Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.

jm4 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not to mention it’s as easy to download books from Anna’s Archive as it is to buy them from Amazon. It’s weird going through so much effort to lock down books people already paid for.

I wonder how much this is about making it difficult for people to migrate to another platform. I recently switched to Kobo and the reader is far superior to Kindle. I had a hell of a time moving my library though.

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sbarre 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suspect at least some of this comes from publisher pressure. An acquaintance works for one of the big global book publishers and his general sense from upper management is that they still hate having to sell digital books.

It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.

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mh- 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's all from external pressure. Amazon spending energy on ebook DRM is a negative ROI activity for them.

A vanishingly small % of would-be ebook buyers even know pirated ones exist, and an even smaller one knows how to get those onto their Kindle.

My wife buys dozens of ebooks per year on Amazon, her friends too. I'm guessing if I poll that group, none of them would even know where to start, nor care to.

	▲	justsomehnguy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Piracy is almost always a service problem" is also true. I see a lot of people who were risen on a pirated .mp3 and .epub to move to the streaming platforms just because it's a bit more convenient.

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atherton94027 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This applies to newspapers too — if you compare the print version to the online version of a newspaper you notice that there's a lot more attention paid to the paper version. Whereas the online version has all kinds of aggressive banners and ads.

I think it's a generational thing, for a lot of publishers the internet is this newfangled thing

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UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is really easy to buy a book, cut the spine off and feed the pages into a sheet fed scanner.

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carlosjobim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's to stop people from seeding new books to shadow libraries. It's not as easy to find new books on AA as on Amazon.

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asveikau 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors.

Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, but after seeing the sibling comment I'm going to guess there isn't.

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estimator7292 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OCR'd ebooks are universally trash. For one, all formatting is gone. Anything in the book other than ASCII characters will vanish. You lose links within the book and all other advanced features.

And OCR is generally just not accurate enough and still makes very visible mistakes throughout the text.

Have you read many OCR'd ebooks? I have, and every single one was massively inferior. Most I would consider barely readable.

	▲	UltraSane 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For books that you want to keep the formatting the best option is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro and its Editable Text and Images feature. This replaces the scanned letters with a custom TrueType font. I used this in college to scan textbooks and it worked really well. Modern OCR on books is incredibly accurate. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0