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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them.

when you pirate them versus buying them: 1a. searching for them has become incredibly easy 1b. searching for them is easy as well

2a. putting them on multiple devices is incredibly easy 2b. depending on the store, then you're going to be restricted to a particular device or app

3a. ten years from now, you'll have the same copy you bought 3b. in the case of amazon, they might arbitrarily modify the copy you "own"

Setting up a system for tv shows is a bit cumbersome, and of course disk consuming, but with a little bit of knowledge you get an extremely good and reliable system.

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We really have completely forgotten the whole napster/itunes lessons.

I'm old now, I've got disposable income, I'm morally inclined to pay book authors but the stores and systems make the experience so completely unpleasant that I rarely use them.

> its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them.

Pirating everything is easier than buying, copyright owners have firmly adopted this mindset. It keeps swinging across the line of comfort up and down over the decades and these days its mostly back down. Games don't have OS Ring 0 level denuvo style crap making your computer more vulnerable and slower, and these days all big ones have all patches available pretty quickly after release. Plus sometimes its good to wait few days before applying if its not a disaster, instead of auto-update.

Remember those unskippable FBI warnings in beginning of official movies? Unknown in pirated version. Even these days with say Netflix stuff that is in EU, but isn't in Switzerland (or it is but only in german voiceover, even though I live in french part FFS. Where is original voice? Who knows). Movies keep disappearing from collection. I know, not a fault of Netflix as much as copyright owners, but at the end I don't care. So I have 10 TB local drive, 1080p/4K in quality I prefer, with audio and subs I prefer.

Music - nothing beats local collection of flacs, I can listen to them on plane or elsewhere without any signal (or half around the world with no good roaming), top quality streamed via aptx lossless to Sennheiser plugs, absolute top. For discovery free Spotify is enough, not forking 20 bucks for me & my wife monthly, thats a ridiculous sum just for (average quality) music.

Books - I feel like if I buy/bought I would be re/buying them over my life numerous times, collection stability and ease of use of shops isn't something I trust long term. I agree with all you write above.

Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier (and in that case, sure - go for the lossless option)

You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride

I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use

>if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier

Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.

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