> - 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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.)
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.
Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
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"
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.
> 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?
Some do!
https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
- 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
Yes, you prevent him from selling a copy to your friend, but he already has your money!
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/
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
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.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
- 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...
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
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.
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.