FastCompany: E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance

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.

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.

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
- Excellent advice. I'd add: if you cannot gift it, or the library doesn't want it, give it to a charity shop or book club.
Also it's free to not read it and it's more fair as well. Or, you know, buy a dead wood copy.

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Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.
- Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.
- It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
- 👨‍🚀🏴‍☠️🔫👩‍🚀🏴‍☠️

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
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?
- Can you point me to a good guide to set up calibre to remove drm?

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.

Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.

Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I "check out" the book and then pirate it, there's no ethical issues with pirating it.

Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. I'd honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when I'm done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.

Thankfully, the only ebooks I have only gotten so far are classics from Gutenberg website.

Ayuuuup. Libgen, calibre, and Apple Books for me these days.

I’ve bought around 1000 kindle books over the years, but that shit ended this year when I found out about this stuff. Spent a week stripping the drm from all my purchases (the ones Amazon didn’t burn up in the memory hole, anyway; bout a dozen of the books I paid for are no longer available for download), adding them to calibre, and backing the data up.

Now I use the apple books app on my phone to read them. It’s not as convenient, but fuck Amazon.