My journey into the darknet

[GhostHawk]

Very well said Elfwreck!

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

While I don't agree with your choice of words (but let's not go into that again!), I do agree with your sentiment. That Logseman chooses to give away his translations and other work, in no way justifies his use of other people's work without their permission.

I think that the point he tried to make is that he is not a hypocrite.

[scveteran]

I will be absent for awhile. I have to have to go back to the hospital in the morning since my doctor's visit on Friday didn't go well. Worse the IV antibiotics they gave me along with the oral ones the last two days don't seem to be helping.

Hopefully that will be short, but no telling when you go in and they start cutting stuff off. After that, we will see. It is supposed to be an out patient just to remove the dying portion on a toe due to an infection, but could easily be worse since I have a reduced immune system and poor circulation due to diabetes.

After that I plan on spending more time with the kids for a bit. So I hope to carry on our conversations then.

[Patricia]

Good luck, scveteran. I hope it goes well.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by vaughnmr

You ommitted several reasons that pirates exist:

1) ebooks are simply not available, the publishers won't release them. You can buy the book, but you can't read it on your ereader.

2) ebooks can't be released due to copyright (including orphan) issues. The ebook is in a legal la-la land, no one can do anything with it, usually for a long, long time. Long after you die, for sure.

3) you can't buy the ebook because of where you live.

4) ebook quality is so bad that properly formatted pirate copies are easier to read. Really doesn't make sense, but that is probably the case a lot of the time.

I've just come to this thread from another thread which concerns the problems newspapers are having, & their use of paywalls to try & make some money off of digital editions. And as I was reading some of the posts in this thread, it occurred to me that book publishers and newspaper publishers actually have different ends of the same problem (how to get people to pay) and that both are trying to sell the wrong thing.

That is, both book publishers and newspaper publishers are trying to sell is content. Thus, DRM, which protects (or tries to protect) content. Thus, paywalls, which is trying to protect content as well.

But what they really should be selling is convenience and accessibility to content. In other words, they are doing exactly the wrong thing, because they don't understand that in the digital world, content simply cannot be protected successfully over time.

In the newspaper world, publishers should be developing applications which serve content to the reader in a fashion that makes it usable in the digital world - bookmarking, archiving, linking, blogging, &c., all pushed to the reader, with updates, alerts, weather warnings, breaking events, video links and who knows what else. This stuff needs to be bundled and sold to readers in a fashion that allows the content itself to be sent anywhere and to anyone. People should come to the News App not for content, but for what the News App does with content.

Likewise, in the book world, publishers should be making ebooks work not by selling the content, but by selling what is done with the content. I'm not a book clubber myself, but if I were a publisher of ebooks, I'd make it possible to participate in a bookclub from within the book - when you buy the book, you already have a username & password, so why couldn't that be used to keep the privilege of admission to the bookclub to the initial purchaser? I'd make it possible to buy the next book in a series right from the earlier book. I'd set up an ebook of the month club, like the old pbook science fiction book club.

I recently interested in reading a Book that was written in the 1980s. I wanted to browse it before I bought, but I could not find a copy in my local Borders. I checked, and could not find anyone selling the Book in any ebook format, much less one that my edevice could read. So I was forced into a position where I would have had to buy it from Amazon & hope I liked it.

As it happened, I found a used copy, which I bought, and found that I liked. But it is FAT. So I checked the darknet, & found a copy, which I am now reading on my Sony.

Now, see what the publisher could have done for me. The Book could have been on Amazon as a Kindle book, which I could sample. It is a whole lot easier to find a book on Amazon than on the darknet. If I liked it, I could have bought the full copy directly from the sample. Darknet can't do that, even for free. The Book, which is a history book, could have been augmented by links within the Book, or by links to "further reading" which would in turn have sent me samples of those books - which I might have bought back at Amazon. The Book could have had a comment web site associated with it.

It seems to me that most of what is damned as pirating has to do with availability of, and convenient access to and use of, content - not with pricing. As long as publishers attempt to deal with that problem by making their own product less available, harder to use, and less convenient, they are just making pirating more likely to happen.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

A new author writes a book and decides to publish it directly as an e-book for a price of say $7.00. We will keep it simple and say he does not bother with any DRM. One person actually pays to download the file and then uploads it to a web site for 'sharing' e-books; say darkwiiiingduckbooks.com. Anyone out there who pays $7.00 to download a copy from the original site is just being foolish when it is available for free at this site. If say 1,000 people download the e-book from darkwiiiingduckbooks.com the author has no legitimate cause for complaint as that $7,000 was only ever potential income.

But if the new author had not ebooked the book, but just published it as a pbook, he would have sold more than one copy. Perhaps it would only have been 200 copies at (to keep it simple) $7.00 each. So he would have made $1400. You can't blame him for thinking that he should make that 1400, no matter which format he sells the book in.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by scveteran

I will be absent for awhile. I have to have to go back to the hospital in the morning since my doctor's visit on Friday didn't go well. Worse the IV antibiotics they gave me along with the oral ones the last two days don't seem to be helping.

Hopefully that will be short, but no telling when you go in and they start cutting stuff off. After that, we will see. It is supposed to be an out patient just to remove the dying portion on a toe due to an infection, but could easily be worse since I have a reduced immune system and poor circulation due to diabetes.

After that I plan on spending more time with the kids for a bit. So I hope to carry on our conversations then.

Saddened to hear this. Best wishes and prayers for you.

Derek

[Logseman]

Ditto.

[lene1949]

Originally Posted by scveteran

I will be absent for awhile. I have to have to go back to the hospital in the morning since my doctor's visit on Friday didn't go well. Worse the IV antibiotics they gave me along with the oral ones the last two days don't seem to be helping.

Hopefully that will be short, but no telling when you go in and they start cutting stuff off. After that, we will see. It is supposed to be an out patient just to remove the dying portion on a toe due to an infection, but could easily be worse since I have a reduced immune system and poor circulation due to diabetes.

After that I plan on spending more time with the kids for a bit. So I hope to carry on our conversations then.

Wishing you all the best, and hoping for a quick recovery...

Take care.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by scveteran

I will be absent for awhile. I have to have to go back to the hospital in the morning since my doctor's visit on Friday didn't go well. Worse the IV antibiotics they gave me along with the oral ones the last two days don't seem to be helping.

Hopefully that will be short, but no telling when you go in and they start cutting stuff off. After that, we will see. It is supposed to be an out patient just to remove the dying portion on a toe due to an infection, but could easily be worse since I have a reduced immune system and poor circulation due to diabetes.

After that I plan on spending more time with the kids for a bit. So I hope to carry on our conversations then.

Good Luck!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Harmon

...

That is, both book publishers and newspaper publishers are trying to sell is content. ....

I'm not sure that is true. What the traditional newspaper sold is ADVERTISING. The price to a subscriber has probably never covered the costs or provided a means of making money.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The big 6 publishing houses want to believe that they'll dominate the ebook market like they dominate the pbook one... but they're rapidly losing their window of opportunity to do so. And Godzillamazon isn't going to take over in their place--because it's trying too hard to meet the needs (or appease the fears) of those mainstream publishers, and that means *not* providing cheap, convenient ebooks. (TPZ means "not convenient," and the pricing ranges they've set up means "not cheap enough" in a lot of cases.)

What they are doing now pretty much copies what the music industry did 10 or so years ago. They didn't want to loose their control over distribution, but private individuals had stepped in to provide a service they were refusing to provide themselves (digital distribution). So their solution was to provide the service themselves, but at a higher cost than the physical product so as not to damage their traditional sales and to put off new adopters.

Things won't really change until you can buy ereaders for £20 in your local Tesco, like you can with mp3 players. But for that to happen you need ebook piracy to be much more widespread than it is now so that it will create a market for the readers.

Best wishes, scveteran. I hope you have a speedy recovery.

[ficbot]

Harmon, you make some good points. What I think publishers are failing to consider now is what alternatives the reader has available to them. For example, I really don't think most people will pay for run-of-the mill newsy news. If I want to read about local stuff and major world events in general detail, there is a free commuter newspaper in my city IN PRINT that I can pick up at any subway stop. So why would I pay for that? On the other hand, more in depth features, I might pay for. For example, a magazine here has a very popular issue every year where they rank the universities and offer information about them. My local newspaper also has times where somebody will win a fellowship and publish an in-depth multi-part series on a topic like health care of education. If they had a system like Amazon where you could read a free sample and then keep going with one (paid for) click, that might interest me.

People WILL pay for convenience. I pay $11 a month to have dvd rentals mailed to me so I don't have to go out and get them. I am also thinking of upgrading the 2 gb free Dropbox account I got over the weekend to a paid one. I just logged into their website from school, downloaded a file I had put in there at home, and ten minutes later had a colouring book printed and ready to go for my students. Now that I have tasted this convenience, I am thinking of other things I can put into that Drop Box, and I want more capacity. A benefit has been demonstrated to me and I am perfectly happy to pay for the extra service I want.

It isn't that people are opposed to 'paying.' It's that people have not had it demonstrated to them how paying for news content will get them something different and better than the other options they have available to them.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Harmon

But if the new author had not ebooked the book, but just published it as a pbook, he would have sold more than one copy. Perhaps it would only have been 200 copies at (to keep it simple) $7.00 each. So he would have made $1400. You can't blame him for thinking that he should make that 1400, no matter which format he sells the book in.

Are you sure about that? Maybe the majority wouldn't even have known the author existed or that they would like the author/book enough to buy it.

If I look at my own ebook library, I only have a few authors I knew before I started reading electronically. I find using a website like Amazon doesn't help me in finding books by unknown authors (to me) that I will like. And my local bookstore, though large, only has a limited amount of space and thus will generally only carry the well-known authors.

The whole category of alternate history I only started to know after I downloaded (from the darknet) a book by Harry Turtledove (and which I replaced after with official versions).