this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
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e-reader were a gamechanger for me.
on one side they are super convinient, because of the backlight alone.
on the other side: piracy
libgen is awesome
It makes me proud that my gf used to have (I think it is busted now) a telegram bot to download books from zlibrary, as an iPhone user that was very convenient, but now she doesn't.
My Android app works pretty fine though, so I just sent her the books there.
TIL theres an android app, awesome!
the telegram bot is not available anymore but there's a workaround, if you make an account on zlib website and go to "edit profile" page there's a button at the bottom to get a personal telegram bot
I understand and encourage this, but I wonder, is there any "Steam" for books? In the meaning of "oh, this service is so good that actually I don't want to bother to pirate them!"
amazon on kindle is very convienient. But I don't want to support jeff bezozs, which is why I like piracy. Also amazon makes it really easy to pirate. You just send the pirated copy to you kindle email-adress, and amazon uploads the pirated ebook to your kindle. I have done this for about 10 years, and I like to image, that Jeff sheds a single tear each time I do this.
On the other hand there are many public libraries with a steam-like service. e.g. you pay your regular library fee (2€ iirc) and you can download all the books you want to your e-reader. The catch is, that you can only keep a certain number of digital copies at the same time for some reason. The other down side is, that the initial setup takes some time (but I guess that depends on the library? idk it was >5 years ago when I did some research in that direction).
If someone knows more about the public-library-ebook-service, please let us know.
Amazon has about 1.5 million employees.
When you buy something from them, you’re also supporting those people, as well as the stockholders, and the book’s author.
If you’re looking for the human effect of buying something from Amazon, focusing on Jeff Bezos is somewhat arbitrary.
I am sorry, but this take is just insane. You do not support amazon workers when you buy from amazon.
trickle down does not work. Companies like amazon will not use additional revenue to increase the conditions of their worker.
In fact, the opposite is true: the more market power amazon has, the worse it will treat its worker (and also the 3rd party sellers, and even the buyers)
Yes but if everyone stops buying from Amazon, those people lose their jobs.
This isn’t “trickle down”. This is “paychecks”. And yes it does work. That’s why those people work for Amazon.
If everyone stops buying from Amazon, those people could get jobs at any of these companies, where people buy from instead.
Amazon has replaced a lot of jobs. When amazon goes away, it in turn will get replaced by something else.
Amazon artificially deflates the value of books, while also taking a humongous cut. If you want to support authors, Amazon is usually the worst place to buy from.
some publishers don't use DRM so there's that, otherwise I guess there's overdrive which is... not that good, and requires library card but it's free
I just want to point out that there are libraries full of physical books that you can also get for a significant amount of time and you don't have to pay for them. And of the library doesn't have the book you want, they can probably get it for you from another library.
(They also often offer ebooks and audiobooks, but that's another issue.)
Unless you want to keep the book with you, one of the nice things about paper books is that you don't have to pirate them and you can get far more obscure titles than you'd probably ever find on a pirate site.
I'm not criticizing you for pirating books, I totally get it, I'm just very pro-library.