But lets see the Positive side: Now the Nazis wont have to burn thousands of books, saving tons of co2 in their Plan to take over the world with propaganda. So, yay for the envoirment I guess
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I’d also point towards alternative reading apps and hardware and drop everything related to Amazon.
Is there a way to donate to the authors? Because I think pirating and then donating the money (directly) to the author is much more ethical than putting a megacorp or a publisher in between
Even better if you send it with something like Monero which doesn’t even put the bank between you and the author
You mean the authors would actually earn money instead of the “publisher”? How unfair! /s
When mist books were made of paper, the publishers job was quite the deal including printing, delivering, stocks, pulp the rests etc. So they took the lions share of the price together with the bookstore and the author got maybe 10-15% from the final price.
Today it’s just theft.
Imagine: pirating ebooks but donating money to the author at the same time. Win win.
Don’t use kindle? They aren’t the only ebook provider
it blows my mind that people buy ebooks when Libby is free.
Seriously. Anna archives, libby. There are so many open source projects out there for the ereader community
The man who made that video is annoying. The story he read out was from the twits by Roald dahl, it was a few years back that those changes were made. Dahl was a great author but wasn’t a very pc person , his family have had to apologise for his anti semitism. So whoever is in charge of his works wanted to make them more modern and less insulting which misses the point of Dahl but anyway. They’ve done it with Enid blyton books too. In one of hers they have a dog called the n word so probably more necessary with her work lol.
All amazon have done is update the digital edition to the match the latest edition. There’s a million things to hate Amazon for you don’t have to make things up. And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book, you own them and they don’t run out of electricity.
Changing words seems wrong with it sanitizing and makes future audiences unaware of how bigoted and flawed writers of a time period might be. It underplays cruel parts of society leading to a flawed rosy colored outlook. Now future readers won’t know how far from PC writers like Dahl were.
Dahl was a great author but wasn’t a very pc person , his family have had to apologise for his anti semitism.
That is putting it very mildly.
"There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
He said that in *checks notes* 1971.
Worse, it was in response to criticism to an article he wrote that was justifiably criticizing Israel at a time when it wasn’t so popular to do so. And when he was accused of the old “you’re anti-Israel, so you’re anti-semitic” nonsense, he decided to go, “hell yeah I am!”
That’s still not OK
That’s why I only read manuscripts. Don’t trust machines. F*cuk Gutenberg
This reminds me of a joke…
A new monk arrives at the monastery and is assiged to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. When he looks closer, however, he notices that they are copying copies, not the original books. The new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out to the head monk that should there be an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. “We have been copying from the copies for centuries,” says the head monk, “however, I must admit you make a very good point, my son.” The head monk then goes down to the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours pass and no one sees him, so one of the monks decides to go downstairs to look for him. When he arrives he hears loud sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old head monk leaning over one of the original books crying. “What’s wrong,” he asks the old monk. “The word is CELEBRATE!” sobs the old monk.
“The word is CELEBRATE!” sobs the old monk.
I don’t get the punchline.
Monks are celibate. But if someone were to transcribe that incorrectly…
Ahhhhh, now I get it. Thanks for the clarification.
Heh. Even funnier to me, as I’m currently reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is set in an abbey that has monks who copy manuscripts.
It’s time to de-Google, de-amazon, de-Microsoft, de-apple, etc.
Now? As if they were so ethical all those decades before.
You know what they say about the best time to plant trees. It applies to many things.
It has been time for that, long ago. Why did you have to wait for everything to go south?
I did it a long time ago. The best time to change was 5-10 years ago. The second best time is now.
Self hosting your email server, are you? How many hours a month does that take?
I use Tutanota for my email
So, Google before the IPO.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Would you rather people switch to non google services or think that since they are all equally evil they might as well keep using the same service.
Did Google ever offer an open source client for the email?
“How about instead of words, we fill books with numbers?”
I’ve got an old Kindle, but not too old, which I jailbroke just yesterday with Winter break. I recommend that method for those considering getting drm free usage out of their device (instead of it contributing to ewaste).
Why not too old? I bought 4 gen 4 & 5 kindles off ebay for like $20 on purpose. I hate backlights and they still work great.
I’m glad I’ve already pulled my audible library in to audibookshelf, I didn’t have many ebooks so didn’t bother with them. I’m moving to librofm this month I think.
I just buy physicals of the reference books I really want and pirate the digitals of anything else that isn’t sold DRM-free. I WILL own what I bought, whether they like it or not.
I wish I could do the same. I prefer paper books, we have a massive library and mostly read in our language on paper (except uni textbooks, I wouldn’t want to buy them and the library doesn’t have enough). However, that stopped being feasible when most of my non-fiction reading switched to English. Since English books are mostly not sold locally, I would have gone bankrupt on delivery costs alone. So thanks Libgen for my education.
Is that what the “you can’t download your shit anymore” is really reaching at?
That’s why Richard Stallman calls kindle the swindle.
Mr Stallman needs to be considered from all sides before deciding whether you’ll follow his lead. He’s not without some toejam.
Is there a text version of this?
The changing the Books part hasn’t been archived in the Catf wiki yet, but the non downloadable books is already fully written
It’s kinda odd that all these years later, you’re still better off pirating than paying for anything digital. All these services solved piracy but we’ve now gone full circle.
Piracy was, is and remains a service problem, as Gabe Newell of Valve (Steam) once stated. Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.
Take anime for example: even if you subscribed to every streaming service out there, you still wouldn’t be able to see everything you wanted. Some things aren’t streamable or sold ANYWHERE, or only on a service that’s actively blocked in your region. Which means there is simply no legal way for you at all to get that content.
Music on the other hand solved that dilemma. You can use Spotify, YT Music, Apple Music or a host of other options. You pay a flat fee and you can listen to pretty much every song you want, as often as you want. Nobody’s pirating MP3’s these days, because nobody needs to. It’s now more convenient to just stream it.
I’d really like to see someone do the same for books. An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee. I’d pay 10 bucks a month for that for sure. Because that would make it more convenient than pirating is right now, with a more consistent experience.
An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee.
A library? We solved that centuries ago.
Except a physical library can only hold so many books, they don’t have most of the books I want and you need to return them. A physical library is not useful to me.
ever heard of zlibrary?
I am aware of them, yes. It’s not the book download site that I use personally, but you can never have enough options.
which do you use?
I usually use Anna’s Archive or Lib Gen, depending on what’s actually up and working. Anna scrapes Zlib as well as other sources. Usually that’s where I can find the really obscure stuff.
Music is definitely not a solved problem. About 30% of my favorite older tunes aren’t available on streaming at all, as I discovered when I tried to find a way to casually share with some friends.
Sure, no platform will have everything. But for me personally, on YouTube Music, I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for. But I’m admittedly not what you’d call a music aficionado.
There’s a problem with this “give them what they want and they won’t pirate” when it comes to Spotify, yt music, etc: They can change the terms at any moment. AKA enshittification.
If you downloaded it or bought a CD? Ain’t no enshittification.
You’re absolutely right in that it’s a risk.
But you can always buy a CD or digital album and rip the DRM off it. Or pirate it. Assuming you care enough to do that anyways.
Me, I’m not really a music fan. Only reason I have YT Music is because it’s included with YT Premium. So it’s not going to bother me much if certain songs or albums disappear. I’ll just listen to other stuff. Music is merely background noise to me.
Interestingly, I am now going through some album series that are not on Youtube, but are on Spotify. It is frustrating because I can’t use Spotify on my phone (browser is incompatible), but I can Youtube, so music discovery is desktop-only. Good thing all of them are on Soulseek, though.
Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.
That’s a sliding scale, though. Streaming comes at a fixed price.
WB/Discovery+ just screwed people in the UK for watching cycling. It was £7 a month to watch before, which I was happy to pay. They just put an end to that and now bundled the cycling with their premium sports service for £29. I’m not paying all that when I only want cycling and none of their other content.
I cancelled my subscription, asked them to delete my account, purchased a fire stick and now paying for some dodgy IPTV service to watch it there for a fraction of the price.
Bruv real libraries will let you download books for free
Yes, a lot of them do. But their digital selection often is pretty limited and comes with restrictions.
For example: our Dutch national online library lets you ‘borrow’ 10 e-books at a time. You get 21 days to read a book, but you can extend that one time by another three weeks. After that, you have to ‘return’ and ‘check them out again’ if you want to continue reading. With my particular reading habits, that’s a hassle and wouldn’t work for me.
But the biggest issue is: they only offer a limited selection. Basically, NONE of the books I’m reading now are available through that system.
I want to be able to read every book I want, no time restriction. And that’s not possible with the current digital library system they offer.
I’ve heard a jailbreak was recently released for all kindle models: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/
I’ll be trying it out soon!
