"OK, I opened the explorer, but I don't see it."

"Type 'kindle' in the search."

"Alright, hold on... do I want kindle.com? I'm on Amazon, now where do I go?"

A slightly more experienced fastball realizes grandpa has opened his never-updated Internet Explorer on his old Windows box.

Maybe your family is tech-savvy, but there's many who aren't.

Rights, licensing, content guidelines, “offensive”, public backlash.

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

Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices”

They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles.

While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.

Kindle department at Amazon got a new manager who doesn't care about books. So he started to cut costs to drive up margins, and this included the cancellation of Kindle Oasis refresh.

Now he's making sure customers are more locked-in into the Kindle ecosystem.

So the fear is that they'll start doing BS like showing ads and/or restricting features like family sharing.

Simple answer, profit, line must go up.

If it makes financial sense in the future to pull shenanigans with book access or content, they will do so unreservedly and with haste.

They have done this already in small amounts, no reason to think they won't do it on a larger scale if it becomes worth their while.

Steam is an interesting example, technically some of the games are DRM free (as in you don't need steam to run them) but most of them rely on steam in some form for continued usage.

The main difference here is that steam has better PR and a history of not fucking everyone over for an extra % on profit margins.

Will that remain the case, probably not, especially after Gabe Newell dies, but they certainly have the general trust of people who use the platform.

Not to say they haven't had their share of fuck-ups over the years but none of them seemed to have "I'm a billionaire so i can do whatever the fuck i want" energy to them.

That's just personal opinion though.

Software, especially on mobile platforms, feels a little more ephemeral anyway. An app left unmaintained won't support high DPI, won't support new screen sizes, won't have dark mode, doesn't support 64-bit CPUs, or even just gets deliberately turned shitty via updates because there was money to be squeezed. So if I buy an app and come back in 10 years I'm pleasantly surprised to ever find that it still exists and works.

That's very different from buying digital music (which I buy from Apple DRM free) and digital books, which should not change after I buy them, don't need compatibility updates, and really ought to work as long as I have the files, even if someone goes out of business and I can't redownload them.

Books really have much more in common with music than they do with software, and it's unfortunate that digital books and ebook readers escaped the "I bought hundreds of dollars of music and I should be able to play it on whatever MP3 player I want" arguments that freed us from music DRM lock-in.

I just tried it and it did NOT work for me. The Calibre page says it doesn't work on Macs and points to some paid software to remove DRM. Really disappointing.

As far as I understand, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA don't make exceptions for fair use, so it's illegal to circumvent copyright protection even if a fair use defense would mean you're not infringing the copyright.

From Wikipedia[1] ("1201" here refers to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions):

  Although section 1201(c) of the title stated that the section does not change the underlying substantive copyright infringement rights, remedies, or defenses, it did not make those defenses available in circumvention actions. The section does not include a fair use exemption from criminality nor a scienter requirement, so criminal liability could attach to even unintended circumvention for legitimate purposes.

The DMCA does include exemptions that allow you to circumvent copyright protection in some circumstances, but these are pre-defined by the government every 3 years. I don't think "backing up e-books that you own" is currently exempted, the only thing I can find in that Wikipedia article that could maybe fit is this:

  Literary works, distributed electronically, that are protected by technological measures that either prevent the enabling of read-aloud functionality or interfere with screen readers or other applications or assistive technologies, or for research purposes at educational institutions;

In other words: if you have an e-book that doesn't provide accessibility functions, you can crack it in order to be able to read it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

Fair use comes from Berne Convention §10 (snipet): “It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public…”

I guess OpenAI and Google use that to be able to build search and training ML-models. Almost all countries in the world is bounded by that.

Fair use is just a defense if you have to go to court for a copyright infringement claim. So after you spend many thousands of dollars, you can claim fair use as one of your defenses. (In fairness, certain types of fair use are fairly well established so no one will probably take you to court within those guardrails.)

NAL, not legal advice, just my current understanding:

> after you buy it

Generally, yes. What you do with that digital copy might be illegal, but the download was legal. Using a torrent to download (and seeding) might still be illegal even if only as a means to copying.

> after you buy it on kindle

That's a more interesting question. Given that they only grant you a license, you're in gray/black territory. When they previously gave you the impression that you were making a purchase you might have been in gray/light territory, but ignorance is rarely an excuse.

> legalities vs practicalities

Once I had one of those torrent honeypots catch a neighbor seeding. Comcast wasn't very careful with their timestamps or enforcement (or maybe the lawyer wasn't), and it happened close enough to an IP renewal that I caught the flak. If you don't get a lawyer involved, they'll blatantly ignore your right to counter DMCA claims and just infantalize you with a sermon about not stealing from intellectual property owners, placing you on a list of problem customers and eventually cancelling service (that last bit never materialized because it was my IP and my devices after the incident, so I never had too many strikes).

What happens, exactly, if you "legally" pirate a book after you buy it on kindle? Who knows, but it might have negative consequences on par with actual enforcement as if you'd broken the law.

I don't believe that's the case. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM, and does not make exceptions for fair use.

There are exemptions granted to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions every three years, but in general, e-books have not been exempted.

If you're just stripping DRM from your own purchased e-books, or are downloading a pirated copy from somewhere, it's unlikely that you'll get in trouble. But it's almost certainly not actually legal to do so.

(Of course, remember that if you're torrenting, you're also uploading, and the chances of you getting in trouble are higher... even if you disable your client's upload functionality.)

Assume there's no DRM involved. Do books not have the same protections as music (e.g., home archival being a defense against the otherwise legitimate copy)? I.e., is it not true that the download is fine but that what you do with it could be illegal?

My strategy is to read a pirated copy for 2-3 chapters and then decide whether I want to buy the book. It's similar to the 90s when I used to read volumes and volumes in a bookstore but only with enough money to buy one or two every quarter.

BTW I wish No Starch ships cheaper to Canada. It quickly adds up when I buy more. One of the best publishers out there I think.

I recall seeing a nice sale, I was to get a few books from them, and then the reality of living on the second side of the Atlantic hit hard :(

At least one of our publishers did a translation for few of them...

I agree that shipping can cost a lot, especially oversea. Last time I checked, Amazon US is still a lot cheaper than Amazon CA. But Canada doesn't have something that can compete with Amazon.

Personally I really don't like the whole downloading-but-not-seeding approach. The whole point of p2p networks is to receive and to give and spread. Back in the day it was the leecher clients that got banned because they were amoral and breaking the system.

Buy books from responsible publishers. And please keep seeding the things you torrent that can't be purchased anywhere. And when I'm looking for that classic undubbed Jackie Chan movie and you are the single seeder making it possible to still get it, I salute you from the very bottom of my heart.

And apparently, as long as you don't read them, if you only need a license to view...

I hope the huge new antipiracy push that is coming will require litigators to prove that you're actually viewing the material you pirate.

Which would make Plex and friends with their metrics a bad idea to trust with all of your pirated content.

Though the antipiracy push is going to focus on the torrent sites themselves.

Teenage me who wanted information to be free didn't imagine this would be the result.

It's like everything I wanted to happen in the 00s did, but from the monkeys paw.

The only way I can think of fixing this is by giving rights to flesh and blood people that corporations don't have.

GPL? Humans only.

Free speech? Humans only.

Very apt. The average individual downloader-not-seeder wouldn't have 1/10th of the cash required to fight a legal battle in court, whereas large firms seem to be able to just do whatever they want.

The average person is put through hell and bankrupted. The large firm, at worst, pays a fine that amounts to some fraction of quarterly profit.

Almost the worst thing about Amazon and this gouging way of renting books is that it ‘legitimizes’ piracy. My partner works in publishing and we know a lot of authors. If you think piracy is going to sustain that industry and give you and your children books to read in the years and decades to come, you’re very mistaken.

As an author, I barely get any money from Amazon. In some cases, with the cut Amazon and the publisher take, I make a few pennies on a $30 book.

If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.

But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.

I contacted a well known author about the shit latex rendering of his ebooks on Amazon. He said sorry and send me the a pdf copy he build with my name on all the pages. I really like the fact that I have a book dedicated to me by the author, but why the fuck do we need Amazon in this interaction?

I would love to buy ebooks directly from publishers, but publishers generally sell ebooks with DRM just as bad as Amazon's DRM, if not worse. If publishers insist on vendor lock-in, then I might as well stick with Kindle where most of my ebook collection already is.

You can buy a copy of the ebook from the publisher (or whatever source the author tells you is the best for them), and then acquire a useable copy by other means. You get an ebook, the author (and publisher) gets a sale.

I'm only speaking for myself, not other authors. As with most authors who write books on technology, I don't depend on my income from writing, so it might be different for professional authors whose primary income is from writing.

But personally, when I went to a local library, saw that they had two copies of my first book, and both were checked out, I was incredibly proud. I love libraries. I guess overall, I would make more money if everybody who checked out my book at the library bought it instead, but I don't care.

Authors love libraries, because libraries create readers. Publishers don't so much, because though libraries have to buy books, a lot of individuals read a specific copy of a book, which means they aren't buying the book.

I have no idea how publishers feel about used book stores.

TBH, I haven't looked into exact numbers in a while, but the way I recall it is that for a Kindle book, you get 35% royalties. So in your case, if a book sold for $30, you'd get $2.6 for that book, which is already not great. If you factor in publisher expenses, taxes, maybe advances, etc., you may end up with a very low amount, depending on how exactly your publisher calculates these.

Tech books tend to not sell very high numbers (a book on a niche programming language is considered quite successful if it sells 10k copies), so it's important to make a good amount of money on each individual sale.

So for me personally, Kindle sales in particular are essentially worthless. Let's say I end up making 2 bucks on a Kindle sale (which is more than I make on average). If I sold 10k Kindle books, that would be 20k income for me, which is simply nowhere near enough to justify the effort of writing a book.

well, if you haven’t earned out your advance, and you encourage people to pirate, you’ll never earn out your advance. i don’t recall exactly offhand, but our net on an Amazon ebook sale is about 70% of list.

I'll never earn out my advance on Amazon sales, period.

The 70% royalty is only available to books below $10, and also incurs other costs from Amazon. Which makes the calculation even worse, because now you're forced to sell at a lower cost, and you pay additional flat fees to Amazon for each sale.

In your case, if you sell the book for $10, you get about $6 ($7 minus fees), of which you get 25%, so you also only end up with about $1.50 per sale.

It doesn't matter who the publisher is. I've shown the calculations for Amazon's take. I've pointed out how many copies reasonably successful tech books sell. The numbers don't work.

I know you probably don't have the option since it's part of the publishing contract, but if you could, would you opt out of being listed on Amazon and just sell direct from the publisher's site?

This is something that regularly comes up in discussions between authors and my publisher, but the reality is that not being on Amazon hurts books. Amazon has essentially a monopoly on book sales. If you're not on Amazon, it hurts your reviews on other sites like Goodreads, which in turn decreases sales on the few other outlets that still exist.

What my publisher does is sell books on Amazon, and then put a page in it to tell people to please buy the next book directly on the publisher's site. They believe that this is overall the least bad option.

Is that true? I see book shops in every town. As for e-books, distribution of these small files cannot be too much of a technical challenge.

I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make a system for authors to sell their e-books and physical books themselves on their own websites, but the problem is that authors would rage with fury for paying an upfront cost or paying 10% for such a system, and instead stay with the publishers to rip them off instead. You see this in every industry.

Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.

If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.

And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.

I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.

> without compenstion

A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.

I think it’s wrong to pirate books, but making it harder and harder to use the thing someone buys will push people to pirate. The onerous DRM from the likes of publishers and Amazon will eventually back fire on them. They are fighting hard to not have books end up like music, but I feel it’s inevitable.

I think it's contextual whether it's even wrong to pirate books. A new book that just came out? Sure. If I want to read a copy of "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968, you'd have to do some marvelous convincing to make me feel bad about pirating it. Piracy would be wrong if the copyright system was reasonable. As is, it's the lesser of two evils compared to following the law as written.

No argument from me around copyright being too long.

My point was mainly saying the publishers are working hard to avoid their Napster moment, but missing that it wasn't only about 'free' music, but convenience. The harder publishers make it to use their content legally, the more people they will push to the pirate sites.

What's that capitalist moniker: adapt or die.

When we pay for a good, be it digital or physical, we want possession and ownership of that good.

When your class of people demand 'licenses to read' instead of the actual ownership of the book, you can shove it.

I would rather pay pirates to get actual non-DRM books than buy the temporary permission to view., especially since the eBook is more expensive.

I will buy physical books, drm-free books, and pirate. I'm not paying hard earned money for a temporary license.

If your publishers and authors can't understand first sale doctrine and actual ownership, then you can close up shop and quit.

We need an AI that produces the text of a book, from a video of it as you flip through its pages. No special hardware, just a phone and a thumb. If a few pages get missed it can ask you to do it again.

well, patreon definitely sustains the industry

people on royalroad make $10K a month, many more make over $1K...

and then there's AO3, the monster in the dark with everything for everyone

I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre, or you can buy elsewhere (local is always good if possible) and then pirate an ebook copy.

I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.

> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre

I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.

I suspect it won't end up mattering too much for most people anyway.

Eventually, we'll just end up in the same situation as we are now with video DRM; DRM being hard enough to bypass that the methods of doing so will be closely guarded scene secrets, but the output of those methods will hit Z-lib / LibGen / AnnasArchive / all the usual places.

The thing with books is that they're small by todays bandwidth and disk capacity standards, so it's really hard to stop their proliferation.

This is one of the reasons I ditched Amazon for Kobo a couple of years ago: not only was it getting harder to strip DRM (which I did regularly), but harder to get non-Kindle books onto the device. My Kobo Clara B&W is comparable to a Paperwhite, and I don't miss Amazon or Kindle at all.

> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre

See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it.

At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.

Is there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)

If they're DRM free it will be in the description. If you want to get rid of that DRM all you need is Calibre, a plugin called DeDRM... you open the ASCM file in the Adobe Editions program, copy the file from the root folder into Calibre, and that's it. DRM gone.

Yeah, and that's great! Where that's an option I'll definitely go for it. I'm just uninterested in spending money on a book that has DRM, regardless of how easy it is to bypass. I think it sends the wrong message.

Only if you don't get caught.

It's not really the same thing. A VPN is a way to avoid getting caught. Meta's legal defense is an attempt to avoid getting punished after getting caught.

Are there even any effective device fingerprinting methods for torrent clients? Given that it's a UDP protocol it's probably going to be pretty hard to get much useful information about the device aside from what the client might intentionally provide.

There are so many incredible works of literature that I’ve yet to read available in glorious DRM free epub on Standard EBooks and Project Gutenberg, I don’t know why I’d deal with this shit for imaginative fiction .

No argument, but there are incredible works of literature being created now, by living authors (who want to continue living, so need to eat) as well. We will likely always the classics, but we need living authors to create new classics.

We don't need new classics. They are nice to have but not a need.

We really don't need so many new books that we have to pay people to write them full time.

We absolutely don't need so many new books that we have to give authors the right to extract money after publishing instead of having to rely on crowdfunding/patronage and other up front payments.

If copyright ended right now, culture would go on undisturbed.

Is it still worth the terrible compromises to our digital freedoms we as a society have to make in order "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"?

I'd argue that the pendulum has swung so far to the side of IP holders that this trade-off is one I no longer support. IP laws were designed for a different world, and in our current age they are often used to lock down content, control devices, and restrict how we interact with technology.

I think the idea that things have swung far to the side of the IP holder is a valid argument. But I don't think it's so much that the IP laws were designed for a different world as it is that large and powerful IP holders (Disney is the canonical example, but far from the only one) hijacked the copyright process for their own ends, blind to the way the world works today. The core concern, to my mind, is that creators be compensated fairly for their labor, however we end up defining that. Burning down the current system is likely the only way to find our way out of the mess we're in.

IP laws were designed in a world without the means to effectively make infinite copies for free using only hardware that everyone carries on their person at all times.

You may say that you think copyright still works for the world we are in today (I don't agree) but that it was designed for a different world is undeniable.

combine Meta's statement with the WEF statement "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy". And you'll start to get a feel for the asymmetric "rules based order" the elites envision for the plebs.

It’s funny but predictable that the same website that has always said that piracy is a-okay changes its mind as soon as it’s Facebook who’s caught pirating stuff.

I can't believe this sort of stuff is legal/passes the regulation.

Is it really fine for them to say "Buy this book *You aren't really buying it"? I guess we've seen "No bandwidth caps *We can arbitrarily cap your bandwidth". Could a food manufacturer say "Contains no nuts *Made on an assembly line that produces nut products"?

It's okay to lie to people, just not that much. Corporations don't operate above the law, they operate X% below the law where that % grows the larger they are because the cost to prosecute X% is too high, so all of them do it.

Yeah. I "bought" a Kindle copy of There Will Be War awhile back to get access to a few of the short stories in the collection.

After reading about how they're taking away downloads I went and downloaded all of my books and found that at some point they must have lost the license to that book because I no longer had access to it.

Love it when my "purchases" can be taken away from me with no recourse. edit: and I was never even informed that the book had been taken away. It just is there in my collection with a few invalid characters at the front of the title and no cover picture. The link goes to a page that doesn't exist. And searching for it shows only paper copies now by third parties. So I know this isn't just a bug in the system.

This does not happen with the Kindle Store.

Anything you've purchased will remain in your library unless:

1) You delete it (which can happen by accident, due to some bad UX).

If you have done this, you can contact Amazon Support and they can re-add it to your library for free. It's not possible to delete your purchase history on the Amazon website, and that includes all Kindle books.

Whenever I've seen people claim that digital content has gone from their Amazon account, it always turns out to be either:

a) They didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.

b) They bought it on a different Amazon account.

I built a DRM system for the major record labels. If you moved your music to a new computer it had to download a new license. It was disheartening reading that they shut down the license server in 2009. I read a lot of posts from suitably aggrieved buyers.

I'm glad the government is forcing companies to be a little more honest about these "purchases." These companies wouldn't have done it on their own.

Of course, someone will say it is government overreach and competition will solve this instead.

Depends, are you a deceptive advertiser or are you a regulator supposed to protect consumers. The average person will read this as "buying a book". They will tell their friends they have bought the book if the topic comes up. They might even ask others if they "own" the book as well.

I’ve had a Kindle since the very first model. I’ve bought 380 books for it, so probably like $3000.

This recent shift by Amazon ends that. I’m buying a Kobo reader and I’ll be buying all my ebooks from bookshop.org as soon as they launch their (promised) Kobo integration.

I understand this may have been how things worked all along, but Amazon making visible changes to reduce my feeling of ownership of my ebooks is a sign of bad things to come and I won’t support it.

I already downloaded and de-DRMed my whole Kindle library this week. Took an hour, well worth it.

For Kobo format ebooks, you can use calibre. There's an extension that automatically converts the files for you when you send to device.

On Kobo you also have access to your library and pocket integration.

Honestly Kobo feels like the more feature complete device

>Amazon Now Openly Discloses You’re Buying a License to View Kindle eBooks

"disclosure" of information sounds like a good thing, but in terms of contracts, "a disclosure" is actually "a restriction/limitation" that you are agreeing to. This is Amazon "disclosing" that it is you who is not actually buying a copy of something.

Yes, it's better for you that limitations are disclosed, but the salient point is the limitation, not the disclosure.

What would a true purchase of digital content look like? Just the lack of DRM? You could still lose your copy and the company you purchased it from could no longer exist.

Just like you could lose a physical book or the publisher could disappear? It feels like you're doing some reductio ad absurdum right now...

You buy a digital, DRM-free file. It is yours forever. If you lose it (bad storage, malware, deletion), it's gone. It doesn't mean that it wasn't yours. It doesn't mean that anybody owes you a new copy in perpetuity. It doesn't make any of that "fake ownership".

This is how Corey Doctorow sells his books. Even at Amazon his books are DRM-free. The file is yours forever, and he and his publisher (Tor) are very happy with the arrangement.

The way most online stores let you buy music is drm free. Seems like a no brainer that this is how it works.

I mean if I lose my copy of any media I own and the seller that provided isn’t around, that’s on me, right?

Not really. Look at open-slum, libgen is uniformly red. Maybe some domains that share the name are operating, but none that provide the same interface, with downloadable files.

Someone should create a video streaming service with a vast catalog. That'd attract all the subscribers even at a higher subscription cost, and they'd surely be able to pay their licensing fees. So long as they don't need to grow infinitely for their shareholders and enshittify their offerings, it will be a sustainable and profitable business[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

This would be more convincing if e-books cost a small fraction of the price of a paperback. I think it would be entirely reasonable for the licensed-only e-book of a $10 paperback to cost just a dollar or two, max.

The whole thing is ridiculous anyway; I remember Amazon and others pushing the idea of e-books as a way to get cheaper books (since they don't have to physically print a book and mail it to you), but of course that turned out to be a lie. Occasionally I even see a book's Kindle version that costs more than a physical copy!

Whatever, every time I buy a Kindle book I download it to my laptop, strip off the DRM, and keep that copy safe as a backup. (If that starts becoming impossible due to Amazon removing the "download and transfer via USB" option, then I'm going to have to buy my e-books elsewhere going forward. Or just get them from my local public library; at least a library's terms of use are sane.

Maybe not a super popular opinion on HN, but this effectively changes nothing for me. I love reading on my kindle, by far the most convenient way to buy and read books for me (esp when traveling often).

It’s good that they are now being upfront about it, but it won’t impact my buying behaviour and it won’t for the majority of readers.

My daughter will grow up with direct access to my entire library of books and all other media, and I'm beginning to think (assuming we have any kind of future beyond current and future crises) that's going to be an enormous advantage for her.

I don’t think I would ever buy an e-book. It makes no sense to me. If I want a copy for my personal collection I’ll keep it in hardcover. Otherwise I’ll just use Libby and check it out when it becomes available.

There are cases where I will toss an independent author a few dollars in exchange to read their book, but there’s no way I would ever pay Amazon or another publisher.

I really want to find a good way to buy DRM-free ebooks. Libby was great early on and is still fine, but at least in my library system the wait times for a lot of titles are measured in months.

I know some people make this work by just having a queue that's constantly cycling, but I don't read print books (as opposed to audiobooks) like that. There's only a subset of all books that I would ever want in print at all, and when I want them I want them for a specific purpose (to consult for a quote or something) now, not months from now. Purchased ebooks fill that role, but I'm only interested in buying if they're DRM-free.

If you browse on Kobo, each book will tell you if it's DRM-free or not. Lots of small publishers will also sell books directly from their website, DRM-free in my experience. And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.

> And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.

Not all of them. I've had at least one bundle where you redeem it via the Kobo store for DRMed ePubs. Most I've got via Humble Bundle have been DRM-free though.

Good question, especially after this policy change. Obviously they will as of this moment, but how DRM-free books will be treated by Amazon after Wednesday is an unknown.

You can (could?) get all of them up until the end of the month when Amazon removes the ability to download them from your amazon.com account page.

There may or may not be easily findable plugins for [popular ebook desktop app] to remove the DRM.

I buy ebooks, remove DRM, and store them on my network storage drive so I can read them on any device I own.

Calibre and DeDRM are the apps you're looking for; DeDRM doesn't include the decryption keys, you'll need to supply your Kindle's serial number or extract the keys from an old version of the Kindle app.

Yeah I did this with all the kindle books I ever bought before switching to a Kobo. Just need to try and get my partner out of the Amazon ecosystem now.

Awhile back I worked with someone who wrote a script to scroll through ebooks he purchased, screenshot each page and then aggregate the screenshots into a single PDF file.

The simplicity of the approach seemed pretty awesome

When I delay amazon shipping til the next week, they give me digital credits. I have over $35 in digital credits right now. I love to spend them on ebooks to support an artist or author directly with them bezos bucks.

Support your local bookstore, before they are all gone.

Physical copies of books might be tough if space is at a premium, but I love having a bookshelf. I can quickly look back to specific books or chapters or notes or whatever. Plus it gives my guests something to talk about - they can instantly see what I've read and how they can relate to me or my interests.

Disclaimer: I've never used this service and I don't know if it lives up to its promises.

bookstore.org ebook purchases can support your local (participating) bookstores[0] by a revenue sharing arrangement. Their DRM set up looks dodgy, though? It's not clear whether they use Adobe under the hood or how easy it is to get the files to then DeDRM. Maybe paying for the license (and making sure to nominate a bookstore) through there and making or acquiring a DRM-free copy to keep can be the best of both worlds, at least as far as supporting local bookstores goes.

If anyone has experience with bookstore.org I'd love to hear about it

[0] https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks

Bookshop.org is new to the ebook business, but seems to be very popular among authors. Books display in their own app for now, but they promise Kobo integration soon. I purchased a book there recently, then visited my friend Anna so I could put it on my Kobo.

Unless you get some tangible value out of your local bookstore such as it being a 3rd space, locating rare books, etc. etc. I wouldn't bother. If physical books ever start going away it will be because publishers stop selling them entirely and neither Amazon nor your local bookstore will be able to save you.

The tangible value is that I support a locally owned business (the money i spend stays in the community), can use it as a third space (as you correctly pointed out) to find like-minded individuals, and above all else, be in a space where everyone isn't glued to their phones.

You’ve still got a couple days to download (DRM’d) copies of the books before they remove that option!

I just finished importing mine in Calibre and converting them all to epub

Why bother? Just download them off of LibGen, and save it on your hard drive. If you have bought them on Amazon, you have already paid off your debt metaphorically and literally

I don't know the details of the law, but I'm morally 100% OK with that. If I bought a copy of a book, I feel completely justified in reading it in whatever format's convenient for me. By analogy if I buy a DVD, I might rip it and watch it on my computer. I don't draw a moral distinction between ripping a copy of that DVD and downloading a ripped copy of it: the end result is a .mov file on my hard drive. Well, same with physical books and epubs. I could morally (and I'm pretty sure legally) scan and OCR that book myself as long as I don't distribute copies of it, so downloading seems to me to be just skipping the labor step in the middle.

I have bought books from Amazon and Manning.com, mostly technical books. I have to say, I am so happy with the business model of Manning.com:

- they offer good quality books

- they also offer a subscription where you can view all books and download one book per month

- when you buy a digital book, they give you the book in several formats (kindle and pdf)

- you can read the ebook in multiple devices

O'Reilly should follow the same business model.

>O'Reilly should follow the same business model.

They used to, but they have their subscription service now.

You can still buy O'Reilly books DRM-free from the major ebook sellers.

he was right all along, since day one, basically.

it's a real shame he was basically put away over the last years over completely unrelated issues.

unrelated, but on software there was another person that happened to be right, but for unrelated reasons: steve ballmer. he was right: open source software is cancer. because software should really be free (as intended by the free software foundation).

Many years ago I started splitting my purchases between Amazon, Google Books, and Apple Books. It is a small nuisance but it felt better than using a single vender.

Now I mostly buy from Kobo and labor.fm and many of the books they sell are DRM free. Often the prices are better also.

Wait long enough and you'll get your wish. Not by eBooks getting cheaper of course but by physical books being re-priced as collector's items. Already happened to songs, movies and physical TV show releases.

As long as the button says "Buy" that's the standard you shoulb be held to. We can't have companies selling you one thing and then hide in the fine print that you're getting something completely different.

Doesnt directly answer the question, but nowadays there are good and free TTS that will essentially turn your entire ebook to an audiobook. (Elevenlabs Reader for example)

Amazon should be forced to refund every last Kindle book sold previously, and these “disclosures” (which basically seem like consumer fraud) should be required to be displayed in huge fonts during the purchase process, not fine print.

Well, no, they never sold Kindle books, they just decided to say so in fine print under the Buy button rather than in even finer print in the ToS.

I can't believe anyone feels the need to buy digital copies of books anymore, especially from companies who have very obviously pirated every copyrighted work in existence as part of their AI offerings.

Sorry, I suppose I meant anyone not living under the yolk of facism. Good for you though for supporting those who prop it up with your hard-earned dollars. Extra points for the Kindle.

I can't say I predicted this, but this sort of thing is why I bought a kobo instead of a kindle. Of course, for all I know Rakuten is worse than Amazon on this issue, but so far so good...

Well they can go fuck themselves with their books, Kindles and licenses.

Personally I've never had even slightest inclination to "buy" books this way.

Is this at all informative? I think the fact that we're buying a license goes without saying, it's the terms of said license that matter, so I don't think this adds any useful information.

The page really needs to specify all limitations that differ from a physical copy, which would be non-revocable, transferable, worldwide, unlimited in time, geographic location, and method of consumption, etc.

Is it really that obvious? I genuinely don't know which services allow a permanent download that will continue to work in perpetuity and those that don't. My understanding of file formats gives me some insight but - I shouldn't need to know that and some smart, technical people don't have that knowledge.

Not to you and me, but there seem to be a lot of people who don't understand the principle and think they're actually buying a ebook.

But - yeah - this is not informative at all. Amazon did the least amount of work necessary to formally comply with those new California requirements (I suspect this is what it's about) about the language on digital licensing.

It's something, though. But I agree it would be nice to have a license summary label, like those broadband facts labels or nutritional labels.

What would actually mean to “buy” an ebook? The concept of ownership doesn’t really make sense for digital goods — no matter how you define it, it will be meaningfully different from owning a physical object.

What doesn’t make sense to me, is there is a more of a need than ever to own copies of the books we read. People will be creating their own RAG of the books they are reading to make use of the knowledge and expand upon the teachings. This way of thinking of licensing is antiquated. I’m sure Amazon will make some “Kindle LLM” but hopefully by then the industry is radically disrupted.

The comments here are an interesting juxtaposition with some other posts on HN today with people arguing about supply and demand and markets. There's plenty of people here saying they're willing to pay for a DRM-free book, and some indications that authors are willing to sell them, but the market won't let that happen because it doesn't leave any room for oligarchs to leech money at every step.

I buy kindle / apple books completely for the convenience factor: formatting, delivery, cloud service and occasional updates. Though, I do wish there were some kind of change log for what they updated.

I've only ever bought DRM-less epub (mostly books from John Scalzi and a couple of other authors). I won't pirate, because I refuse any DRM-laden shite as a question of principle.

That's why I always recommend people buy Kobos. far superior product, far superior reading experience, and you get the extra bonus points of not throwing more money at fucking bezos

Yeah, I just got a Clara BW recently - really liking it so far!! My first e-reader. There was no possible way I was going to get Amazon's e-reader.

My dream regulation would be that they can't use the word "buy". Call it license, rent, subscription, etc. but your not buying anything.

I would like to declare that after sooo many years not touching a torrent, I not only started pirating, but I suggest everyone to do so for all abusive companies and services nowadays.

The current state of reality is taking a dark turn, and I will be dammed to just ignore it. So many companies are too powerful, and we suckers have been too nice accepting abuse and obeying laws unilatery.

Think of companies like Meta and OpenAI pirating EVERYTHING they can lay their hand on online just to regurgitate to use behind paywalls. Also don't forget OpenAI recently crying foul because DeepSeek did the same to them.

I have over 1600 Kindle books. I am not now nor have I ever been afraid of losing any books. I've always known I'm buying the ability to READ them, NOT OWN them. Why people are behaving so paranoid and entitled over this fact, is not beyond me, because I know how humans are, but it is embarrassing. It's ignorant at best, narcissistic at worst. You didn't write the books. You're DON'T OWN THEM. Never did.

Every now and then when I’m lugging around a book or lamenting that my bookshelves are full, I wonder if ebooks and a Kindle would be simpler, better. Then Amazon does something like this and I’m reminded the headaches are worth it.

Renting is a perfectly valid option, if the service provider is being upfront. What's not okay is having a Buy button, but in reality only selling a license that can be revoked.

（评论） (comments)

（评论）
(comments)