[vhanda]

The bigger problem for me is buying Ebooks without DRM, which are cheaper than the paperback. I see no reason why I should be paying the same (or often more) than the paperback version.

Just let me buy the ebook and let me own it.

Right now, after pirating it, I have to find the author's patreon / something and contribute some money that way. It shouldn't be this hard to give someone money.

[Jtarii]

>Right now, after pirating it, I have to find the author's patreon / something and contribute some money that way. It shouldn't be this hard to give someone money

Why not just buy the thing you are pirating? That would seem to be the easiest way to give someone money.

[Macha]

The thinking is the sold product is the inferior product than the pirated version and so rather than reward the people making it worse (Amazon, mostly), trying to reward the person who made something you want in the first place

[rcxdude]

Because significantly less of the money you pay goes to the person who wrote the book.

[vidarh]

To quantify that: If the author has self-published on Amazon, 35%-70% goes to the author. (70% above a certain price threshold and assuming the e-book is exclusive to KDP) If published via a publisher, the author is more likely to be getting 10%-15%.

[boarush]

To be fair though, a lot of publishers also do a one time payment deal with authors as well, after achieving a certain milestone of number of books sold.

[vidarh]

The more common is an advance payment, but note that these are almost always offset against royalties, not in addition to royalties, and you need to be fairly successful before you'll ever earn out a full advance.

For 99%+ of authors, writing is a hobby that pays less than minimum wage. For self published authors it's often a net loss after costs like editors and cover design.

[b00ty4breakfast]

Calibre (though this is not so simple with Amazon ebooks since they disabled downloading books to your PC)

[LocalPCGuy]

Amazon did re-enable downloads for books without DRM, in the same place in the Content Library. Not as good as it was before, but better than nothing.

[Ferret7446]

Because you're primarily paying for the copyright. The cost of a book is fairly trivial

[vynase]

Not with paper prices where they are these days.

[ghaff]

I haven't done the research recently, but I assume that the cost of printing and distributing physical books is still less than a lot of people assume it is.

[presbyterian]

> I see no reason why I should be paying the same (or often more) than the paperback version.

I rarely see the ebooks cost more than print, they're usually slightly cheaper. But the reason they aren't drastically cheaper is that a significant portion of the cost of a book isn't actually in the paper or the printing, it's in paying the author, editors, designers, marketers, etc. All of those people are crucial to the book publishing process, whether it's print or digital or, usually, both.

[sync]

You can strip the DRM fairly easily these days if you have an ACSM file, I vibecoded this the other day after I couldn’t find any online converter that actually worked: https://www.acsm-converter.com

[hahajk]

> (or often more) than the paperback

Not an expert but my guess is that price is supply and demand. And oversupply of physical books will drive the price down since it costs money to warehouse them. There cannot be an oversupply of ebooks.

[HPsquared]

On the other hand, there cannot (physically at least) be a supply shortage of ebooks.

[deepsun]

Is it hard to buy non-DRM books?

Well, if you bought Kindle, then I see, but... don't buy Kindle? There are plenty other options.

[xboxnolifes]

Care to share these other options?

[aaronax]

Where can I buy DRM free Anathem? The Road? Hunger Games?

[renewiltord]

I like to pay the author for the marginal cost and then once it's hit a sum that can be transferred I do that. e.g. I estimate about $1E-12 per time I hit Cmd-C and Cmd-V on each book. So far, no author has hit the threshold for me to send them their cent, but I dearly believe "render unto Caesar what is Caesar". It's important we pay authors.