Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Even if I pay for a product I love some asshole suit is going to get a bigger cut than the artists who did the work.
I’m an indie author, and all my novels ended up on PDFdrive.
Not that I’d be mad about it. If someone pirates my books and likes them, maybe they’ll support me in the future.
Just saying, I’m not wearing suits. I’m working full-time and write when I have off and got the time and energy.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
Yep! Often the math is “the people who pirated probably wouldn’t have bought your product if they couldn’t pirate it, so you didn’t lose anything. But you did gain a reader, who can now recommend it to others, and / or make future purchases themselves”. Generally speaking, pirating isn’t bad to the bottom line (not saying it’s good).
It hurts brick and mortar stores, but then, so do libraries. (Hah)
I’ve always been of the opinion that people who truly love what they piratesd will at some point want the author to carry on writing. Just like someone who just stumbled upon your work by accident. That’s the beauty of humanity, people do remember, and they do care, and creative arts are a pursuit that connects author and reader.
It hurts brick and mortar stores, but then, so do libraries. (Hah)
libraries are not comparable to what damage piracy does to brick and mortar stores and small authors
Piracy does not damage at all compared to the damage monopolized america is doing to them.
That was a joke about how much capitalists hate socialist libraries.
If we had any sense as a species we would be funding artists so that they can pursue their art full time. Industry advances technology, but art advances the mind.
We might end up like people who do graphics… replaced by AI tools. There aren’t any that make it as easy yet (and maybe there won’t), but who knows where tech will lead us.
If you do it as a hobby, you don’t need to worry about it so much, but it does take something away for sure.
Just like the invention of the camera stopped people painting portraits.
AI will change the game, but I think after an initial period of growing pains that we’re really facing a shift in the economy whether we’re ready or not. All of the “problems” of capitalism have been due to runaway efficiency. A scarcity economy is absurd when we’re infinitely capable of producing everything people want or need.
I agree, and the optimist in me desperately wants to experience a post-scarcity society like the one we’re seeing in the The Culture books, where AIs run the world, and we humans are free to chase whatever it is we’re dreaming of.
Maybe that’s a romantic notion, but I’m hesitant to give up on in. Dreams are what’s kept us going for the past millennia.
You might become bored and depression does seem to be more common when you do not have a particular sense of purpose.
I like the idea as well but human psychology might not be so conductive to easy living.
What do you mean when you say we need a purpose?
We are biologically designed to reproduce. So our current purpose is to survive until we’re grown to sexual maturity, reproduce, then raise our offspring to a stage where they’re able to survive on their own. Then, we either do it again, if we’re still young enough, or die and make room for the next generation. That seems like a very depressing purpose to me, but this is how evolution works.
I think that we now have the intellectual capacity to transcendent this cycle. We’ve been for a while, and we formed societies, developed technology. Our first models were small tribes, very much hippie-like little communities, that suffered from attrition by tribe warfare and rule of the strongest, where reproduction was controlled by “the fittest”. Then we developed monarchic systems that provided a much more stable life for everyone, but ran on servitude (slavery) of peasants. We experimented with systems like communism, that then lead to terror by the ruling class (can still see that in China today), and landed on a somewhat democracy-adjacent system of capitalism that we’re running today, and that’s not sustainable, because we’re destroying our planet.
What’s next, and what purpose for the individual do you have in mind?
You mean, being forced to find your own meaning instead of just going down a socially acceptable to-do list?
Boredom is simply a lack of imagination and drugs.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
I am sorry to hear that. If it ended up on pdf drive, then I guess it’s either that, enough people want to read it or pdf drive has a bot which is ruthlessly uploading all the books it can find. Have you tried self publishing on kindle? Also, name your books if you want to, it looks like some eyeballs and popularity will do you some good.
I tried on Kindle, but the reality is that every day, a six-digit number of books are being released, which leads to insane odds.
I wrote cyberpunk/urban fantasy crossover books, but am now switching over to space opera. If you’re still interested, I can give you the title of the “entry book” that starts the story.
Shadowrun?
No, I’m not writing Shadowrun, but the genre has some similarities.
Just curious — why do you consider writing to be an expensive hobby? I mean, it’s totally expensive from an opportunity cost perspective, but wouldn’t any hobby be? Is it the cost to get it published somewhere?
If you just write for yourself, it only costs time. If you plan to (*self-) publish it, though, you want at least a good cover, and optimally, you’d hire an editor and maybe things like sensitivity readers. And then, most people seem to prefer audio books these days, which is either expensive, or hard to pull off, due to having to find a narrator who’s okay with royalty share with a non-established author. And then you haven’t advertised your book at all yet.
I’ve so far only worried about cover and editing. Wrote 4 novels. Now I’m writing a series and am considering writing the whole thing completely first, then getting a deal with an artist for all the covers. This also makes it easier to do foreshadowing properly over the course of more than one book, and it’s probably advantageous to stagger book releases, even if that means a few years without putting anything out to the world.
*All these points are moot if you aim to get published by an established house, but then you’re dealing with “the suits”, and people who rank “will it sell” higher than “is it good”.
How expensive does editing and cover art get? I imagine it’s pretty pricey to hire people to do that. You mention this is moot going the traditional publishing route — I guess because publishers will front the costs for these things if they think your book will sell? If you’re buying cover art and stuff to self-publish, where do you publish your novels? Do you sell print copies, or is it all digital? Is selling physical copies even feasible without a traditional publisher?
The cover costs anywhere from USD 100 to 1000, depending on the artist and the cover, where 100 would get you a somewhat decent one on Fiverr, while something not generic can go up in price very quickly. Most “cheap” artists have a flat rate with one or more stock image sites, where you’d then pick a model and tell them what setting you’d like to have. If you have very specific needs that would require hand crafting, the sky is your limit (The covers for ebook, print and audiobook are separate, and print/audiobook covers will cost extra).
Editors come in categories. Developmental editors check the characters and plot for consistency, logic problems and structural things. Then there are copywriting editors that focus mainly on things like grammar, spelling etc and, while being a bit cheaper, still cost quite a lot (Which is why people use tools like grammarly or pwa to self-edit, which basically saves you the copy editor).
Sensitivity and beta readers are tricky. If you already have a fan community, you might be able to recruit some of them for this purpose. You’d want them to avoid faux pas when describing people of another ethnicity, sex, gender etc, and there are professional options for that, too (I already suspect my current project might not be fireproof, because names like Born Of Rain remind Americans of natives, even though they’re completely unrelated to my story – there aren’t even humans in my book).
Audiobook narration can go way, way up. You might be able to negotiate royalty share with a new voice actor who needs gigs to build skills and a portfolio, but nobody wants to spend hours every day for weeks in a recording booth if there’s no money to be made, and therein lies the problem – you need exposure to sell your books and make some money back, but exposure doesn’t come for free. While less and less people read books, they do listen to audiobooks, which would increase your chances of being seen drastically.
Newcomers don’t usually have a backlog of ten books, with lots of positive reviews, but most people don’t buy books from some dude with two books and zero reviews. They also don’t buy books that don’t have a nice cover, and they demand the professional quality you’re getting from having your book edited by an expert. Some genres also just sell better in general, like romance or thriller (to a lesser extent).
If you go with just a cheap Fiverr cover and some basic copywriter editing, you’re already looking at approximately 1 grand, with sales extremely unlikely, unless you have a platform somewhere with a related following (you often see book-related youtubers advertising their books during their videos). For someone like me, who has 3 books out (Out of 4 – I pulled my first novel, wasn’t satisfied with the book), writing something like science fiction, which doesn’t have a ravenous market, that means you calculate with 100% loss and are happy if you sell 10 units.
Indies often rely on things like Facebook/Google ads, newsletter and heavy social media marketing, all of which I hate with a passion. But it’s “part of the business”, which makes it a very unpleasant endeavor for me, and I’ve so far not done any marketing at all, which basically guarantees I’ll stay an obscure writer in the hobbyist league, one small fish in an endless ocean. And that’s okay.
If you think of traditional publishing, you have “the big 4” in the USA, and some foreign houses elsewhere, and you need an agent. Agents take a cut of anything you might earn, and they’re not optional. An agent helps with some very basic plot doctoring, and most publishing houses won’t even look at your manuscript if you send it in directly. Even with an agent, even if they’re well-connected, there’s a high chance your book will end up on the slush pile and never be seen. Not because editors are malicious, but because they’re overwhelmed. You wouldn’t believe the amount of books people put out every day, with a large percentage being unacceptable.
Agents, and editors at publishing houses, look for something they think sells. They’re notoriously bad at predicting trends, but they are the ones who decide what gets published and what not. Remember the vampire hype? Then the “magic academy” boom? Editors tried to create an “angel hype” with very lacklustre success.
If you’re lucky and write a book that falls into a category editors are looking for right now, they will then assign development and copywriting editors who work with you and tell you how to get the book in shape. They’ll get a cover made (over which you have zero control, even if your name is Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson) and pay you a 5k advance, with a small percentage of the sales if and after your book makes the advance back (and if it doesn’t, your pen name is burned).
It takes me about 3 months to write a book, which is just the writing. The planning can take weeks or months, depending on the setting, the characters, the plot and how far you lean on the planner-pantser-spectrum. If you just count the writing hours, a 5k advance means below minimum wage, so you won’t live off your books. Add to that the high barrier of entry and the other activities like marketing, in which you will have to participate especially as a new author, and you’ll see a very skewed effort/reward ratio.
Traditional publishing used to be more competitive, and until a few years ago the Big4 were the Big5. There also used to be a mid-list, the kind of author who could work as a writer full time, barely profitable, and usually paid for with profits from star authors’ sales, in the hopes that one of their books breaks through. G.R.R. Martin was such a mid-lister for decades. The trend though has been to abandon that concept completely and fully focus on the established star authors, and on cheap newcomers who hopefully sell their books themselves by somehow going viral on TikTok.
That’s why I said I see it as an expensive hobby, and why I don’t mind being pirated. I want to be in creative control of my work, get a cover I like, tell the story I have in mind, without deadline or the pressure of having to sell.
I want to be read, not to sell; readers, not customers. So if someone puts it up for free, cool. Not that I could do anything about it anyway.
That all makes a lot of sense. If I’m reading you right it sounds like you do make a profit, but you’re making much less than minimum wage? Or has it been not profitable at all and a loss in that sense? You at least mentioned that new authors go in expecting it to be a total loss, which makes it sound like it could be sensible to put the writing online (basically free self-publishing), at least if the point is just to have people read it, and you’ll make a loss from a more properly published thing anyway (although it sounds like your biggest costs are editing / audiobooks / covers which maybe you consider an important part of the work in the first place). That said I feel like the internet has changed quite a lot and people don’t really follow specific creators and their websites so much anymore.
Yeah, I’m an Indie, I do self publishing without advertising. I’m spending more than I make.
The problem with putting your stuff online is, the pages that specialize in that and have it all set up and ready to go are mostly fanfiction and romance, so you won’t get a lot of reads there, either.
I guess I could just upload my books on GDrive and put download links on my website. Haven’t thought about that deeply yet. But I do write books, not blog posts or diary entries, and I like to have them in a neat package with proper presentation, in a format ebook reader apps can display painlessly. Nobody wants to read 70-100k word novels on a website ;)
Agreed. I can say that personally I went back and bought a lot of music that I copied off of my friends’ ipods as a kid. I’m sure it isn’t the norm to go back and buy stuff, but it happens.
bigger cut than the artists
that’s the shitty part! I don’t like that one bit.
Then pirate and make sure the creator gets nothing.
not ideal, you know, I would prefer it if creators had pay links attached to their accounts and you could anonymously send them money. Pirate something, pay the creator some money if you can. I mean, if enough people do it, the corps would be forced to change the game.
How do you tip say 500 people who made a film?
The sentiment is great. I’d love this also, but for film it won’t work.
While undermining the system that is already failing artists.
So you pirate it and donate the normal price to the author directly, right?
When I was in university, I watched a movie online using alternative means that I had been kind of interested in, but never went to see. I then watched it again. Then I went out and bought a DVD.
A little after that, I watched a lets play of a game that basically gave the entire experience in a single watch. I liked the game enough that I bought it immediately and just let it sit on my steam library without an install, just so the creator would receive their dues.
A year or so ago, I got a game through a charity bundle and wound up playing hundreds of hours of it. Since the creators got no money from my purchase, I bought merch, and waited for DLC to come out for me to buy instantly, just so they’d get something from me.
Recently, a AAA studio let go a bunch of creators while their game was wrapping up, essentially punishing them for a job well done. The creators will get nothing if I buy the game they made, but the studio that screwed them over will get everything. Just like I always have, I will give as much as they deserve to receive.
I did the same with Chernobyl. Originally watched it with my friends password, but I liked it so much I bought the steel book 4k. If I hadn’t had that shared password they wouldn’t have gotten any money out of me
Sometimes, when it’s particularly impactful. But you can save your shaming for somebody who cares about your opinion. The fact that you’ve given me more attention than anybody with the power to change things shows where your allegiance lies.
I don’t know what you mean by “allegiance”, you were talking about ethics and that authors don’t get what they deserve. Your problem was not compensation itself but that some people that you don’t think deserve it get a bigger cut than you’re comfortable with.
It logically follows that in this frame of mind the ethical thing to do is to cut out the middle man and compensate the original author for their work directly.
I don’t know what kind of box you put me into based on one sentence but not everyone is out to get you who doesn’t 100% agree with you. This is why civil discussion is not possible online anymore.
The problem is that pirates are mostly full of shit. They just don’t want to pay. It’s that simple. Everything else is an attempt to rationalize.
You want to criticize my protest and waste my time, but when was the last time you sent an email to an elected official?
I’m not some kind of activist set out to undermine your movement, I asked a question. This is an online forum where anyone can comment, if you feel like it’s wasting your time then don’t answer.
when was the last time you sent an email to an elected official?
Last time? A few months ago when a chinese company wanted to build a chemical distribution center in my district.
Give me a reasonably priced, accessible way to enjoy the content and I will happily pay for it.
Streaming has become untenable and now it’s neither affordable nor convenient to watch what I want to watch. And with how frequently shows and movies bounce around platforms, who knows if the show I want to watch this weekend will be still available on one if the many platforms I’ve been paying for.
I’m just done with it.
I know people like to shit on Spotify. But it’s the reason I stopped pirating music forever ago and the reason I’ve paid for it for years now.
It’s fairly reasonably priced at $10-11/mo. It’s available on basically any phone, computer, tablet, etc. And nearly every song I could ever want to listen to is just there, seamlessly. You can even download the songs to play locally for when you don’t have Internet access. I will admit there are some rare occasions where a song I want is not available there, but it’s so infrequent that it doesn’t at all impact my listening experience. I can also very easily discover new music by generating playlists based on a song I like.
Now look at something like Netflix. It used to be this way…priced well and had everything you could ever want to watch on it. But now everyone and their mother has their own steaming platform. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s become as expensive as cable to get the same watching experience as TV streaming sites used to be. Sure there are people who say “well I just periodically subscribe and unsubscribe to the service I want to make it cheaper”. And sure, it makes it cheaper, but it sure as hell isn’t convenient. I don’t want to have to fuck with all that shit. So I use illegal TV/movie streaming sites instead. Or I just watch YouTube videos or use free services like Tubi and Pluto. Paid for TV streaming services absolutely suck ass nowadays.
If we started having issues with artist and production company fragmentation, I would cancel my Spotify subscription. But thankfully that hasn’t happened and I hope it never does. The trend doesn’t seem to be looking that way thank goodness.
If you have a reasonably priced service that has everything I could want, I pay for it. If you don’t, then I pirate. Simple as that.
The biggest issue to me is that all music services offer effectively the same access to music. I’m not choosing between Spotify and YouTube music because my favorite artist is on one, but not the other. However we are conditioned to think this is ok when it comes to video. Streaming services never should have been content creators, we should be choosing Netflix vs Hulu based on price, app quality, video quality.
I was never conditioned to think it was ok for video and it’s why I hate TV/movie streaming services lol
I’m with you. I’ve had a Spotify sub for more than a decade and have no plans to cancel.
I still pirate my music, using YouTube music revanced, but the main reason I do it is because I find it to expensive for how often I use it. I don’t use it that often, mainly just when cooking dinner, if there was a way for me to use YouTube music for $5 a month, I would probably pay for it.
Also for me it has to be YouTube music, as alot of the songs I listen to aren’t on other platforms, (song covers, and remixes).
Ah see I listen to music all the time. When I was in school, it would be hours upon hours every day. Nowadays, I listen to it far less, but it’s still whenever I drive, which is near daily. And when I feel like it sometimes I listen a lot at work.
YSK that YouTube Premium can be bought over a VPN for a whole lot less than the regular retail price, it’s a bit fiddly to set up but I’ve got a Nigerian based family account that costs me £1.76 a month.
This is how I do it.
I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.
The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.
My philosphy is Buy what you can afford, pirate the rest
Dito. Mob Psycho is awesome, but if i want to buy all 3 seasons in HD i’d spending more than 100€ (on Blu-Ray). This is nothing but ridiculous.
All culture belongs to everyone, therefore should be accessible to everyone.
The sale of goods only concerns those who can and want to afford it.
Sharing is not theft.
Pirates are cool.
Well said. The world is unequal and the rich in 1st world countries still try to milk the 3rd world no matter what, mercilessly. We just repay in kind. 😃
If there was a service I could pay like $100-200/mo for and just have every movie and TV show I’d happily pay for it. It doesn’t exist, but pirate sites do and they do have every movie and TV show, including tons completely unavailable on any streaming service
GabeN got it right, piracy is a service issue. I haven’t pirated a PC game in probably 12 years because steam works great and has basically every PC game I could ask for.
You know how writers get paid fuck all for the movies they write? You know how animators are paid criminally low wages for the anime they produce? At the end of the day for most media it’s the companies that get all the money, not the artists. Therefore, fuck them, I am pirating your content not contributing to your profit margins.
I spent a decade with streaming services, because for 10 years, it was the best, easiest way to watch what you wanted to watch. I paid a fair price, and studios got a fair cut.
When every studio decided they wanted a bigger cut by extracting more out of my pocket, they intensionally fragmented the market and made me pay an unfair price for an inferior product. They haven’t innovated, done more, or produced better TV or movies, they just demand more for the same.
So, I pirate.
I only pirate TVs/Movies. Streaming is in such a shitty state that I don’t want to figure out what service is on what, and I’m certainly not going to subscribe for just one thing to watch. I feel no remorse.
This, the difficulty of simply paying for the things you want. I used to pirate music back in the IRC/pre-Napster days, and then iTunes came out. “I can just click a button and the song is on my computer, high quality, no fuss?” That was the end of music pirating for me.
I have Amazon Prime and I’ve tried Netflix in the past. The amount of time I spent sorting through their shit movies to find something worth watching was abysmal, not to mention no way to filter out the huge influx of low-budget non-English content.
Difficulty paying for the things speaks to me. I have musical tastes, esp. in bootleg remixes, such that there is no way to legally buy many of the tracks and CD length megamixes I like.
I actually want to pay for these things but there’s not really a way to do that.
I had to write a research report in university about whether or not piracy hurt or helped the recording industry.
From the research, I found multiple studies that compared brain activity of shoplifters compared to those of pirates. The area of the brain that lit up when stealing physical objects did NOT light up for those who pirated.
Digital piracy is not theft. No one is hurt except for unrealized revenue. But if someone pirates, was that even potential revenue to begin with?
It was also found that piracy allowed for greater reach of content which statistically resulted in more people attending live concerts (think of piracy as free advertisement). Concert attendance led to increase in ticket and merchandise sales.
So overall? Piracy is good. It is only bad if you ignore multiple factors and only focus on short term bottom lines. A net positive.
This holds true for music, but what about other forms of media like books, games, and movies which don’t tend to see the same kind of revenue streams resulting from free advertising?
If I pirate a movie, for example, it might be because I didn’t want to go to the theater and now my wife and I can both not buy a ticket and watch from home. I guess I could see how some big studio games could benefit through merchandising in the long run but if your game doesn’t have merch or any other revenue streams then what?
For books, if I torrent something and find I really like the author, I’m more inclined to pay for another book in the series of another book by the same author. Same concept as music. Physically having a book in your library is worth a cost.
For games, one may buy a sequel or another in the series or recommend the game to a friend who would then go and buy it. Steam and other game services make it much less attractive to torrent than to buy it at a discount. Achievements, social network aspect, and such make buying a game come with other intangible benefits.
For movies, same concept applies. If the movie is in a series and the new one comes out, one may be more inclined to pay for it or see it in theatres or recommend it to someone else who will pay for it.
Of course in these scenarios, it’s totally possible that none of this happens and the content is acquired for free and that’s it. But when you scale these possibilities up by larger numbers of people, the chances are much higher that additional revenue will be made in the long term as a result.
We also need to keep in mind that piracy has its own high barrier for entry. The majority of the population do not have the technical skills to be able to successfully pirate content so we need to remember that when we think about all of this, we’re looking at a relatively small subset of the population.
My justification: nobody has stopped me yet🤷
My justification: nobody has stopped me yet🤷
I can sense angry Germans staring at your comment
What happens when a German vists a piracy site:
https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/09/wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.html
Do you?
Yes
Do you justify?
No
Philosophy?
Mood
I agree with your friend.
If there’s a media that I want to continue to exist and similar works to be made, I will buy it. Depending on how much I enjoy it I will wait for a sale or pay full price.
I don’t justify it. I stopped caring. That’s as evil as it can get, I suppose.
I dont have any deep philosophy. I do it because its free.
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o7
