The Kindle Cloud Reader used to display book text in the DOM. This was very helpful for people with disabilities who use browser plugins (like mine [1]) to get accessible access to their Kindle books.
A couple years ago, Amazon "upgraded" their Kindle Cloud Reader so that it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, and we heard from joint users who were upset to no longer be able to access their Kindle books in ways that were easy for them to read. For some people with disabilities, this move essentially 'bricked' their Kindle library.
My guess is that they did this for anti-piracy reasons. But how effective can this be? It's not like people can't use OCR to capture text from the new image-based platform. Hell, you can even point your iPhone at a computer screen and capture all the text. And once one person has pirated a book, it's game over. I don't understand how they think they'll 'win' this game of cat-and-mouse. Are they just doing this stuff to appease publishers? Are they willing to sacrifice accessibility for this Sisyphean attempt to quash digital piracy? I understand both sides of the argument from a theoretical perspective, but I don't get how this is supposed to work on a practical level.
There's a bunch of interest in doing this widely to a huge part of the web. Removing all (almost all) HTML/DOM & using WebGL or WebGPU, having the page load a big wasm rendering engine & doing all the interactivity through that.
The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!!
Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how.
One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld.
Google did it to Docs also, with the same effect. They had even received letters from the Disability Services Offices at leading/large universities, including Stanford, asking them not to.
Ironically, my plugin still works on Docs...but only on comments. The body text is untouchable.
I thought docs was working? At least in Mac's voice over on a laptop. There's also a menu setting to turn on more accessibility things. Not sure what that actually does though. But as of December VO could read the body text.
There are ways to have some accessibility support, but still break absolutely every extension an accessibility user might want to use (already know/enjoy), by not having HTML/DOM.
These efforts will, in some cases, have hacks & workarounds. The ARIA group is active building alternative imperative accessibility options for graphical systems. Every one of the folks involved ripping out the actual html web for their own developer-defined Canvas-powered stack realizes accessibility is a minimum legal requiremement. But it can still violate every norm & break every tool an accessobility user wants to use/has ever used, and tick this legal box. It can still be a nightmare hellscape for them. (It probably will be.)
And we get much accessibility by default from having DOM/HTML. It's quite possible that these "Modern" un-web apps have accessibility options in the framework, but that many developers botch up or dont spend the time to use these accessibility options, or they use them poorly. There's plenty of A11Y/ARIA concerns sites should consider on the current web, and fail to do great. But the baseline can be ok, & the user can refine the site/experience (since it's html/dom)!!!! Whether the baseline did-nothing experience stays the same/gets better/gets worse for users (assuming they happen to have compatible a11y tools, per above paragraphs) on these "Modern" un-web apps is very TBD, and I tend strongly towards believing it'll be worse. And it wont be as malleable.
Since the publishers aren't able to directly control the user's OS, it seems they're trying to bypass the OS in a way by doing everything in the GPU where it's extremely difficult to access it from the OS.
If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live.
> But how effective can this be?
As you point out it will not stop pirates.My guess is that they implement the feature, piracy goes down the week it is released, and everybody gets a bonus. In less than a month piracy is up again as they develop new tools, and people with disabilities lost access to it. But it is too late.
Accessibility in websites need some kind of evolutionary pressure to exists. Otherwise change after change it disappears. And the population that needs this features to have normal lives is not large enough to create an economic incentive.
> If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live.
Years ago, I worked for a university. We were implementing Netscape/iPlanet/Sun email for students. The webmail was not accessible. The director of our disability services office was blind, (she was both a full-time staff member and a part-time student) and she complained it was unusable for her. Sun told us “accessibility is coming in a future version”. What did we do? We gave her a shell account with Pine, and told her we’d offer the same to any other student who couldn’t use the webmail due to disability. She was happy with that outcome.
Similarly, suppose someone like Amazon provides a non-accessible privacy-resistant service, and then offers users with proof of disability an alternative service which is more accessible but less privacy-resistant - depending on the details and the jurisdiction, that might comply with disability discrimination laws.
So you think a person needs to be officially labeled as disabled before they're allowed to use screen readers?
Personally, that doesn't bode well for my deteriorating eyesight, which is still very far from disability, but already at a level where audiobooks are easier than real books.
you'd think Amazon would have to at least pay lip service to accessibility, at the scale of that company. it's infuriating that they don't seem to care.
The Alexa app is great for having books read aloud. But many dyslexic readers don't want TTS — they want to read visually. And the app does have some accessibility settings (or rather, usability settings that are particularly helpful for dyslexic readers).
But there are many other types of assistive technologies out there, including some that are life-changing for all kinds of readers with disabilities. By making the platform inaccessible to browser extension, Amazon has created a situation where their in-house accessibility options are the only ones that can be used. For someone who has accumulated a library over a long period of time, on the understanding that the KCR supports browser extensions, it's pretty lousy to have the rug pulled out with no recourse.
There are some great people working on accessibility at Amazon, and I'm sure this is frustrating for them. But it's not unique that the accessibility team doesn't have as much power as another team — I see this at all sorts of companies, including pretty much all FAANG.
To play the-devil-intepreted-through-the-lens-of-poorly-constructed-web-apps advocate, they may have switched to rendering text in a canvas element (not saving and serving images of text) because... Web Developers. I've done it before (sorry).
Is there any kind of potential law that can be used against this?
There are limits to what contracts are allowed to legally do. And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.
Obviously there are some legitimate reasons for contracts around third-party actions -- betting, derivatives, insurance policies, and so on. Which are either for entertainment or risk mitigation.
But what Amazon is doing here simply feels abusive. However I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if there's a legal term for this type of "abuse" in contract law.
I suspect the terms of service for the Kindle lets Amazon do this.
It's been clear for a long time now that if you use a Kindle you don't "own" the content you read on it. Very, very clear. Ironically I think it all started when an Orwell book was taken down. It's hard to feel sorry for Kindle buyers when this stuff has been known for a long time.
1) The Terms of Service for usage of Kindle devices are not relevant to a contract between Amazon and an author whose work is published through Kindle Unlimited.
2) Kindle Unlimited is a "all you can eat" subscription service. Users of the service explicitly do not own the books they download and read through it, just like you don't own the music you listen to on Spotify or whatnot.
> 1) The Terms of Service for usage of Kindle devices are not relevant to a contract between Amazon and an author whose work is published through Kindle Unlimited.
No, but it's definitely relevant for Kindle users who purchased a book only to see it disappear from their devices!
> No, but it's definitely relevant for Kindle users who purchased a book only to see it disappear from their devices!
Actually, no, that's even more irrelevant.
I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but: Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service. It is not the same as purchasing Kindle-formatted ebooks through the main Amazon web store, nor is it the same as a Kindle device. (Kindle Unlimited doesn't even require Kindle hardware; they're just both marketed under the same brand name.)
Kindle Unlimited books are "free" books if you're paying for the subscription. It's similar to Netflix removing a show, you have no recourse because you never bought the show.
This has literally only ever happened once. Among millions of titles available on Kindle, a book was only remotely pulled from user's devices once. I'm not saying this was ok, I'm saying that clearly the issue is completely blown out of proportion.
It's happened more than that, because an Orwell title was mentioned here and it happened to me years ago with a title from another author. (This was before Unlimited existed and I've never used Unlimited.)
Amazon also removed an anime I purchased in 2019. For a while it said it wasn't available to watch in my location. As of today it's trying to sell it to me again!
It's never happened since - you are almost certainly mistaken.
This is a common problem with digital storefronts - people think they bought something from store X, but they actually got it from store Y or on a different account.
Amazon remembers every order you've ever placed - including digital ones. Check whether you can find the order in your order history - if you can see the order, but not the item, Amazon customer support will add it to your account again.
Since what? The Orwell incident? I wasn't aware of it. I discovered the book I'm talking about missing on July 16, 2013. It reappeared in my Kindle library a few years ago but was gone for most of the intervening period.
In the case of the anime, I have the order on Amazon and can follow the link to the item. I also know a bit about the production and release of this anime in different markets and can assure you I'm not mistaken.
Well if you have the order reference in your amazon purchase history, but the book isn't physically visible in your kindle library, then contact Amazon support and ask them to sort it out - that sounds like a bug not a deliberate action.
It may have been a bug but it coincided with the physical book going out of print, and reappeared in my Kindle library when the physical book was reprinted.
That's not even remotely the same. That's like saying you "lose" your driving licence if you move to a foreign country(because it stops being valid). Those users still own the books they bought, they can only access them in regions where they bought them because that's the limit of the digital licence on the product - nothing has been removed from their library, it just became inaccessible temporarily(while they reside elsewhere).
Apparently they've stopped pulling them from individual physical Kindles, but they still pull them from "your library" and the cloud reader (which is very much presented as being your own space full of books that you privately own). http://teleread.com/amazon-removes-incest-related-erotica-ti...
Copyright restricts the right of copying to the copyright holder. Once they make a copy, and sell it, they've sold a copy. You seem to confuse the world for a place where only streaming subscription services exist.
I'm not sure but parent might be talking about the contract between Amazon and the author of the book, since violation of the terms of that contract is the rationale Amazon is using to take down these books. I.e. how can Amazon claim that the author violated their exclusivity agreement when the author did not consent to the book being released on The Pirate Bay and such a release was the result of copyright violation by a third party.
Yeah it was 1984. Which was almost too much and i don't know nobody internally balked at it simply to refuse being that deeply ironic. Or they thought it was hilarious, which I suppose is a possibility.
Pretty dumb stuff happens at big companies all the time, although this is a rare case of it being both public and hilarious.
This whole book takedown thing is another dumb move that probably happened because someone thought it was a good idea to zealously enforce an exclusivity contract without realizing what would happen -- especially not realizing the possibility that third parties might put books on torrent sites in order to hurt the authors and get their books removed from Kindles.
When big companies do dumb things, people have a tendency to vastly overestimate the amount of thought and intention that went into it. This was probably a dumbass move by some mid-level person who thought they were helping.
Honestly, this is my feeling on the matter. I definitely buy books from the Kindle store as it is convenient and the author(s) get paid. If Amazon decides to mess around with my licenses or take books away, I will just take to the high seas to replace them.
In the mean time, though, I do feel like I'm doing the "right thing".
You're not doing the right thing if you're helping to enforce DRM. This removes power from both authors and readers to Amazon's benefit. If you want to do the right thing, buy a physical book and then pirate the ebook.
I don't want a physical object, though. With the way I'm doing it the author receives payment and I get to read their book without having to find space on a bookshelf or carry a bunch of bulky books with me while I travel.
Clearly there are already ways to remove the DRM, and the lifespan of a Kindle is decades so they will not easily be able to add new DRM to the old hardware.
In my opinion, it's roughly analogous to Steam but it moves at a glacial pace.
They're slowly closing DRM loopholes and getting rid of old hardware. Older versions of Kindle for PC that allow you to remove DRM won't let you download books published after Jan. 3rd 2023, they won't let you use the download and transfer feature to download Kindle Unlimited books any more either. They've given 1st gen Kindle owners/users new hardware, offered discounts to 2nd Gen owners, etc.
I'm genuinely curious as to why Amazon Kindle DRM seems to be so difficult. Whenever I look at the current state of affairs to try and backup my book collection, I find a lot of howtos on how to do it, all of them broken, with people discussing when such-and-such update broke it etc. And on the other hand, deDRMing and backing up stuff from Amazon Video is trivial with e.g. StreamFab. You'd expect it to be the other way around.
They don't have control of all the devices that support Kindle books either. Right now you can read them in a web browser, Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.
>There are limits to what contracts are allowed to legally do. And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.
I hate to be "defending" amazon here, but I doubt that they're doing this intentionally. In other words, they're not trying to retaliate against authors that had the audacity to have their books on torrent sites. Their behavior in this case resulted from a series of seemingly logical actions, at least when considered independently:
1. they have some sort of program which promises some sort of benefits (eg. higher royalties) in exchange for exclusivity
2. to enforce the above, they created an enforcement team to scour the internet looking for infractions
3. some worker was tasked with some vague task like "can you find this book on an alternate distribution platform?", and they were able to turn up some instances. Maybe it's not obvious to them that it's an unauthorized site (I don't pirate ebooks but some pirate streaming sites look plausibly "legit"), or they do but they don't give a fuck (the backoffice interface has a yes or no checkbox, and they're too lazy to draft an email to management informing of this edge case), so they flag that book as violating the agreement.
"Amazon is aware of the complaints and informs TorrentFreak that it’s working with the people involved to find an appropriate solution."
That's PR speak indicating they won't be reversing this policy and re-adding everyone banned. So now it's an official policy endorsed at a high level and can be criticized as such.
I think you're underestimating how much time it takes to get the ball rolling on policy change in an organization as big as amazon. The story was published today, and even though torrentfreak reached out to amazon for comment, it's not clear how much time transpired between "amazon PR department is made aware of media story" and the article was published on torrentfreak. It could be very well be as short as "a few hours before publication".
Honestly, I’m okay with holding companies responsible for the results of systems they set up. That it occurs in several steps with disparate actors at each point does nothing to absolve them of the overall effect.
And with regard to the short time since publication, I don’t think the clock starts when there’s negative PR about an issue, nor when they are informed about an issue. The clock starts at the point where, if the system were well-run, they would have become aware of the issue. That is, neither ignoring an issue nor cultivating silos of ignorance should garner any sympathy.
Unfortunately it seems to be mostly automated. In my experience if your book shows up on some foreign site that appeared out of nowhere and clearly is just a machine translated copy of the description, and the site doesn't even actually have a copy of the ebook to provide, all your KDP titles get delisted.
You can usually get Amazon to put the books back up, but it tends to take a while and is very disheartening having all your work removed. It's been a problem for years, but Amazon basically owns the market so there's not much you can do.
That doesn't make any sense. Based on a skim of the KDP site, it looks like they're using the spotify payment model. In other words, a portion of kindle unlimited subscription proceeds is used to pay authors that have enrolled their books to be available on kindle unlimited. The allocation is determined by some metric (eg. time spent reading book), but the total amount is fixed. It doesn't matter whether amazon offers 1M books or 100k books, or a user reads 1 book or 100 books, since the only thing that changes is how the amount gets distributed among the authors.
I asked someone who was published how Kindle Unlimited works. There's a pool of cash reserved for each month and authors are compensated a certain amount per pages read. There's a maximum number of pages, per customer, which will be counted.
> And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.
Isn't this actually an incredibly important part of every contract? Surely I would want any contract I'm part of to be clear about what happens if one of the relevant parties gets injured, or is unable to fulfill their obligations due to any reason beyond their control.
which means you could go after the third party for getting the contract broken, but it's likely that what Amazon has in the terms allows them to do this.
The author has some control over it, he may, for instance, issue takedown notices, and some may argue that if the pirate website didn't receive a takedown notice, the author didn't do his job protecting his IP and was, therefore complicit. The author may respond that Amazon itself allowed piracy. It may take lengthy legal battle that no one but lawyers will win.
Also, contract law varies a lot by country. What is allowed in the US may not be allowed in France for instance, adding an extra layer of complexity.
read the TOS. i dont know how many times it needs to be said, but at the end of the day the EULA and TOS for kindle and amazon books is a RENTAL agreement (and a pretty awful one at that.)
the question that has to be settled by the courts (if ever) is whether or not "buy" button is a bait-and-switch if Amazon reserves the right to rescind your purchase at any time without a refund.
This is so dumb on Amazon's part. It just creates further ill will with self-published authors and increases their own support headache.
If Amazon is truly worried about exclusivity violations, the KDP Select program should focus its policing efforts on legitimate platforms (Apple Books, Google Play Books, Smashwords, Wattpad, etc.) where the vast majority of readers who don't use a Kindle may be expected to seek out ebooks. There should also be some mechanism for screening out excerpts that might appear on blogs, PR channels, and the like.
FWIW, there are new authors who run afoul of the exclusivity terms because they don't understand what this means or why Amazon wants exclusivity. This in turn follows from the fact that self-published authors are often tricked into signing up with KDP Select, following the dark patterns scattered throughout the KDP UI and not understanding how the program works, or even that they will lose control over pricing and ebook distribution rights.
So their reaction to pirated books is to... remove books from their most-competitive-with-piracy service? Does nothing to help prevent piracy and only hurts authors and paying users.
Piracy will never end and the only way for businesses to meaningfully reduce it (to an extent) is to provide a compelling option that competes with it.
Netflix is a great example. Price was fine and watching streams was so easy that people forgot torrents. Now, that they increase prices, include ads and prevent password sharing, people remember torrents again.
Don't forget the fragmentation of the streaming market, as every content owner spins up their own streaming service and pulls their content from Netflix.
In my opinion, fragmentation is annoying but not anti-competitive nor anti-consumer. I'm sure Netflix wants to give 3rd parties worse and worse deals so they can prioritize their original content.
Netflix is a terrible example, because they grew off the back of finding value in under-valued content (the back catalogue content of big studios, streaming rights of newer content). Now that the value has been identified, they have to give up the rights to the newly-valued content and/or raise prices.
Another example is Spotify and Apple Music. Not too sure on the stats but I’d imagine there’s been a significant more decrease in music piracy compared to movies and tv shows.
Tons of authors are worried about this right now (including my wife, who self-publishes on Kindle Unlimited). There's stories of major authors being taken down every few days because copies are being found on pirate sites, which they can't control. I want to say there was 4 authors my wife heard about that had their works taken down suddenly from Kindle Unlimited just last week because of this.
There's some software out there that's like $7/month per book I think, that's supposed to help find and help issue Cease and Desists for this stuff, that my wife is seriously considering getting to at least point to in case hers gets taken down to show she tried to do something about it. Problem is, for each book she releases, that's an extra $7 a month she's paying. Feels like mafia extortion money almost.
There's even been some anger lately because of pirated books that keep getting uploaded on Scribd, who now have an ebook subscription service, so Scribd is making subscription money off of pirated ebooks.
It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of, that Amazon punishes authors for this. If they carried process over to tv, movies, music, etc, they'd have to take down their entire catalog because all of that has pirated copies out there somewhere.
I'm a publisher for >10 years. At first I used the policing services, but I stopped worrying about torrent sites and other low-grade pirates when it was clear that A) most readers don't use them B) site operators are located overseas and don't give a FF about U.S. C&Ds and C) I have better things to do with my time.
As for pirates on Amazon itself, or other major marketplaces: That's a different story. I have a registered trademark on Amazon Brand Registry and do use it to find bogus copies and copyright violations (usually in the marketing copy or cover images) to get them removed, with about 60 or 70% success.
She doesn't care if people pirate her books, she just cares that Amazon might take her books down from Kindle Unlimited if they discover a pirated copy online like they've done for many other authors.
Almost all of her income is from KU, not book sales, so it would crater her revenue.
It's MUSO. $7/mo per book or $70/month for your whole catalog, so I guess once you get 10 books out there the price flattens out.
Only reason I didn't mention it by name in my earlier comment is I forgot what it was called, I had to ask her.
And to be clear I don't think MUSO is a bad company or anything, just that it's insane to me that authors have to feel like they have to get this service just to maybe hopefully keep their books on KU (or maybe hopefully facilitate getting them back on if they do get removed).
She doesn't have to (not that she ever would). The article states that it's already being done automatically in many cases, from Amazon-provided files.
So to get a book removed upload it to the piratebay? I figured most book worthy if they are worthy to someone will showup on pirate sites. Didn't realize it could be weaponized
It isn't directly related, but a few years back my family purchased "Ready Race Rescue, Paw Patrol" on one of the major media platforms. This last week we wanted to watch it with our kids, or rather we wanted them to watch it so we could have 20 minutes of quiet. I went to turn it on and found out that it had been removed, but I could get access to it by purchasing a subscription to "Universal Unlimited" or something like that.
That sent me over the edge, I had purchased and paid to be able to view this and it had been taken from me. Something inside of me snapped and so now my house sails under the flag of the jolly roger, because it's the only way to really own something anymore.
Smells like gig economy. Because you're an "self-published" author you get to do all the stuff a normal publisher used to help you with arranging, like anti-piracy. But if you don't do it to their standards, you get unceremoniously fired (sorry, "removed from the platform"). Can you feel the independence yet?
Honestly, is it really possible to secure copyright for digital books? It's been ~16 years since the introduction of the Kindle and pirated books are just more plentiful. Publishing exclusively on paper seems to be the only real solution (and even that will likely be only temporary while pirates manually copy the text).
No, you turn the pages, but you don't have to unbind the book or press the face down to get a good scan. Just place the book facing up and turn the page and it will perspective correct and scan for you.
And it's worth pointing out that this process doesn't take that long. A few seconds per page, plus you're photographing two pages at once so you're only turning N/2 pages, or ~170 times for your average length novel. You can definitely plow through multiple books in an hour this way.
The difference between "effectively" and "literally". You're effectively giving Amazon your copyright because the contract gives Amazon control of who can make copies (and removes that control from the author).
> The company stresses that, if books are removed from Kindle Unlimited, they remain for sale on Amazon’s regular store.
Kindle Unlimited pays authors out of subscription fees, based on pages read. There's a price per page read. [1] A pretty obvious fraud would be to get paid for reading (or at least skimming) by taking books you found elsewhere, uploading them, and reading them (probably with a different account). It's not easy for an automatic system to tell whether an author wrote a book themselves. This runs up the number of pages read and lowers the price per page, effectively taking money from other authors.
So, this seems to fall under "business models that aren't very seller-friendly because fraud." Amazon, like most businesses, does tolerate some amount of fraud, but I guess there are limits?
When people pay for specific books then it might be used as a money-laundering scheme, but at least it's not taking money away from other authors.
I've been using KU as a reader for the past four years, about 5 books on average per month (mostly lighthearted fantasy).
First became aware of this issue on the fantasy sub last month (https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/106ebm3/sometimes_...) - read the first book of that series, liked enough that I would've read the sequels on KU but not so much that I'd pay for it (2nd book costs more than 2.5 times the KU monthly subscription cost where I live).
Saw a few more such cases on twitter after too. Just can't understand Amazon's stance here.
"1. Exclusivity. ...you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select. During this period of exclusivity, you cannot sell or distribute, or give anyone else the right to sell or distribute, your Digital Book..."
That's not a warranty that no 3rd party will distribute it contrary to your rights, however, so there's no breach if someone else distributes without your permission.
However, it doesn't matter since:
"3. Period of Participation... We can end KDP Select at any time at our discretion..."
I can sort of see where Amazon is coming from—-they have limited space for hyping up books, and if they spend that on books that are not truly exclusive, that adds less perceived value for the user (“Why am I paying for KU when I can find all the cool books on there somewhere else free”).
However, I can’t believe that’s the right move. I could probably pirate everything on Netflix pretty easily, but I pay for the convenience. If my favorite authors newest book was not on KU just because it was uploaded to another site I wouldn’t be happy.
None of the streaming services appear to be standalone profitable, seemingly the only way to turn a profit is via anticompetitive tying of services/software/hardware. Or maybe more ads.
The standalone services have already started making big cuts to their own original content, with HBO Max removing Westworld and Netflix planning to remove Arrested Development, as (profitable) physical media returns: most CDs sold since 2004 in 2022, DVDs returned to overtake Blu-ray, new cassette music releases, etc.
I have to say, my favorite use-case for Netflix was the DVD plan. I had a queue that was over 300 movies long. By the time something showed up in the mail, I didn't know what it was. I'd just put it in and watch it blind, a gift from my past self.
Then I briefly lived somewhere with unreliable mail, and they decided to close my account on a whim. My queue was lost. Honestly wouldn't mind something like that again, although maybe they could just send me little thumb drives or something, because I don't have any optical drives anymore.
This type of behavior is psychotic and it's costing us great works. For example, the Salvation War series, military fiction novels involving war against first hell and then heaven, were put on hold after the publisher dropped the author's contract following shitty PDF versions of the novels leaking on a pirate site. Years later the issue was finally resolved, just in time for the author to get killed by COVID shortly after starting the third and final novel.
Amazon sucks as a platform. it's my absolute last ditch effort....and only if all other means seem impossible. This has happened three times in 5 years....Amazon is not necessary and in all three cases....I felt dirty using them..
AWS is also crappy and has hidden costs everywhere with an aweful reporting experience and no simple cancellation process. just scum
On one side is a world where anyone can download any book for free.
On the other side is a world where all books, textbooks, and journals are available exclusively from Amazon/Pearson/Elsevier and can only be read with a crappy official app (or device) and an active Internet connection.
I assume this isn't a deliberate strategy and is instead a result of an automated system with almost no human supervision. If it just crawls the web looking for PDFs, it won't be able to distinguish between legitimate and pirate copies. This kind of unsupervised automation is typical of Amazon and other tech companies.
This is obviously Amazon putting intentional pressure on powerless authors (they wouldn't dare with a title from one of the multinationals) to go after book piracy with a bunch of individual lawsuits that Amazon will be happy to help the authors with and to finance. Typically cynical behavior.
There are a number of books I'd be interested in buying paper copies of but which I wouldn't buy on Kindle because I never want to have the "you don't own the device or it's content" relationship with anything.
Create unique copies of ebooks for sale on Amazon only. If these show up on the pirate sites then accuse Amazon of providing copyrighted material to pirate sites.
I'd rather news organizations focus on their core competencies. When you allow comments, you're now in the business of spam filtering and social media moderation - neither of which are easy. Better to allow discussion boards to host discussions and news organizations and blogs to host articles.
I don't really see the problem. We're discussing it right here & now. The primary thing of the web, in my mind, is linking - we can discuss something here even though it's over there.
I think the simplex communication of an article and the half-duplex communication of forums both have their time & place, I don't think it's a problem that television is simplex.
This is a response to a different comment of yours that was flagged (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34962126), I can't respond to it, and normally I'd just drop it but I wanted to offer you this in case it was helpful:
I think maybe you're not communicating as clearly as you imagine? Your statements don't feel connected to me, I don't understand why you feel some of the things you're talking about are related. Maybe you're better at communicating in person than you are over text? Maybe thinking we're all being dumb is a hindrance to you seeing what you might do differently to explain yourself better? Maybe we just disagree with you and that doesn't mean anything is wrong with us or with you, but that we simply don't see eye to eye?
Buddy I don’t know you in person, but if any of my friends said “I don’t read news sites without comment sections” I would laugh out loud in their presence. Doubly so if they proposed creating a youtube channel to illustrate that point.
Let's not be mock people when they say stuff out of frustration. That's just pushing people's buttons. We've all gotten frustrated and said something silly like that. No need to rub it in. You could've made the same point in a constructive manner.
I stated a fact. He decided to call people that disagreed with him “tardations”.
I am not a big fan of time policing, but may I suggest you try to correct the folks using childish names rather than suggesting they be treated extra nice?
I actually tried to respond to it but it was flagged before I finished typing. I have several comments in this thread that are critical of them.
I'm not defending their insults, but I take issue with you responding to them in an inflammatory way. It's not okay to stir someone into a temper, and then when they react badly, weaponize that against them.
Someone behaving badly in conversation is not license to treat them badly. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
My suggestion to you would be to flag insulting comments and move on rather than trying to be hurtful to someone who was hurtful to you. As a personal rule I try to respond respectfully or not at all. I don't always succeed at this. When I don't succeed I find I make an fool of myself and end up saying something dumb.
Honestly I think that's pretty much what happened here - your first comment in this thread has insulting undertones, the other commenter took the bait, and they came out not looking so good. You took advantage of their overreaction to further insult them, and in my eyes you look like a jerk and a bully. But I bet you don't treat people that way in general, and that it isn't compatible with how you see yourself and the reputation you'd like to cultivate.
When somebody bursts into a normal thread like Kramer from Seinfeld and starts spouting genuinely odd, angry and fully off-topic nonsense, I see no issue with pointing out the fact that that behavior is in fact childish to the point of being comical.
How many paragraphs were you prepared to write to admonish that poster? This bit of policing is kind of strange to me.
My genuine feedback to you: Your very detailed analysis of my posts was not asked for, and calling me a jerk and a bully is not going to engender a working conversation between us in the same way that if I said “holier-than-thou backseat moderator” wouldn’t encourage you to engage in a real dialogue either.
Respectfully, in the future please try to curtail your impulse to impose your personal rules on me. I am not open to your coaching. Any further criticism of me is wholly unwelcome, will not be applied, and I’ll just have to ignore our respond to it in the same way I decide how to engage with any other pointless off-topic emotional nonsense.
I'm sorry if what I said bothered you. I will stick to responding to your criticism of me, and not include any further criticism of you in this response.
I don't think I'm better or holier than you, I regularly fail to live up to what I'm suggesting. I'm not trying to impose anything on you; everything I said was a suggestion, and I interpreted your offering me advice as an invitation to offer advice in return.
Much like you feel you have license to tell people they are being childish when you judge it appropriate, I feel I have license to tell people they are being rude when I judge it appropriate. Both of us are expressing our view of how people should behave in this community, "back seat moderating" if you will.
Thank you for your feedback. Have a great rest of your day.
> Let's not be mock people when they say stuff out of frustration.
The first thing you said to me was a condescending command. lol at “inviting advice in return”
Buddy you showed up to backseat mod in the first place. I’ve just asked you to personally leave me alone with the (from my perspective) kind of silly decorum police nonsense. I did not come out of nowhere and tell you how to interact with other people. That’s kind of a significant difference.
"Let's not" is a suggestion, not a command. I chose "let's" for that reason specifically.
I don't see why you feel it's condescending to ask you not to mock people, and I'm sorry you feel patronized - but you told someone you'd "laugh in their face" and called both of us "buddy". You're being condescending on purpose because you feel it's warranted - you said as much ("I see no issue with pointing out the fact that that behavior is in fact childish to the point of being comical").
You're free to say whatever you please, but I don't see why a different standard applies to me. The same goes for "lol at advice in return" - it's not clear to me why you think the notion that I might respond in kind is laughable. For that matter, that also goes for your criticism that I'm sharing thoughts in a way that's not conducive to productive conversation - was laughing in their face conducive?
You "came out of nowhere" to tell this person you had a problem with the way they were interacting with the forum as much as I did. No one gets invitations here, we all come out of nowhere. Again, I don't understand why there should be a different standard.
The real difference here is that we view our own behavior as justified and each other's behavior as excessive. I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.
A Web site profiting from thievery, writing articles about effects of that thievery? Will this backfire?
A typical pro-piracy talking point is "these big companies are evil, so you should feel justified taking their product without paying them money", but some of these stories have other explanations.
Especially when it comes to smaller victims, like independent writers and smaller businesses, who typically are already abused by bigger companies, the "pirates" (glamourizing term) can be seen as further abusing from a different direction. And (in cases of DRM and invasive legislation, etc.) the pirates help justify and enable further abuses from the big companies.
I don't think Torrentfreak has as much malicious intent as you think but I would agree overall. I love libgen and I would not be able to read as much as I do without it but no one seems to ask how Libgen got its library to begin with. Yes a lot of it is Onedrive and Proquest rips which maybe you can convince yourself is ethical but a lot of the books on there especially the independent more technical ones are bought with a stolen credit card which screws the author over twice: once for the loss of sales and again with the chargeback fee. "They can afford it" is the new hip justification for theft but I don't find it persuasive because it would justify theft from almost anyone in a decently developed country. Though I would never pay for scientific journals so maybe I'm a hypocrite.
A couple years ago, Amazon "upgraded" their Kindle Cloud Reader so that it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, and we heard from joint users who were upset to no longer be able to access their Kindle books in ways that were easy for them to read. For some people with disabilities, this move essentially 'bricked' their Kindle library.
My guess is that they did this for anti-piracy reasons. But how effective can this be? It's not like people can't use OCR to capture text from the new image-based platform. Hell, you can even point your iPhone at a computer screen and capture all the text. And once one person has pirated a book, it's game over. I don't understand how they think they'll 'win' this game of cat-and-mouse. Are they just doing this stuff to appease publishers? Are they willing to sacrifice accessibility for this Sisyphean attempt to quash digital piracy? I understand both sides of the argument from a theoretical perspective, but I don't get how this is supposed to work on a practical level.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...