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Comment by sfn42 | Hacker News Reader

I just Google the book name followed by the word epub and generally find what I'm looking for pretty quickly.

Apples and oranges. Both fruits, some don't enjoy one as much.

Books are staggeringly affordable (aside from hardback), and if even they seem too expensive, libraries exist and offer ebooks. I would honestly be embarrassed to announce this – it reveals something very unflattering.

Staggeringly affordable? Last time I checked ebooks were roughly the same price as physical books. That's ridiculous. If they were like 20% of the price I'd buy them.

I don't care man. It doesn't matter to the world whether I spend money on books or not. It only matters to me. Or I guess it's more correct to say it matters much more to me than to the rest of the world.

So yeah, I'm not worried about it. I don't tip either, by the way, unless I see a very good reason to. Given the choice, I prefer to keep my money rather than give it away. Couldn't care less what you or anyone else thinks about it.

Maybe you should care a little bit what the people spitting in your food think about it.

Oh yeah because I definitely want to be giving money to entitled shits who'll spit in my food. That makes all the sense. Tipping happens after anyway.

And for the record I'm not American, we don't have the insane tipping culture you guys do. I know you're American because only an American would say what you just did.

I'm not American, but I assumed you were American because you were defiantly declaring that you don't tip, whereas in Europe (for example) it would not be worthy of comment :P

Guess we both assumed.

Also, you're right that the tip comes after, so not tipping is safe... until you go to the same restaurant twice (in America).

Sure, ebooks could be cheaper, but they’re still cheap as hell. $5-10 for what, ten hours of entertainment? A fraction of what you pay to dine out. I mean, you can be as cheap as you like, but this thread exists because you’re promoting your cheapness tactics for others to emulate, which, at scale, actively harms the very things you are enjoying. You can be cheap! It’s just parasitical, which is why I suggested it was a shameful thing to announce.

I looked up the price for Project Hail Mary which I read recently, it's like $20 and the physical book is the same price. Think about that. Imagine all the work involved in producing and transporting the physical book, compared to just infinitely copying a single epub file that's probably generated automatically from a word document or whatever they use to write books. The fact that those are the same price is outrageous. It's completely unreasonable.

I wouldn't say I'm cheap, I'd say I'm frugal. I'll happily spend money on things, just not when I don't need to. And especially not when it's completely unreasonable like ebook prices. I can get it for free so I'll take that deal. You can say it's parasitical, I guess I don't disagree with that. Personally I think there's a lot bigger fish to fry in that department like insanely rich people who hardly pay any taxes, but sure I'm slightly parasitical in some minor and insignificant(to everyone except me) ways.

I also don't really think it matters that much. Most authors don't make enough money to live off it. The ones who do, make a fortune. I generally read books written by those lucky few who make a fortune, and I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about not paying money to Andy Weir, who's worth about $55 million according to a quick Google search. He'll be fine. And all the middle men like Amazon and publishers etc can pound sand as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I mean millionaire authors are one thing, but saying "Most authors don't make enough money to live on, so I'm not going to pay them for their work" is a bit absurd.

That's not what I said. I said I don't read their work. Maybe I do some times, but it's not often and I seriously doubt the $2 or whatever they end up getting after everyone else has their cut makes any difference to them.

Are you going to give an epub as a present to somebody?

No, I don't mind giving physical books as gifts to people who want them. In fact I don't mind physical books at all.

I just prefer ebooks because an ebook reader is 100 times better. It has backlight so I can read in the dark, it's compact so I can put it in my pocket, it's light and ergonomic so I can easily hold it and flip pages in one hand, and it can fit literally a whole library worth of books in my pocket. It's not even a competition, as far as I'm concerned physical books are furniture at this point.

Weird, I regard a far-superior UI as the advantage for physical books (with ebooks winning on just about every single other front).

The main issue is that you can't actually buy ebooks anywhere

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