1. I went to Amazon, since I have a kindle and didn't want to buy physical books. Amazon doesn't have a shopping card for kindle books, so I started buying them one by one. My company uses Spendesk for managing funds, so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped, and the funds are returned to my company.
2. Not wanting to give up, I go to a different online store, Thalia, to buy the books again. After buying them, I download the files, which are in an .acsm format, and can only be opened on the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. Once opened, an .epub file is downloaded, and even though I can't transfer the files to my kindle on ADE, I download Calibre to transfer them. Once I try opening them on Calibre, I get an error message saying the files are protected by DRM. Funnily enough, it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal, and makes me question why did I decide to legally buy the e-books in the first place.
After spending hours trying to buy e-books, having my Amazon account blocked, and downloading files that can't be transferred to my Kindle, the only conclusion I come to, is that I'm never buying e-books again.
This isn't just true for books. Streaming film/TV is essentially cable TV at this point: you either pay out your arse for all streaming services or you have to constantly micromanage different subscriptions. Even if you are happy with the former, there is no way to centrally browse everything so you need 7 different apps.
Not to mention series being removed from streaming platforms because of profit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/westworld-removed-from-hbo...
You can't even rely on being able to access the media you want in the future if you do it legally. It's insane.
I'm a big fan of old scifi films and series and the more obscure ones are getting harder to track down. Quite a lot of the stuff produced in the early 70s is sometimes available on DVD which can easily be ripped, but it depends on whether it was popular enough for them to issue it.
With some old BBC series, I'm in the position of paying for a license, but not everything is available. Just before Xmas, I was searching for M.R.James Christmas Ghost Story adaptations and whilst I was able to get the newer Mark Gatiss produced ones from iPlayer, the older "Tractate Middoth" isn't available (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03n2rnf).
There's going to be so many lost productions unless pirates get together to hoard old media.
There is no actual pirating going on when you copy a digital file. Now there could be a loss of income if it grows out of control and artists are not being compensated. So obviously the discussion should focus on that.
Steam already solved piracy for gaming. Make it easy to download and manage your games. Apparently the same hasn’t played out for movies and songs on the whole.
FYI: https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5940948
Tractate Middoth adaptation is awful Gatiss tripe. (He's so hit-and-miss, and this is a miss for me). It's also on YouTube:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5MlQgGu6nCU
My favorite of those M R.James adaptations, by far, is A View From A Hill. It's on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGh0ybk-xyk
Gets even harder when you're dealing with hearing loss and it's nearly impossible to find subtitles for some older releases, despite there having been such when they were available....even for some non-obscure stuff. Some stuff is sitting in streaming-rights purgatory, the last release was on DVD and no one has it any more, etc etc...
The people at OpenSubtitles.org do their best to curate a good collection but those are only as good as the people who upload them.
The German public-service broadcasters like ARD, ZDF and many regional ones offer such a service. I can request a program from the 70ies, tell the name and (helpfully) where and when it was broadcasted. Then they search through their massive archive, make a copy on DVD and send them to you. It's not cheap (up to 40€ per hour of program), but it is legal for personal use. No need here to pirate anything, except very very old broadcasts from before ... around 1967.
I have been told that the BBC have a massive digital vault of shows that are available to producers obviously since iPlayer came into being any shows listed are there, just not available. And they are constantly archiving old material.
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Yes, its 100x easier.
Games could be in some cases easier to buy, especially since you realy must test those for viruses and other malcious stuff, not something you should be concerned with multimedia.
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And then Netflix solved a lot of those problems for a reasonable price.
And then through paying attention to the goldmine of watch data, they did it even better than piracy.
We knew that the licensing model would catch people off-guard eventually, but for a time they had actually solved it.
Then, they lost the contracts.
And media companies saw them as competitors instead of partners.
And Netflix brought back region locks (some not their fault, but some that was).
And the prices started to go up in chorus with the anti-consumer practices.
And now we’re back to the fragmented battleground that was cable TV.
And the book industry has somehow stayed just as bad the whole time, in many ways more draconian than Hollywood...
Maybe next time the pendulum swings back in favour of the consumers, we’ll end up with better contracts so we can avoid this sort thing as it swings over to producers again.
To pile up onto your example of Westworld, I was super annoyed when I subscribed to AMC+ to catch up on The Walking Dead, just to find out that only last few episodes of current season are available and since I was waiting for more to air, I am now SOL.
My issue with Plex is their unceasing dark patterns and attempts to monetize users. Forcing centralized accounts and constantly re-pinning their “value add” channels made me leave them. Also eroded my trust with them, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that they log all the media I watch in their app…
Why is it not possible to pay for this version of the stream? Even if I sign up for ESPN through Comcast or whatever hoops I have to jump through to access live sports, I still get the version with the ads and screen junk. Pirate streams are higher def and just more pleasant to watch. Sometimes you can even choose streams with no commentation at all, just the sounds of the sport. Where are these options in the paid streaming service?
Because they want both your money and ad money.
I don't know why people ever accepted advertising on pay cable TV. Pay to watch ads?
Ads made sense on over-the-air broadcast because there was no way to earn revenue from that other than a BBC-style "license" tax that wouldn't really fly in the US (though we do have NPR so...)
And Amazon is now doing this shady thing where the subscription includes every episode except the hold the last episode of each season hostage and make you buy it separately.
I think your best bet would be to just use a website like https://www.justwatch.com/au
To me that's the killer app right now, one-place-to-toggle-them-all, with a running tally of what you're paying this month. Unfortunately streaming companies have no vested interest in making it easier for people to turn on and off their subscriptions, so even if it could be done it'd be a constant arms race.
The Apple TV App (on iOS/iPadOS) does this. It even links you directly to the show in the app, assuming you have a valid subscription on that app. If it's not streamable, you can almost always "buy" or rent it.
It's not perfect, but it's the best there is that I'm aware of.
I basically agree with everything else you said.
I’m not playing this game.
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Calibre provides a very good service, but it can be a bit puzzling in terms of UX, also getting certain pirate books is a big chore and might require visiting dodgy sites. But the reason I stopped downloading books is that I often ran into small issues, like footnotes or a table of contents that didn't work correctly. The last book I remember downloading was "Thinking Fast and Slow"... I ended up purchasing it on Amazon because every half page it had a word duplicated, with the duplicate slightly scrambled srcambled. It was maddening... probably planted by the author , Daniel Kahneman, as a psy-ops DRM device.
They also provide an email address where, if you send an email with some epubs attached, they make them magically appear on your kindle.
I was pleasantly surprised by this last week, since I got a kindle and I thought it was going to be a hassle, but nope.
When I tried emailing an epub this way, Amazon messed up the conversion. I've had good luck converting pirated epubs to MOBI using an online converter so I haven't changed my practice.
Because of this support I can download directly from libgen without converting or using a different device. For books that are only available through Amazon, I have the Kindle app installed.
It remind me of whenever people discuss about OS and someone said their grandmother can use Linux just fine, hell, I'm quite sure she's just browsing with Firefox and not doing command line kung-fu.
If you use an Amazon account you can email them to a specific email address to get them on your device.
Download file > Add to Calibre > Transfer to Kindle
We're talking four clicks.
I understand generating a virtual card for a per company basis, but what's the point of generating a card for every book you're buying? Besides the added hassle for little benefit, surely you can understand why such behavior might be considered "suspicious"?
I haven't checked the logs, but I guarantee there have been people/bots trying to do card testing on our site in the past 24 hours. It's pretty nearly a non-stop barrage, so you have to auto-detect and auto-block.
Well there's your problem. Look Amazon is a shady company and I completely understand not wanting to hand over any more money to Bezos. But one account making N orders on N different cards in quick succession is going to trigger any rudimentary anti-fraud protection
Using a ton of different cards indeed would sound like a database leak to me, so with the retailer being liable for the user's and/or bank's failure to design a system under which the user can keep their credentials secure, this behavior being not allowed is understandable. This is all relatively foreign to me as a European who just pays with iDeal (Dutch system) that doesn't know fraud chargebacks or anything, and where it's on the banks (rather than retailers) to refund fraud from e.g. phishing so it's in their own interest to design a secure system, so correct me if I misunderstood something about how credit cards work.
The "single click" is in fact super annoying in my use case. I have an account with Amazon, with two different cards, one for professional purchases and one for personal ones[0].
When I buy a physical thing I can choose the card when paying. But for Kindles that's not possible, so I have to change the default card before buy. Very annoyging.
Also, for some reason, as described by the OP, one can't add a Kindle book to any cart to buy more than one at a time... or even save it for later! Which is completely absurd and user hostile.
[0] It's also possible to have two different accounts, but that comes with different problems; I have a pro account with Amazon but never use it.
That way, my conscience was clear (subjectively).
Then, the FBI or someone took down z-library. So, I’m not sure what my next move will be.
You do need to login with an email though which sucks.
Have you considered libby? Nowadays libraries around the world provide you with an account that gives you access to their catalogue for free.
While I like the idea of authors making more money rather than less, I see no fundamental reason why they _should_ benefit from second hand sales. When I buy any given object <X>, use it for what I need it for, then sell it to someone else; the original producer does not make anything off that second sale. And that's normal/expected.
Authors should benefit from secondhand sales at least a little bit.
The more demand there is for a used book, the higher sellers can price the used book. And as the price of a used book increases, more buyers will choose the new version over the used version.
It's not as beneficial as buying a new copy, but it benefits the author more than just pirating it. Libby is similarly beneficial in an indirect way.
I'll check out a physical book from the library, grab an epub, and delete it when I return the book.
If you just try and imitate the average customer you will almost always be on the happy path, but ordering multiple books with multiple cards in a short period... I think that would trigger any decent fraud protection and not just at Amazon scale.
Next step: force customers to submit to a full cavity search upon payment