Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

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Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle

If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd probably be right, but we're now in the "cloud consuming" era. Hence the trajectory of music piracy. When people were used to managing their CDs and MP3s, ordinary consumers absolutely did engage in opportunistic (often friend-to-friend) piracy, but then streaming came and made both legal and illegal MP3s almost a footnote

[1] Of course you can upload your own "personal documents" to your Kindle library via send-to-Kindle, but few people know that outside of tech/enthusiast circles. Even knowing what an EPUB or AZW3 is almost puts you in that bubble

Errata: rephrased the first sentence from "several hundred megabytes" to "a high-quality movie", to better explain the point that download size is rarely a barrier for piracy

> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle

citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book signing. most people who have ebooks don't even ever deal with the files in any respect.

Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device.

We exist! There might even be dozens of us!

Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?

Size is absolutely a factor in that most ebooks can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't.

> can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't

The average pop song at average bitrates would fit that limit, though, too, even with less room to spare.

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