We do this at a used book store. It’s books that we don’t think we can sell inside for whatever reason, and we put them on shelves outside. There’s a big awning so they don’t really get rained on unless it’s raining sideways. We sell them for a dime or a quarter, and there’s a slot for overnight drops in case people want to get books at night. Every morning there’s at least a couple of bucks from the previous day/night.
We donate the proceeds to public radio, and over the years we’ve donated over $100,000.
I have stolen books and then read them, so …
I think that’s just one way of saying they’re not prints worth stealing
i do think you’re wrong, but I am not willing to spend time to prove it so yeah i agree with you.
At one point you could get swaths of ebooks on pirate bay. Probably still could. With seeders. Soo…we know that’s not true.
piracy is not the same as stealing. You having a copy of a bible as a PDF is fundamentally physically different from having a physical book.
Publishers have perverted the concept of ownership by hiding the fact that there is no scarcity of digital items compared to physcial ones.
I’m tired of people pretending like piracy does no harm.
If 100% of readers pirate an authors book, they get 0% income. It really is that simple.Pirate your shit if the publishing sucks, but also support the author.
Donate, buy their merch, buy the ebook of their site directly.Don’t be a cunt.
OK, but there are barriers of entry to piracy. You have to be tech literate enough to know what to do, and you have to be on top of the latest developments to know where to even go to get the files… and you must have heard about the book from somewhere, presumably some people had to buy and read it first.
There will never be a text published with 100% piracy rate. It’s a fantastical scenario.
Right but it’s still not stealing any more than those little library boxes people put outside their residence
Depends. They certainly lose a potential sale from some people, but many people who pirate books never would have read it if they needed to pay for it. Be that because of a lack of money or a lack of interest. Same with games and shows. So no lost sales there.
You could even argue that pirating helps with sales by causing people who never would have read the book otherwise to discuss it with friends or strangers online. I personally think that argument is a big stretch, but it’s not entirely wrong.
But yeah, more pirates should be willing to support authors of books they like. If you think they deserve it, buy the ebook even if you’ve already read the whole thing.
HBO knows the benefits of pirating. For many of their shows, they tend to be very lax about allowing trackers and streams for the first episode of a season, but then militantly take down everything for the second episode. Of course you can still find episode 2 if you know where to look, but the point is it’s harder. They want people to view the first episode and get hooked, and then pay for a subscription when they can’t find the next one.
Both points are true. Honestly, I pirate stuff wildly, but donate to the authors or buy their stuff and donate it to my local library if I like it enough.
The fence? He is friends with the thief and the reader.
It also has a roof because it doesn’t rain indoors 🧠
This is clearly a indoor Bazar with doors that lock on both ends, they leave them out cause it’s not technically outside and ain’t nobody breaking in to steal some books, shits heavy and probably doesn’t sell for all that much on the black market
Yeah it’s a cute quote but that’s obviously not outside. Jeez
They should learn to read and find out the shit Sheherazade said about them.
That’s pretty smart until you learn that “the thief sells”
Or that “the drunkard urinates on books for fun”
Yeah or what happens when it rains? Or someone drops a book into what appears to be an upper gutter running through the middle of the street?
The image is incredibly misleading. Its an indoor Bazar which is locked at night.
Is the gutter locked at night? Also there appears to be a questionably secured window unit air conditioner. Which in the worst case might fall onto a gentle reader. But more likely condensation would drip onto the stack of books below.
Probably not a lot of drunkards where all alcohol is illegal.
it which universe is crime illegal but you don’t have a system to catch and punish people because you expect people to be flawless or an agent of circumstance?
Or even “the bored shithead sets fire to things”
or perhaps “the feathered rat takes refuge in high and low literature alike”
Or that “the nazi burns books”
In this case it would be they scan it for the Amazon price list and take anything that has a positive rating.
The epubs in my PIRATED MEDIA folder begs to differ
Piracy is not theft. You have not deprived anyone of something they would otherwise have.
I have deprived the authors and publishers and bookstores of the money they would’ve made.
Libraries, lending to a friend, donating to someone, buying used… All the same as piracy?
Libraries pay for their books.
A fraction of what an author makes through selling. And libraries end up selling those books after some time anyway, “ripping off” the author twice.
I think we all need to realize that there are so many things we do that could be compared to piracy, yet piracy is the one that’s made to look like the worst thing you can do. It really isn’t.
The picture clearly shows a 2nd hand book market. No money is going to the authors or publishers there either.
I have a physical book collection worth thousands of dollars. The only party that has profited off me is Elsevier.
Thousands of dollars for your books? Three books hardly counts as a collection.
Hah. Our textbook market isn’t quite as captured. They run from $50-$350. I have about 100 textbooks and a bit under 200 books total.
Debatable.
If I did not have the money to pay for the books or they are too hard for me to find then no loss would have occurred because purchasing was never happening.
If I did have the money and the books were eaay to find but still pirated then a loss did occur.
You were never gonna buy all those books in the first place.
Maybe. I pirate a shit ton of stuff, a lot of it yeah I would never have bought but a lot of it I would, or at least I would’ve rented. I enjoy crime though
This. As a hillbilly with no access to books growing up, with my education practically stopping at the 4th grade and no stores in sight to purchase books from, I would have never had access to the things I read without piracy.
I half believe that’s why it’s an issue in the first place.
I started my reading adventure at 640x480 on windows 98.
One cannot be entitled to castles in the air just because they imagined it.
edit: if some person spent some effort and got a copy online for free, were they ever considered to be a prospective customer in the first place?
Me, stealing every pdf I can find:
But the reader does not steal, the clear logical conclusion is that piracy isn’t theft if you read the book.
Do you read them?
Sometimes 🥲
It’s a shame the people who you stole them from don’t have them any more…
Next you’ll tell me that you wouldn’t download a car.
Digital piracy is not theft. You’re not depriving the person who shared the pdf to you of anything.
I also don’t steal. I download my books from online copies, which is copying, not stealing.
Cool, you hate creatives and feel entitled to their work on the basis of semantics
on the basis of semantics
It’s not semantics when “stealing” results in the loss of the original by the owner while “copying” just results in a new one being created.
TL;DR: ✨die mad✨
I mean that’s literally semantics but whatever, if that’s the definition you’re going with then sure. If you ask me, you breached a contract and got a product out of it anyway, I’d call that stealing. I don’t think scarcity even factors into whether it’s stealing when it’s all about whether it was a legit transaction. Lack of scarcity may help justify it when the distributor is a shithead but it doesn’t make you not a thief.
-a proud thief, steal your shit, especially from Adobe fuckem
Publishers don’t lose money when I download their products, but I wish they did.
Too bad. Because it’s being redistributed through a third party, you aren’t even stealing a negligible amount of electricity, bandwidth, or CPU time from them. Damn, when you think about it, it’s just not “stealing” in any capacity, is it?
That’s a semantic point. The truth is that artists deserve to be paid for their work. Whether you “copy” or “steal”, you’re getting the work without paying the creator. That’s fundamentally shitty behavior.
Is it stealing if I buy a second hand book? I’m still getting to enjoy the work without paying the author (even if the original person paid). Multiple people can own a physical copy at different times (with the author only getting paid once).
Just like downloads. I don’t feel bad about downloading stuff that’s out of print. No one is making money from it now anyway, so what harm. If anything, digital copies help to stop these books being lost.
Okay, but I literally just expressed how they’re fundamentally, pragmatically different while you keep reaching for the word “semantics”. You can still disagree that it’s wrong to copy – that’s not what I’m trying to litigage. To call it only semantically different from stealing is asinine.
I never said it was only semantically different, only that you were making a semantic argument: namely, citing the semantic distinction between copying and stealing as grounds for one being acceptable and the other not (“stealing” is wrong but I’m “copying”), ignoring that the injustice against the work’s creator is not pragmatically different. Practically speaking, the author is equally robbed whether you “copy” or “steal”; therefore, arguing that copying is not stealing obscures the heart of the matter behind a semantic distinction.
That wasn’t me you were talking to initially; that was TheLeadenSea. You’ll have to ask them, not me.
Oh, fair enough
i often buy books on a DRM’d store or a paper copy, but then download the epub to put on my e-ink tablet so i don’t have to deal with the shitty DRM’d app it would be stuck in.
You don’t deserve the downvotes, you’re right. If everyone used the “iTs NoT sTeAlInG” argument then no digital works would ever be profitable and everyone would lose.
Here people even “steal” books from public bookcases and sell them.
For people who aren’t familiar, let me explain: These public bookcases are a weatherproof shelf, old phone booth or something in the streets. The concept is you can take any book and leave any book. There are no written rules and you can keep a book if you like or just read it and put it back. In recent years people started to scan the barcodes and checked what books they can sell. There is a debate going on if people should mark these books or not, so they can’t be sold.
Who tf is buying normal books from the local black market in 2025 is my real question here
It’s more of an online market. eBay, Amazon to a certain extent, there’s loads of book specific ones and some that are for used items generally and allow books. And unless marked it’s not the black market at all. I mean obviously the book is stolen, but it’s just entering the used market as opposed to being sold through a fence or whatever
The climate isn’t good enough for this where I live all the books would get ruined
I’m in the UK and these are all over the place, especially in more rural areas, and we’re famed for our lovely weather! 😂
I live in SW Finland on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It’s wet and cold 90% of the year.
We still have this sort of book exchange in the entrance way to my local shop. A tiny bookshelf/night desk. Not too common though, I can’t think of any others right now.
But like the weather shouldn’t be the issue, that’s just an engineering problem at that point. I imagine like a glass doored fridge with some dehumidifiers placed inside should probably work in most places to protect books.
Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
You might call it a shopping arcade. Pretty common in many cities, and likely is a public street, despite having a covering.
Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
One of those Iraqi shōtengais unoe.
Just a regular bazaar ;)
There’s a wet gutter down the center…
But what if the thief steals the books not to read them, but just to fill their house with books and make themselves seem erudite and intelligent?
I’m imagining the most extreme version of this, where a man is living in a house that is a veritable library. Yet, they’re actually illiterate.
Sounds like a “truther” or flat earther.
I was about to describe here a world wherein a flat earther glass through a book to call it out on all the “lies”, then I realised “oh wait, I literally watched a video on that”
… It was a children’s science book 😂
That’s common as a backdrop for offices and stuff, they sell books by the pound for that.
