> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms.
You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms.
Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore.
You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important to clearly distinguish true morality from this false morality, which is nothing more than the preservation of existing privileges. Those who fail to make this distinction tend to neglect true morality.
You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it.
Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.
You could have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights - there's nothing that makes the latter instrinsically follow from the former.
Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it.
In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project.
Surely you agree that you have a property right to your computer. How did you get it? You purchased it from the manufacturer (or a retailer, who purchased it from them). The laptop itself was their property from the moment it was made.
What about the factory that made it? Surely, the factory is their property, too. It would be theft for you to get a gang to go and take it over, just as it would be theft for you to loot its machinery and supplies. A factory, though, isn't just a building. It's a set of processes, designs, and techniques that a company uses to build products. For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
Similarly, a book on your shelf is yours. The store bought it from the printer, who was contracted by a publisher, who paid the author to write it. The fact that _you don't like these middlemen_ doesn't give you the right to steal from all of them.
To those of you who rationalize your thieving behavior: It makes you an entitled child.
The ideas in the book are the author's intellectual property, and only because that exists, you can claim any right to own your copy of the book as physical property.
So, no, you cannot have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights. That is a complete contradiction.
> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
No, it's for fundamentally different reasons.
Physical property rights exist to protect people.
IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that explicitly exist to prevent consumer confusion).
"Processes" and "techniques" that aren't patentable don't "belong" to a company with a factory in any legal or moral sense, and if they are patentable, they only belong to the company for the defined term of the patent, after which they belong to the public via public domain.
Your morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.
One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental.
Two cases:
1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement.
2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway.
With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area.
There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading.
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
> What is making it complex for authors to sell directly?
If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations.
The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that.
Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
A lot of authors are not technical people and/or are busy writing. There isn’t a simple system with a large audience of potential book purchasers that makes it easy for authors to sell their books because Amazon became that place but now wants to irritate its users by mangling the kindle.
Also unfortunately the problem lies when the platform has too much power and makes this relationship with the author disproportionate. At first such a platform seems like a good deal for everyone, except when it stops being one
the decision is on you: if you like it, you send some cash. if you just send five bucks that'll be like what author gets from about a hundred "legitimate sales".
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
I think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
That’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us
and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.
Yeah… There’s a few things I think the tech crowd misses the mark on when discussing media creators of all sorts:
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.
>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform.
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.
I have no desire to become a millionaire, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
or use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant. Open AI wants to provide all Americans stock options, which is one way but the more the merrier.
>sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant
Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet
What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make us pay a "piracy tax" on all storage devices sold in the country, from blank CDs and HHDs to SSDs and mobile phones with EMMC/NAND. The same thing will happen with AI companies, once they become profitable enough, they'll force the consumers subscription prices to include an extra tax that will go back to the major rights holder part of the unions.
I agree, easy and much more pleasant. Walk down the street, go into the bookshop (which is by essence a place in 3D, much more pleasant than a screen), search for a book, find it, turn a few pages, chat with the seller or with someone else interested by a book you liked, buy the book you came for, and another one you did not plan to buy, stop somewhere to drink a coffee, open the first few pages, etc... How can a website reproduce this "quality of life" ?? No need to live like during covid and lockdowns. If you live 30 km away from the nearest bookshop (like I did for 4 years) a phone call to check if the book is available and order it if it is not. Never bought anything on amazon (don't want, don't need), and maybe 10 times online in the last 25 years for very specific stuff.
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
Jeff doesn’t care what you do period. They’re in another plane, it’s some poor schmucks now with only a few million fighting for table scraps of the billionaires who don’t care.
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
I’d be curious to see the financials on the Kindle readers, my suspicion is that they very quickly make the cost back through book sales. If retaining customers was a concern they could simply ship people the cheapest reader before cutting service.
Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
tbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
I’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them!
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
If you find yourself with an excess of books buy a bird house and set up a little library[1] somewhere in your neighborhood to outsource that storage and the knowledge contained in those books! I liberally loan books that I love out though the ones I really love go to homes I know will appreciate them.
1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.
> Well, from now on the workflow will be:
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
If you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest
Right? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providers
It’s very simple.
They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms.
You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms.
Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore.
You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
It's even simpler than that:
Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important to clearly distinguish true morality from this false morality, which is nothing more than the preservation of existing privileges. Those who fail to make this distinction tend to neglect true morality.
Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad.
You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it.
Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.
You could have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights - there's nothing that makes the latter instrinsically follow from the former.
Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it.
In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project.
Surely you agree that you have a property right to your computer. How did you get it? You purchased it from the manufacturer (or a retailer, who purchased it from them). The laptop itself was their property from the moment it was made.
What about the factory that made it? Surely, the factory is their property, too. It would be theft for you to get a gang to go and take it over, just as it would be theft for you to loot its machinery and supplies. A factory, though, isn't just a building. It's a set of processes, designs, and techniques that a company uses to build products. For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
Similarly, a book on your shelf is yours. The store bought it from the printer, who was contracted by a publisher, who paid the author to write it. The fact that _you don't like these middlemen_ doesn't give you the right to steal from all of them.
To those of you who rationalize your thieving behavior: It makes you an entitled child.
The ideas in the book are the author's intellectual property, and only because that exists, you can claim any right to own your copy of the book as physical property.
So, no, you cannot have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights. That is a complete contradiction.
> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
No, it's for fundamentally different reasons.
Physical property rights exist to protect people.
IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that explicitly exist to prevent consumer confusion).
"Processes" and "techniques" that aren't patentable don't "belong" to a company with a factory in any legal or moral sense, and if they are patentable, they only belong to the company for the defined term of the patent, after which they belong to the public via public domain.
Your morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.
The moral principle here is just property rights.
One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental.
Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway.
With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area.
There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
Authors’ wages are paid by people buying their books.
I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
Assuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.
Or buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.
I went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazon
I have a kobo. I use it to check out books from the library via Libby/Overdrive. I have never purchased an e-book.
I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading.
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
Actually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.
What is making it complex for authors to sell directly?
Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
> What is making it complex for authors to sell directly?
If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations.
The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that.
Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
True, my original view of the matter was too simplistic
A lot of authors are not technical people and/or are busy writing. There isn’t a simple system with a large audience of potential book purchasers that makes it easy for authors to sell their books because Amazon became that place but now wants to irritate its users by mangling the kindle.
Also unfortunately the problem lies when the platform has too much power and makes this relationship with the author disproportionate. At first such a platform seems like a good deal for everyone, except when it stops being one
the decision is on you: if you like it, you send some cash. if you just send five bucks that'll be like what author gets from about a hundred "legitimate sales".
The next sentence says:
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do.
They're deaf to anything besides pain. If you want to help your fellow humans, you need to inflict that pain. Otherwise the company won't change.
I just see it as a way to highlight the absurdity. They're heavily implying they won't buy books on Amazon anymore in the next paragraph:
> So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year.
I think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
> Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do.
Probably because doing what you suggest would not look great in court:
"Dear Jeff Bezos,
Here is my signed confession letter of intellectual property theft.
Yours Truly, Mike Taylor"
The poster isn't pussyfooting around the issue, he's feigning discovery to emphasize the point as a rhetorical move.
I agree, but I think that the author is saying the same thing.
Came here to complain about this workflow too.
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
Or just buy an actual book from and independent bookshop.
That doesn't cut out the publisher.
Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Maybe a random lieutenant of hell versus Lucifer's advisor here.
You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.
> Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech.
Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
That’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
Most indie bookstores will happily order books for you from the publisher/distributor if they don't have them in stock.
At which point I might as well order from the publisher's website instead of having to explain to a shop owner what I want.
>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
Some do!
https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
Read the Rifter's trilogy because of this, quite good IMO. Made buying Blindsight in hardcopy way easier once money wasn't a strain.
> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.
Yeah… There’s a few things I think the tech crowd misses the mark on when discussing media creators of all sorts:
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
Because Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.
I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations.
Never Amazon!
>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform.
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.
I have no desire to become a millionaire, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
or use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
Cloudflare is just another middleman.
sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant. Open AI wants to provide all Americans stock options, which is one way but the more the merrier.
>sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant
Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet
What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make us pay a "piracy tax" on all storage devices sold in the country, from blank CDs and HHDs to SSDs and mobile phones with EMMC/NAND. The same thing will happen with AI companies, once they become profitable enough, they'll force the consumers subscription prices to include an extra tax that will go back to the major rights holder part of the unions.
Sure and we as developers can vibe code other systems / ways to ensure we get paid for keeping AI relevant.
Did you read to the end of that list and then close the article?
Buying the physical book from Amazon isn’t a great way to stick it to Bezos. Just have your local bookstore order it for you, it’s easy.
I agree, easy and much more pleasant. Walk down the street, go into the bookshop (which is by essence a place in 3D, much more pleasant than a screen), search for a book, find it, turn a few pages, chat with the seller or with someone else interested by a book you liked, buy the book you came for, and another one you did not plan to buy, stop somewhere to drink a coffee, open the first few pages, etc... How can a website reproduce this "quality of life" ?? No need to live like during covid and lockdowns. If you live 30 km away from the nearest bookshop (like I did for 4 years) a phone call to check if the book is available and order it if it is not. Never bought anything on amazon (don't want, don't need), and maybe 10 times online in the last 25 years for very specific stuff.
> search for a book
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
If you want to stick it to Jeff, the best part is to give/lend/sell them once you've read them. Or even better, get them from the (public) library.
Cancel your prime is a good start.
Jeff doesn't care what you do after you've already given him the money though
Yes, you prevent him from selling a copy to your friend, but he already has your money!
Jeff doesn’t care what you do period. They’re in another plane, it’s some poor schmucks now with only a few million fighting for table scraps of the billionaires who don’t care.
Or just get it from your library. I rarely find myself re-visiting books, so that model is ideal to me.
With regards to buying physical books, https://bookshop.org/ or https://betterworldbooks.com/ are better options than Amazon imho if you're not going to buy from your local bookstore. Bookshop allows you to configure your local bookshop to receive a cut of your purchases from Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores).
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
I’d be curious to see the financials on the Kindle readers, my suspicion is that they very quickly make the cost back through book sales. If retaining customers was a concern they could simply ship people the cheapest reader before cutting service.
It’s straight up greed, IMHO.
Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
haha
It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.
It's cute you don't know that it was used as a co-hyponym.
I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
There is a very good open source conversion tool called "Calibre". I use it all the time to convert my, erm, security backups of books I own.
It's an exceptionally odd decision, but planned for approx. a year now.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
Too bad, I remember when kindles came with a free 3g connection and web browser.
funny enough, just noticed on jailbreak that my kindle touch web-browser never lost its "beta" label, in all those years :)
I extracted my books from my kindle over a year ago. Never buying books from Amazon again. EPUB on iOS works great.
on the other hand 14 years of usage of a ~100$ device sounds ok. these days you need to be happy if things last more than a few months…
What electronics are you buying that only last a few months?
I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
Never been happier that i bought a kobo instead of a kindle years ago
For those of you who don't want to pirate, there are legal means to do this.
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
Kobo e-readers can connect directly to library e-book stores and download many titles directly for free from libraries.
tbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
Shoutout to https://libro.fm/ which is a non-Amazon Audible that lets you:
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
I’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them!
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Fuck ‘em.
[dead]
I buy paper books. So far zero have been stolen by Jeff Bezos. They take up a bit of space but there are always trade offs.
If you find yourself with an excess of books buy a bird house and set up a little library[1] somewhere in your neighborhood to outsource that storage and the knowledge contained in those books! I liberally loan books that I love out though the ones I really love go to homes I know will appreciate them.
1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.
Maybe you should ask Andy Jassy, the current CEO?
Does Andy know what Jeff thinks is going to happen?