Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharikous | Hacker News Reader

I really like e-readers and e-books, mainly for the reasons commenters pointed out (much lighter than physical books, configurable font size, etc..).

But there are big downsides too. Mainly the market discourages ownership on the one hand and encourages piracy on the other hand. The result is that DRM protections are everywhere and some authors like Jonathan Lewin were burned up by e-book piracy and reverted to only physical copies. Also for some reason e-readers perform badly with technical writing (many references) and math formulas. It's not a technical barrier, it's just that the software is not optimized for these use cases.

Also showing off huge book shelves is impossible with an all-digital model. Some people care about that.

View on HN

I wish there were a Netflix like model for books. I think Amazon has a service like that, but without very much content (last time I checked). If the selection was good I would be happy to pay monthly for what is effectively a library card (which is basically how you do that today with ebooks but for free. Much worse user experience than piracy unfortunately)

I too love ebooks by the way. Between that and audiobooks I now consume more books than any other kind of content. It has been pretty amazing, highly recommend it.

Amazon has two services like that with different content; they used to have three!

For kids, there's Amazon Freetime Unlimited, which has a catalog of younger people stuff. This one needs a newer kindle --- if you've got a Kindle Keyboard or similar, no go.

For adults, there's the more expensive Kindle Unlimited? or Prime something which has more older people stuff, costs more, and may have the first book of a kids series, but not all of them.

The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is now gone. It was a lot smaller catalog.

A lot of libraries offer ebooks at no cost to patrons, so maybe check your local library to see if that's an option for you. It does come at a cost to the library (which is worthy of its own discussion, but probably not in this thread), so consider a donation if you can.

It's Prime Reading which is like a light version of Kindle Unlimited. It's, as best I can tell, meant to entice you into the higher cost subscription. Particularly since it usually only offers the first book in a series, you either pay for the rest individually or get goaded into paying for Kindle Unlimited. Or go to your local library.

> If the selection was good I would be happy to pay monthly for what is effectively a library card

Libraries offer this service for free. Our local library has a huge and increasing number of ebooks available.

Also keep in mind that your local library may be in a larger system. My local library can borrow books from almost the entire state (minus from the largest city in the state, for some reason). If you're willing to wait a week or more, you can put books on hold and get an email when they arrive to your local branch.

They do, yes. However, libraries typically have a very small number of "copies" of ebooks available to loan, which means there can be quite a queue. Add to this that there is literally no incentive for the person who checked it out to "return" it when finished, which means ebooks are always kept out for their maximum borrowing time. As a result, it can be months before a popular book is available to borrow.

It's a very frustrating situation for an artificially-constrained supply.

Putting physical books on hold at the library is a much faster experience. You can still initiate it online, but you get your copy much faster. And you naturally return the book when finished because this lines up with when you go in to get your next book.

I use Overdrive for both ebooks and audio books, and I really appreciate the service, but it's really not a "Netflix for books". This is like saying Visual Source Safe, which prevented you from editing files a coworker had "checked out", is just as good as git. :-)

> However, libraries typically have a very small number of "copies" of ebooks available to loan, which means there can be quite a queue. Add to this that there is literally no incentive for the person who checked it out to "return" it when finished, which means ebooks are always kept out for their maximum borrowing time. As a result, it can be months before a popular book is available to borrow.

My public library network has reduced the number of holds & checkouts of ebooks since the onset of the pandemic - 3, down from 10. I personally return audiobooks & ebooks immediately once I'm done since it frees up my slots. My holds get delivered semi-chaotically, so I checkout requested books as soon as I can. So holding on to digital books I don't need anymore comes with a tangible downside for me. If I had 10 digital slots I might never deliberately return books either.

Good, I'm glad your network is trying to fix this.

The other thing I do is return whenever, and just put my Kindle in airplane mode and read the book at my leisure. Sure, I can't add any content for a bit, but they can't remove anything either.

Amazon's service IS a "Netflix like model" - like you note about Amazon's model, neither are a comprehensive solution.

The model I want (and presumably you would as well) is a Spotify/Apple Music model, where the vast majority of all books are available for a single subscription. Audiobooks are even worse! Audible's consumer hating model still treats digital media as something you purchase one at a time (or rather two a month).

> The result is that DRM protections are everywhere

Not everywhere, in Poland ebooks are only watermarked, there is no DRM protection and you get epub/mobi/pdf copies of every ebook you buy.

From which reseller / publisher?

Manning books in the US watermarks their ebooks too (each page have a "property of XYX" on it). Its not DRM or even unsharable, I think it just makes you think about who your sharing with...)

Ditto in Russia, e.g. https://www.litres.ru/. They know that if they don't do that, people will just pirate en masse - they had to compete with pirated books for convenience.

It probably won't surprise anyone that the vast majority of ebook sales are for genre fiction and light, nontechnical nonfiction. I work for an academic publisher and we do ebooks (I wrote the code spec), but it is suboptimal when you start getting into large tables, charts, math, etc. on smallish tablet screens. Yes, better software support for these things would help. Apple iBooks isn't terrible. But there's not so much incentive for the vendors.

Anyone know why ereaders are so bad with this stuff? Rendering latex math is like 40 year old techology. You'd think there were a dozen open source libraries that these companies could utilize to do this. Maybe they figure only 1% of readers look at math formulas and its not worth the developer time to make a reasonable solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com