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Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.
Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.
It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
Not just probably, they’ve literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.
They said “provably”, not “probably”, so the good news is we all already agree :)
Well politic’d, friend
You don’t even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.
Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.
Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.
And not only that - it’s not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?
Yeah that’s spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?
I know there’s also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.
👨🚀🏴☠️🔫👩🚀🏴☠️
Oh no… I’ve believed the propaganda uncritically for most of my life and am just now realising how absurd it was to ever trust the establishment’s narrative.
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Idk, I think it’s normal to believe proaganda. We all do, and sometimes it’s even true. I’m just commenting on it because I’m so used to automatically criticising the mainstream message, so I’m usually on the other side of this discussion. But for a long time I worried about viruses from piracy, but it only just dawned on me that I am now far less afraid of that than of corporate proprietary spyware.
It never occurred to me before that of course the pirates are more trustworthy, they always have been. The mainstream propaganda is so pervasive that it’s going to leave little bits stuck in your mind for a long time.
Never considered my library was spying on me. Spent years hyping the library system to save money on ebooks. Does pirating all your ebooks solve the problem or does tracking also take place on the e-reader side too?
I used a Kindle, but get the lion’s share of my ebooks from Anna’s archive. Books are often delivered to my Kindle through the email to Kindle service.
I have no illusions that every single book I read is fed through Amazon’s data machine. The Kindle estimates the time to completion of a book based on your reading speed - everything that it could possibly interpolated from your reading… Will be. And you can bet it will be sold, or at the very least advertised to you on Amazon.
I do the same by feeding my kindle via email. Got my kindle but wonder if there are more privacy friendly readers
I have a Kobo, you can set it to “sideload mode” and you don’t need an account of any kind. It disables the store and all that and I never turn WiFi on so it’s completely offline.
I use Calibre, an amazing FOSS ebook manager, to sync my books to the Kobo.
Pretty much just download whatever from Anna’s Archive, throw it in Calibre and get it to fetch all the artwork and metadata if I want it and sync to the Kobo.
Calibre takes a little getting used to but it’s not too bad, it’s also extremely powerful once you learn more about it.
Keep your ebook readers dumb and use them offline. Load them up with books and read them.
Pirating and Librera or e-reader nevernconnected to internet.
Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.
Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I “check out” the book and then pirate it, there’s no ethical issues with pirating it.
Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. I’d honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when I’m done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.
Thankfully, the only ebooks I have only gotten so far are classics from Gutenberg website.
