Sideloading: Own content or "from somewhere else"

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

I am still questioning why this poll requires the names of the voters to be made public, especially when the presupposition behind the poll seems to be that side-loading = piracy.

I'm sure that some of the respondents might be a little upset that their innocent responses can be used to label them as pirates by anyone viewing the poll results and using the same "side-loading = piracy" definition.

I can't change it anymore. I'm perfectly fine if some moderator changes it. I don't make that many polls and wasn't aware it can be hidden respectively is public that way. I thought the results would be public, not the names. But the people knowing you will know your position anyway, it won't change a thing.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

...especially when the presupposition behind the poll seems to be that side-loading = piracy....

Where do you read that from?
Option 1 says "I buy and I sideload".
Option 2 says" I sideload but get my content 'from somewhere else'".
Option 1 makes it perfectly clear, there is a totally legitimate way of sideloading.

[crane3]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Where do you read that from?
Option 1 says "I buy and I sideload".
Option 2 says" I sideload but get my content 'from somewhere else'".
Option 1 makes it perfectly clear, there is a totally legitimate way of sideloading.

Option 2 implies that people who do "some" pirating don't buy which is not true. And one can just get the books free for legitimately from the various sites & haven't bought a book yet.

I don't know what the copyrights info are but is it also piracy to obtain translated ebooks by "amateurs" when there isn't a version in one's language & will not likely ever will be? I'm thinking in terms of the Japanese light novels.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

People who buy their content are "a small target group"? They should be the vast majority, theoretically. Especially on MR.
The point says "I buy..." not "I buy all"...
Meaning, if you buy some you already can make a tick in that box. Thus it should be the vast majority, else the business model of Kobo and even more so Amazon wouldn't make any sense.

That is not and never was my point. My point is you are acting as though the only alternative to purchasing books is to pirate them, and your target group of people-who-don't-purchase-books is artificially restricted to pirates-only. Thus saying if you check the box for sideloading from "other places", you believe that must mean the person is a pirate, which does wonders for your analysis of your target group.

Originally Posted by mgmueller

It's not for the entire public, but a small target group.
In this case:
Buying and sideloading vs. sideloading pirated stuff.
Free downloads don't make sense in this context, since it's rarely pirated.

I don't really buy your explanation that free downloads don't make sense in this context. They may not be routinely pirated, but then again, the purchases aren't being pirated either (insomuch as they are, indeed, purchases), so perhaps we shouldn't count those either. And then your target group will be pirates-only... and shockingly, all of them pirate...

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

What makes you think, I have any kind of "wish"?
I don't have any agenda, nobody is paying me for whatever result.

You may not have a legal or political agenda, but you certainly seem to desire to vindicate your opinions in your own mind.

self-vindication-of-opinions is a valid agenda in my book.

Originally Posted by mgmueller

They are. Either way.
You understand, we're in a user forum?
It's not the real world here, nothing to gain. No money, no reputation. It's a hobby. I don't intend to publish or renew my MBA.

Let me rephrase that.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

...any self-conclusions for your own vindication based on it are worthless for your self-vindication...

That being the use of the conclusions you wished to make. (I assume you must've had some idea of what you were going to get out of this poll, other than finger exercise?)

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Even your average HD stream in Netflix only has 5GB tops, as opposed to MKVs starting with 5GB, usually having 10GB and in a 1:1 BlueRay Rip exceed 20GB.
There's certainly your occasional retiree, watching 15 hours of Netflix and reaching the limit of his bandwidth. But the vast majority of users exceeding 100GB per day (and that's not once, that's every single day, else your bandwidth doesn't get capped) only can be pirates.
Yes, my neighbor as a web developer exceeds his limit occasionally. We have the same ISP, so we exchange data about performance, stability and such a lot. Even he, as a power user, will exceed this enormous limit only a few times per month, never on a daily basis.
And if you consider, that ISPs even have changed the small print of their contracts already, this kind of traffic has to be in a significant dimension.

I have never looked at the statistics of my family's data usage, but I do know that my mother, while the main watcher of Hulu and Netflix etc., is not the only one and a substantial amount is used by other members of the family.

I would simply assume that more than one person was watching stuff.

But perhaps in Europe each member of the family has their own data plan, and it is therefore logical to assume the big users are pirates?



Also, I have heard that Netflix is offering a certain amount of 4K video, and Amazon is set to begin doing the same thing. I assume that would raise the bar as well...

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Where do you read that from?
Option 1 says "I buy and I sideload".
Option 2 says" I sideload but get my content 'from somewhere else'".
Option 1 makes it perfectly clear, there is a totally legitimate way of sideloading.

Option two makes it perfectly clear that option one is the only legitimate way of sideloading (in your mind).

Whether that was your intention or not, is not the issue, it is indisputable that that is indeed the reaction many have had, and thus it is valid to say that that at least seems to be the presupposition.

That has been the problem the whole time. Did I/we not do a good enough job communicating that? (If so, I apologize for not being more clear.)

[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

)
In this case:
Buying and sideloading vs. sideloading pirated stuff.
Free downloads don't make sense in this context, since it's rarely pirated.

Erroneous assumption.

There are a lot of "free downloads" available on the sharing sites. Not everyone has access to the same sources, or even knows that an item is being offered for free somewhere else.

If the assumption is that anyone who sideloads from those sharing sites it a pirate, then you are labeling people sharing free books as pirates, too.

And unless you yourself frequent sharing sites and fact check whether or not a book is being offered for free somewhere on a retail site, then you really have no idea what is being shared and to what degree.

[eschwartz]

Not to mention that MobileRead itself has been a victim of people (at least one person) coming and taking the Ebook-uploads, then slapping his own covers on them and selling them. I'd call that pirating.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Atunah

I can't even remember the last time I used my usb cord on my kindles.

How do you charge a Kindle without using the USB cable?

[nathany]

I buy my books direct from self-published authors or from publishers that support DRM free formats. Publishers like O'Reilly, Pragmatic Publishers, No Starch Press, Manning, Apress and imprints under InformIT have been making ebooks available in multiple DRM-free formats for years now.

I hope one day Amazon, Kobo and Apple will push other publishers to take the same route, much like iTunes Music went DRM-free years ago.

Compared to Send to Kindle, Apple has the best app for sideloading books. Drop ePubs on iBooks and sync.

For eReaders I sideload books by syncing them with a command line script I wrote. O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers update my purchased books in Dropbox, which i then sync to my Kobo.

Calibre is very capable, but the UI hurts my eyes. I haven't bothered investing the time to figure it out.

[murg]

Originally Posted by HarryT

How do you charge a Kindle without using the USB cable?

Plug it into the wall.

220 on the money, honey!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murg

Plug it into the wall.

220 on the money, honey!

But what do you use to connect the Kindle to the wall charger? To the best of my knowledge, there's no way of doing so other than by using a USB cable, which is why I was surprised by the previous poster's statement that he never uses one.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Personally, I'm pretty sure the number of pirates is way bigger than you might assume.
I don't know about the US.
But in Europe, there are intense discussions about ISPs capping the download capacities.
Depending on the ISP and the country in question, they typically drastically reduce your download speed after reaching a certain daily limit.
But here it comes: The limits in question are in the tens of GB. Per day! The limit I have in my business contract is 100GB per day, for example.
I don't need that, not even close. But I automatically got it, linked to my speed of 100Mb.
Question to me would be, why so many people exceed their limits. Obviously enough, so the ISPs have to react.
Yes, my neighbor as a highly sought after web developer will need this kind of capacity from time to time. But the general public?
Such capacities largely only make sense for pirates.
Downloading BlueRays of 30GB and the likes.

The main problem with capping usage nowadays is the amount of legal content you can download. Downloading HD content to my Sky box is a couple of gig per hours viewing, add in streaming, gaming, OS/software updates etc and a family could hit 10's of gig fairly quickly, in fact with the amount of online stuff nowadays your average family can probably download as much or more than your average pirate.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

The main problem with capping usage nowadays is the amount of legal content you can download. Downloading HD content to my Sky box is a couple of gig per hours viewing, add in streaming, gaming, OS/software updates etc and a family could hit 10's of gig fairly quickly, in fact with the amount of online stuff nowadays your average family can probably download as much or more than your average pirate.

Yes, exactly. Legal HD video streaming (which is about 300kbytes/sec, or a little over 1GB/hour) dwarfs ebook piracy in terms of traffic.