I am guessing this works for you because more people reading = more people talking = more readers discovering and potential sales?
It would be interesting to see at what point of notoriety that is no longer true. Like is this still a factor for Stephen King, or at that point is it really just lost sales?
As for scale... There is only a tiny fraction of the industry that can support their life on writer's income, let alone be a household name.
It probably does become just lost sales at that point, but to reach that, you're probably already beyond most competitive forces, leaving only piracy around.
Some of my publishers are, as they're American. I'm unlikely to see any of that.
Unfortunately, I'm Australian, and my government saw fit to narrow their interpretation of current laws, to make AI scraping of illegally obtained data, legal.
You now have to prove direct harm - not the indirect harm happening to the entire industry.
>The more people who pirate my books, the greater my sales across all platforms.
You think more piracy leads to more sales, but surely this is correlation, not causation? It seems far more plausible that popular books get pirated and bought more, hence the correlation.
It could be pure correlation if you, personally, are a household name. If you're secretly Stephen King commenting on Hacker News, then yes, exposure isn't going to help you.
But if you're not Stephen King, then more piracy is going to make a direct, causal, positive impact on your sales.
Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...
Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.
Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.
How many times has this happened, such that it can be called a cycle?
There are other possibilities, such as people simply not writing as much anymore, or higher quality writers existing the market due to lack of sufficient return.
Bad DRM led to Napster led to Netflix lead to a fragmentation of services led to a resurgence of piracy.
Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).
Similar in books.
I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.
Instead of lining bezos pockets get your ebooks from above sources and go to a real bookshop to buy hard copies of books you like especially - you can give them away and so support the actual author while not supporting bozo
I pirate all the books, I treat that as a public library. I don’t read most of them. The ones I have read and found good, I talk about them, write about them, and I can buy them. For myself, plus as gifts to others. I just dislike buying highly marketed book that turned out to be useless.
If I’ll ever to become an author myself, I don’t see any issue with that.
I use the local public library from time to time (physical/via Libby) while reading on my kindle otherwise. Libby is something else, but for the physical books, I just see zero difference between going to the library in person, checking it out and returning it later vs just pirating it online. It's not like the publisher does not get any more money. OK there is a difference where there is a limit to the number of copies available, so some people have to wait, just typical of public resources. But I noticed that most books I borrow are always available, especially with interlibrary borrowing. So what difference does it make?
In the end I pirated more often. I am not proud of that, but I also don't see how any of this makes any difference. It's not like I'll ever buy the book with my own money.
I wasn't sure how it works where I live, so I looked it up and apparently in Germany (according to Wikipedia) public libraries pay 3-4c per checkout to a central private body which redistributes it somehow.
So unless the book is checked out a thousand times over and its lifetime, buying it still dominates overall.
I loved the talk but some kind of reds flags went off in my mind when he couldn't answer about heavy metal contamination but i'm no chemist so i have no clue either
So you need 2 hours of both encrypted and unencrypted data at same time to make this attack work, is this feasible? And if you just flip the switch on devices to use more bits in the encryption the attack becomes unfeasible. Piss poor that NATO never replied to them.
I can only speak to living in rural suburbia USA but when I was 15 my hobbies were severely limited by the lack of independence. No ability to drive, part-time employment, academic busywork and parental oversight severely curtailed the range of experiences I was able to enjoy. This somewhat continued into college as I had to spend breaks working full-time to pay for tuition and housing. In these types of circumstances video games are a great hobby because they're affordable social experiences that don't require travel.
Now that I'm fortunate enough to be liberated from these considerations I choose to do more expensive outgoing things like backpacking, going to festivals, trying new restaurants, biking, etc. I make occasional exceptions but these days I try and stay away from video games; it'll be easier to catch up on all the games that I missed when I'm retired in 30 years and don't feel like walking 20 miles in a weekend.
For sure I get that, and same. I mostly play games these days on Steam Deck as a wind-down activity that competes with reading a book or watching a YouTube video. It doesn’t complete with high energy activities anymore.
It's an indicator to the amount of time one has spent on coping and accepting the inconvenient truth about their past hobbies that they fervently lie to themselves and others about.
It's not a mystery to anybody else why they immediately switch interests after finally reaching stability to 'do the thing they've always wanted to have time to do' and glorified multiple years of their adolescence engaging in: they aren't interested in it as much anymore, or were never actually that interested in it. It's weird that they'll always be the last to figure it out.
Video games don't charm me like they used to. Somewhere around college I logged into IRC and realized I like online socializing more than I like gaming.
Single player games are lonely. Multiplayer games are mostly competitive. Cooperative multiplayer is just socializing with busy-work added. And they usually demand an entire screen to themselves, when I would rather have a few windows open at once.
I bought a Steam Deck because I'm no longer young. I could rave about the haptics and build quality, but honestly, I just like that I can tap a button and pick back up where I was weeks or months earlier.
Plus, it was $300 (on sale) for the first fully equipped computer built for Linux in a handheld form factor. Even if I barely use it, that's /cool/.
I have been enjoying the new version that just came out yesterday, they implemented a new video player and IMHO the user experience is much improved, if the UI glitches you mentioned were related to the player, maybe you could give it a try.
