I honestly hadn’t considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
But a pirate is always free 🏴☠️
Yar har, fiddle de dee
Being a pirate is alright to be
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.
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like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if you’re not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why you’re ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
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plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you aren’t the product.
Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people don’t, and I’ve seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.
Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.
Don’t like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it
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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.
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.
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.
No ned to pirate. Just send your ebooks through Calibre to remove DRM and put them on your privacy friendly* reader. Maybe don’t buy them all from Amazon in the future.
* may need some work. PocketBook doesn’t track you, Kobo is pretty good too, Onyx must be debloated to not send telemetry (like any Android device), Amazon devices are Android too?
This is the method I use for my Kindle (and some Google Books) purchases.
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.
