"Pirating ebooks is an offence against moral justice" says... GoodEreader!?

[ZodWallop]

Okay, so the article is in relation to Sir Philip Pullman. They are reporting on an ebook related issue and that is fine until you hit the end and Mikey editorializes with:

I believe that ebook piracy is morally reprehensible. You would not walk into a bookstore or secondhand bookstore and steal a book, because you do not want to pay for it or cannot afford to buy it. The same goes with digital, stealing is stealing. You are fundamentally an amoral person if you engage in theft.

I'm not sure what the treatment of amnesia is, but he really ought to get that checked out.

[ZodWallop]

Incidentally, I don't have too much to quibble with in the article itself. But the fact that they are sending a letter to the government on the heels of the story about the EU wanting to shut down Project Gutenberg gives me the heebie jeebies.

[tubemonkey]

I believe that ebook piracy is morally reprehensible. You would not walk into a bookstore or secondhand bookstore and steal a book, because you do not want to pay for it or cannot afford to buy it. The same goes with digital, stealing is stealing. You are fundamentally an amoral person if you engage in theft.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Incidentally, I don't have too much to quibble with in the article itself. But the fact that they are sending a letter to the government on the heels of the story about the EU wanting to shut down Project Gutenberg gives me the heebie jeebies.

What on Earth makes you believe that the EU wants to shut down PG?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What on Earth makes you believe that the EU wants to shut down PG?

Those nuts over at MobileRead: EU wants IA to take down entire Project Gutenberg archive

[HarryT]

Did you read the thread rather than the wholly incorrect title? It is absolutely not the EU that issued the takedown notice; it was the French government!

Sorry for editing your post - clicked the wrong button .

[j.p.s]

As near as I can tell, they only went after IA, not PG or CSPAN directly.

[hollowpoint]

It's true the French issued this directive, not the EU. But there's background. The EU is moving forward with plans for Internet censorship under two new regulations, the Terrorist Content Regulation and the Copyright Directive. As expected, they supported adoption by using easy non-controversial examples that everyone can get behind. There has been widespread concern about this leading to censorship and not just in US tech companies. Germany had large protests over it. The French eagerly embraced these EU regulations. So the French are the actors in this case, but they are acting based on EU regulations they support, using EU software by the EU agency that will be regulating (censoring) Internet content. So this incident may be an early example of a growing trend.

[barryem]

I'm not really sure what "an offense against justice" means. Does anyone know?

The article says they're afraid piracy will lead to fewer novels being published. Piracy has been around a long time. I just googled and found there are estimates of 600,000 to 1,000,000 new novels every year. It doesn't seem that piracy is slowing things down.

I'm all for honesty in obtaining books. I'm just as much in favor of honesty in the other direction. I'd love to be able to read descriptions of books on the back cover or on Amazon and be able to believe them. In the approximately 65 years that I've been buying books I've never been able to do that and it's no better now than it was when I was a teen.

I have no problem with shutting down pirate sites. I have no problem with shutting down lying book sellers and publishers.

The article also mentions the high percentage of ebooks on devices that aren't purchased legally. A lot of us make backups of the books we've purchased legally and then read them on our devices. I wonder how that affects those counts. I find it pretty hard to believe that most people have a very high percentage of pirated books.

I don't have a Kindle at hand as I type but I do have a Nook handy. All of the books on it, 561 to be exact, were purchased from Amazon, legally. None were purchased from B&N. If B&N were able to see what is on it now they might very well think they're all pirated books.

On my Kindles I do it a little differently. I'll make a safe backup of a book and send it to my library at Amazon to download to my Kindles. I have a lot of Kindles and Kindle apps and I like to rotate through them. I never read on more than one Kindle and one phone but I'll often switch Kindles so this helps me avoid the limits of 6 devices. I have contacted Amazon about this and they have no problem with it. In fact the last time I contacted them about it the guy said a lot of the Kindle support people do similar things.

This is all legitimate but it would be easy to misinterpret if someone wasn't paying close attention.

Barry

[pwalker8]

So, this is all based on some online poll with less than 2000 respondents?

[haertig]

Originally Posted by barryem

The article also mentions the high percentage of ebooks on devices that aren't purchased legally. A lot of us make backups of the books we've purchased legally and then read them on our devices. I wonder how that affects those counts.

That would be an interesting fact to find out. My process is, buy book (usually from Amazon), strip DRM on the way into Calibre, sideload to my Kindle out of Calibre.

Now, if I go online with my Kindle and Amazon scans what is on it, if they find the book I bought (where I followed the sequence above) and call it "pirated", then their counts are going to be off. Of course, they may call me a pirate for doing the above. But I don't consider that pirating. It's my book that I paid for and I don't want to end up getting screwed again, like B&N did to me.

[AnemicOak]

Gotta love a site that started out by charging money to access pirated books "forgetting" their roots

[barryem]

Originally Posted by haertig

That would be an interesting fact to find out. My process is, buy book (usually from Amazon), strip DRM on the way into Calibre, sideload to my Kindle out of Calibre.

Now, if I go online with my Kindle and Amazon scans what is on it, if they find the book I bought (where I followed the sequence above) and call it "pirated", then their counts are going to be off. Of course, they may call me a pirate for doing the above. But I don't consider that pirating. It's my book that I paid for and I don't want to end up getting screwed again, like B&N did to me.

Amazon doesn't consider that pirating. I called them about it a few years ago. I live in a small town and I don't have a car so I depend on Amazon and I worried that they'd shut me down for things like this. So I called their support and asked about it and I was told it was fine.

A couple years later, because of some discussion in this or some other forum, I called them again. This time I got a new support guy who said he'd ask around about it and call me back. He called back the next day and said that not only does no-one at Amazon have a problem with that, a lot of them do it as well.

The specific thing I asked about was removing DRM and sending the book to my library so I could avoid the license limit since I read on a number of devices. They saw nothing wrong with doing that.

That's not to say that this isn't reflected in any statistics they're maintaining such as the ones under discussion here.

Barry

[barryem]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Gotta love a site that started out by charging money to access pirated books "forgetting" their roots

That can be seen either as hypocrassy or as them having learned something as they grew up. It's hard to know which it is.

Barry

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by barryem

That can be seen either as hypocrassy or as them having learned something as they grew up. It's hard to know which it is.

Barry

that's true, but after considering how they have handled their own line of hardware, it is not so hard to decide.