I've can completely related to your thoughts and it applies a lot more in developing economies with so much of good content floating around.

From the learnings, I did a fulfilling and enriching side coding gig for a couple of years spending a couple of hours every week that matched 50% income from my full time job (managing a large US real estate portfolio). It was related to increasing health awareness in the US and later to help immigrant families to prepare for the new administration.

I make every effort to buy content nowadays as an attempt to pay back the authors. That is the main reason, I totally love Medium, Spotify, Netflix and other content providers. They allow me to pay as you go and are on-demand.

An alternative to "Never buy a book" that I think is more fair is buying a couple of copies after I'm finished with a book and sending them to others if I find I enjoy them. A $50 Tensorflow book may not be initially affordable for some people, but assuming you got an understanding of Tensorflow out of it, you'll be able to convert the knowledge to at least $50 pretty easily.

Ah I see. What is the mechanism by which I can convert my knowledge of Tensorflow into $50 cash in pocket?

If you mean "go work for someone," then certainly. But that involves working for someone. Almost everybody on HN works for someone; many are less well-off than they seem. Students, for example.

One reason this is true is that GCE offers $300 credit for new accounts, and TFRC emphasizes that you should sign up for a new account before activating TFRC. $300 ain't much. If that didn't matter, they certainly wouldn't bother mentioning it. Yet $50 is 1/6th of $300.

Of course, buy them if you can afford to. I probably didn't emphasize that enough.

That $300 on Google Cloud is exactly what enabled me to learn as much as I know now about cloud computing. And to Google’s advantage, it made me really like the platform.

Luckily, at this point someone else foots the cloud bill for me, but I’m still loyal to GCE just for giving me the opportunity to explore.

Many authors also live paycheck to paycheck, and dropping 50 bucks on their utility or supermarket bill might be very important to them. You don’t need to make 500k at a FAANG to pay for a 50$ book.

While I understand some people could be in such a spot, I think many people use this argument to wash their conscience.

How much of those 50$ get taken by the publishers, managers, etc.? I'd much rather pay for stuff if i knew it actually went to the person who wrote it.

I agree - and your point actually reinforces mine: your 50$ translates into 10$ of the authors utility bill. They probably need it more than you do.

I don’t know why an author would get into such a unbalanced commercial relationship with a publisher, but it’s common for this to happen, and at the end of the day, it was their choice: Price tag is 50$. Let’s not use fake morality high ground to continue stealing from the original author.

If you don’t like the current publishing industry or cannot afford the price tag: just don’t buy it, choose another cheaper book, or try a Public library or learn by experience and write your own free book...

"Buy or pirate" is a false dichotomy when there are good public and University libraries available; which is true for most big cities in the US. They will not stock the latest tech books, but you can easily get them through an interlibrary loan.

> "Buy or pirate" is a false dichotomy when there are good public and University libraries available; which is true for most big cities in the US.

It's worth pointing out, that many of the book pirates are from outside the US. There are more than 500 million people in the EU, and the most up-to-date technical material has always been in English.

Before Kindle was available, it used to take 3 weeks for the books from Amazon UK to arrive in my country, and almost half of the costs were shipping.

Also, ten years ago, when this article was written, even senior software engineers in my EU country were making less than 1000€ / month after taxes, which made a 30-40€ book a luxury item. For a junior developer, a single technical book could have easily taken away 10% of his/her monthly salary.

I expect something similar to still be the case in many parts of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, which are developing regions with a lack of world-class universities and international libraries.

For someone in Lviv, Ukraine, a city with 12 universities and 8 academies, where an average monthly salary is 350€, pirating a book might still be the only way to read it.

If the book is freely available from a library does it really matter if you find it more convenient to get it by pirating?

Sure, but libraries must buy books to loan. For physical books, there's only one concurrent user. And for ebooks, licenses specify allowed numbers of concurrent users.

But still, that is an interesting argument.

So why aren't libraries considered to be pirating?

IIRC, there have been that claim: Libraries, of course, were going to put book publishers out of business because all of their patrons were reading books they otherwise would have purchased. We simply don't hear of this pushback much anymore and we more see it as a public good - though not always good enough to fund them properly or make sure everyone has access to one for free.

It's more complicated than that; in the 19th century when libraries (at the time mostly subscription ones akin to a Victorian Netflix) were the primary purchasers of books rather than individuals, novels were extremely expensive -- the typical novel at the time was a rambling 1000+ page affair taking up three volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel) and cost over 30 shillings. That's like £150 or $200 today! It was the decline of the subscription library that forced publishers to sell books to individuals at a more reasonable price and eventually invent the idea of the paperback

Piracy. The ultimate market segregation.

> I don't know how to feel about it.

Don't feel bad at all. Intellectual Monopoly laws are morally wrong (and I would argue counterproductive if the goal is progress of the arts and sciences and/or economic growth). I hope that when the generation that grew up with the web is making the laws we'll get rid of these abysmal systems.

The author of the comment you referencing is wrong. Copying a book that has been released to the public is not stealing. It makes zero sense without complete bastardizing the definition of property (but I'll admit—that analogy has been an effective lie, other unscrupulous marketers should take notes!). Transistors are property. Telling me how I can arrange my transistors is almost the exact opposite of property.

Ideas published cannot be "stolen". Don't let anyone lie to you and tell you otherwise. The outrage of that comment is not justified. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. If anyone thinks their book is so amazing, let me ask how great it would be if it removed all ideas that were "stolen" from other books? How great would their book be if they couldn't steal from Leonardo Pisano's Liber Abici from 1202, the first sentence which is "The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1?"

So how would you better compensate writers for the product of their knowledge and labor? IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.

> So how would you better compensate writers for the product of their knowledge and labor?

It's a good question. I think there's a 2 phase answer. But first, it's important to figure out the numbers. And one thing that quickly becomes apparent is on the order of 99% of writers make $0 from IM laws. IM laws instead, regardless of intent, funnel almost the entirety of profits to 1% of holders.

So the question then becomes, how do you better compensate those 1%? And the answer is you don't. The 1%'s current compensation is artificially inflated, and the 99% is under compensated.

Right now IM laws create artificially high compensation for less meaningful contributions like a 500 page book or 50 page pdf in a publication like Nature, and undervalue more meaningful contributions like small additions to Wikipedia or commits to the Linux kernel. I would much rather have the top 1,000 compensated "authors" in the world never write again than I would have Wikipedia disappear.

I think we should 2 phase the transition away from IM laws. I don't think we should abolish overnight, as that would be very disruptive to the families of folks in the IM industry. I have no sympathy for IM lawyers and IM business folks, but I do think we should have a transition period where we perhaps switch patents from an Intellectual Monopoly system to an X-Prize style system, and perhaps then phase it out (or keep the X-Prize style system, if it seems to be effective). Then in phase 2 the progress of the arts and sciences will flourish so much, I'm not too sure if you need any sort of system to artificially inflate the value of intellectual contributions at all. Creativity of billions of people will be unleashed. For a single example, if I didn't have to worry about IM laws, I (or many other people) could build a viable alternative to Google search in a year. I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of the world by making many more markets feasible. There are so many markets and opportunities now, that if you lowered the cost of product development (which eliminating IM laws would do), I could see an argument where it's feasible that everyone who desired could have a natural monopoly, because there would be so many markets to choose from.

> IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.

IM is one idea. There are plenty of alternatives. When a janitor cleans a room, do we then give that janitor the right to charge a royalty for every person who enters that room?

But then we need a new system, for example governments could pay writers a salary to create, rather than have them rely on selling books.

The software industry is already pioneering this new system. For example, many companies pay developers to write useful free open source software in lieu of ephemeral marketing spend.

As the saying goes, the future is here, just not evenly distributed.

That's how it worked in the Soviet Union. Official writers were paid by the government (there were of course unofficial writers passing their work via illegal self-published "samizdat" versions, and some writers lived in both worlds). The problem was the government wasn't too keen on publishing works critical of it.