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Comment by raspyberr | Hacker News Reader

This isn't to do with the article but I really think book piracy cannot be managed. The uploaded epubs are so tiny that there's absolutely no hosting issue. There's no DRM/watermarking for scanning a physical book into digital. I don't think anything can be done. Luckily many people prefer to read/own physical books anyway.

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I think, on the whole, widely available books is better for society than publisher's and even author's profits. Of course I believe an author should receive compensation, but laws designed to get them that compensation shouldn't get in the way of public knowledge.

Book publishers just have an archaic business model. I happily pay for Safari Books Online which gives me access to all O'Reilly published books and I imagine I'd be willing to do the same if other services offered something similar for non-technical books. Instead of looking towards how the video industry handled piracy, book publishers just seem stuck in their ways.

Have you heard of Kindle Unlimited? Amazon's been running this for years. They even pay the authors based upon how many pages are read. It's a very granular model.

Audible runs a similar service for audio books.

It is worth noting that publishers have been trying to adjust to the new economic realities, but this means they have to slash quality typesetting and even basic editing and proofreading. The result is that many books today are frustratingly sloppy compared to a few years ago, even from publishing houses that were once august and revered.

>but this means they have to slash quality typesetting and even basic editing and proofreading

At that point, what's the point of using a publisher vs. self publishing or using some kind of print on demand service?

Publishers still often do some kind of promotion, e.g. ensuring that review copies get to influencers, hawking the book at book fairs, etc. Self-publishing means you have to do all the promotional work yourself.

Also, certain books in the humanities can have their costs covered by grants, and the publisher might already have staff that are proficient in grant-writing, while authors don't have that savvy or reputation.

>> Publishers still often do some kind of promotion.

Which is almost certainly how the article about a book due to be published in April came to be written.

Heck even on Amazon it is kind of a gamble whether you get a pirated book or not when ordering one.

Piracy (as we know it today) is only really an issue because of lack of political will. Pirates find refuge in jurisdictions where there is little effort shown against them. There is no reason why this has to the case. Countries who have interest in maintaining IP rights could sanction countries who don't put in the effort to oust pirate activities if they really wanted to.

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