The current experience of using a Kobo Libre Color, Koreader, any webdav mounted in koreader and pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering. Unsuprisingly my copy of 1984 has never been deleted from my NAS
That's my take. I break the DRM off books I've bought. I own those copies. I'll format shift them for my own convenience. Bought on Kindle but want to read on my Kobo? It's impossible to make me feel guilt about that.
But I don't read books I haven't legally acquired, whether through a paid bookstore, or temporarily borrowed via Libby, or Standard Ebooks or whatever. I won't yell at other people for doing that, but I don't do it myself. In a nutshell, I follow the same rules as with physical books I own (or temporarily possess).
> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering
While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.
So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?
I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.
Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.
People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.
It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.
Datahoarders with hard drives full of pirated books are not nearly as much of a threat to writers as, say, AI slop making it difficult to market new books. If you pirate a book and read it, the author can still sell you the sequel. Not so much if you don't even know who the author is.
