Yeah but the vandal does vandalize. In my country there are tons of shitheads who like to see the world burn and destroy someone else property when nobody is around. Like in some neighborhoods in certain cities you can’t have a mini library in your front yard, since a certain type of teenager will ransack it and set the books on fire.
That’s pretty smart until you learn that “the thief sells”
Or that “the drunkard urinates on books for fun”
Yeah or what happens when it rains? Or someone drops a book into what appears to be an upper gutter running through the middle of the street?
The image is incredibly misleading. Its an indoor Bazar which is locked at night.
Is the gutter locked at night? Also there appears to be a questionably secured window unit air conditioner. Which in the worst case might fall onto a gentle reader. But more likely condensation would drip onto the stack of books below.
Probably not a lot of drunkards where all alcohol is illegal.
it which universe is crime illegal but you don’t have a system to catch and punish people because you expect people to be flawless or an agent of circumstance?
Or even “the bored shithead sets fire to things”
or perhaps “the feathered rat takes refuge in high and low literature alike”
Or that “the nazi burns books”
In this case it would be they scan it for the Amazon price list and take anything that has a positive rating.
This is clearly a indoor Bazar with doors that lock on both ends, they leave them out cause it’s not technically outside and ain’t nobody breaking in to steal some books, shits heavy and probably doesn’t sell for all that much on the black market
Yeah it’s a cute quote but that’s obviously not outside. Jeez
We do this at a used book store. It’s books that we don’t think we can sell inside for whatever reason, and we put them on shelves outside. There’s a big awning so they don’t really get rained on unless it’s raining sideways. We sell them for a dime or a quarter, and there’s a slot for overnight drops in case people want to get books at night. Every morning there’s at least a couple of bucks from the previous day/night.
We donate the proceeds to public radio, and over the years we’ve donated over $100,000.
Which store is this? It sounds like a great place to hang out.
Me, stealing every pdf I can find:
But the reader does not steal, the clear logical conclusion is that piracy isn’t theft if you read the book.
Do you read them?
Sometimes 🥲
It’s a shame the people who you stole them from don’t have them any more…
Next you’ll tell me that you wouldn’t download a car.
Digital piracy is not theft. You’re not depriving the person who shared the pdf to you of anything.
I also don’t steal. I download my books from online copies, which is copying, not stealing.
Cool stuff.
Cool, you hate creatives and feel entitled to their work on the basis of semantics
on the basis of semantics
It’s not semantics when “stealing” results in the loss of the original by the owner while “copying” just results in a new one being created.
TL;DR: ✨die mad✨
Publishers don’t lose money when I download their products, but I wish they did.
Too bad. Because it’s being redistributed through a third party, you aren’t even stealing a negligible amount of electricity, bandwidth, or CPU time from them. Damn, when you think about it, it’s just not “stealing” in any capacity, is it?
That’s a semantic point. The truth is that artists deserve to be paid for their work. Whether you “copy” or “steal”, you’re getting the work without paying the creator. That’s fundamentally shitty behavior.
Is it stealing if I buy a second hand book? I’m still getting to enjoy the work without paying the author (even if the original person paid). Multiple people can own a physical copy at different times (with the author only getting paid once).
Just like downloads. I don’t feel bad about downloading stuff that’s out of print. No one is making money from it now anyway, so what harm. If anything, digital copies help to stop these books being lost.
Okay, but I literally just expressed how they’re fundamentally, pragmatically different while you keep reaching for the word “semantics”. You can still disagree that it’s wrong to copy – that’s not what I’m trying to litigage. To call it only semantically different from stealing is asinine.
I never said it was only semantically different, only that you were making a semantic argument: namely, citing the semantic distinction between copying and stealing as grounds for one being acceptable and the other not (“stealing” is wrong but I’m “copying”), ignoring that the injustice against the work’s creator is not pragmatically different. Practically speaking, the author is equally robbed whether you “copy” or “steal”; therefore, arguing that copying is not stealing obscures the heart of the matter behind a semantic distinction.
That wasn’t me you were talking to initially; that was TheLeadenSea. You’ll have to ask them, not me.
Oh, fair enough
I mean that’s literally semantics but whatever, if that’s the definition you’re going with then sure. If you ask me, you breached a contract and got a product out of it anyway, I’d call that stealing. I don’t think scarcity even factors into whether it’s stealing when it’s all about whether it was a legit transaction. Lack of scarcity may help justify it when the distributor is a shithead but it doesn’t make you not a thief.
-a proud thief, steal your shit, especially from Adobe fuckem
i often buy books on a DRM’d store or a paper copy, but then download the epub to put on my e-ink tablet so i don’t have to deal with the shitty DRM’d app it would be stuck in.
You don’t deserve the downvotes, you’re right. If everyone used the “iTs NoT sTeAlInG” argument then no digital works would ever be profitable and everyone would lose.
The epubs in my PIRATED MEDIA folder begs to differ
Piracy is not theft. You have not deprived anyone of something they would otherwise have.
I have deprived the authors and publishers and bookstores of the money they would’ve made.
You were never gonna buy all those books in the first place.
This. As a hillbilly with no access to books growing up, with my education practically stopping at the 4th grade and no stores in sight to purchase books from, I would have never had access to the things I read without piracy.
I half believe that’s why it’s an issue in the first place.
I started my reading adventure at 640x480 on windows 98.
Maybe. I pirate a shit ton of stuff, a lot of it yeah I would never have bought but a lot of it I would, or at least I would’ve rented. I enjoy crime though
Libraries, lending to a friend, donating to someone, buying used… All the same as piracy?
Libraries pay for their books.
A fraction of what an author makes through selling. And libraries end up selling those books after some time anyway, “ripping off” the author twice.
I think we all need to realize that there are so many things we do that could be compared to piracy, yet piracy is the one that’s made to look like the worst thing you can do. It really isn’t.
The picture clearly shows a 2nd hand book market. No money is going to the authors or publishers there either.
Debatable.
If I did not have the money to pay for the books or they are too hard for me to find then no loss would have occurred because purchasing was never happening.
If I did have the money and the books were eaay to find but still pirated then a loss did occur.
I have a physical book collection worth thousands of dollars. The only party that has profited off me is Elsevier.
Thousands of dollars for your books? Three books hardly counts as a collection.
Hah. Our textbook market isn’t quite as captured. They run from $50-$350. I have about 100 textbooks and a bit under 200 books total.
One cannot be entitled to castles in the air just because they imagined it.
edit: if some person spent some effort and got a copy online for free, were they ever considered to be a prospective customer in the first place?
I have stolen books and then read them, so …
That’s not nice. Please don’t do that.
You suck
I think that’s just one way of saying they’re not prints worth stealing
One persons treasure is another’s trash. I have bought books for a dime that I treasure.
i do think you’re wrong, but I am not willing to spend time to prove it so yeah i agree with you.
Here people even “steal” books from public bookcases and sell them.
For people who aren’t familiar, let me explain: These public bookcases are a weatherproof shelf, old phone booth or something in the streets. The concept is you can take any book and leave any book. There are no written rules and you can keep a book if you like or just read it and put it back. In recent years people started to scan the barcodes and checked what books they can sell. There is a debate going on if people should mark these books or not, so they can’t be sold.
Who tf is buying normal books from the local black market in 2025 is my real question here
It’s more of an online market. eBay, Amazon to a certain extent, there’s loads of book specific ones and some that are for used items generally and allow books. And unless marked it’s not the black market at all. I mean obviously the book is stolen, but it’s just entering the used market as opposed to being sold through a fence or whatever
The climate isn’t good enough for this where I live all the books would get ruined
I’m in the UK and these are all over the place, especially in more rural areas, and we’re famed for our lovely weather! 😂
I live in SW Finland on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It’s wet and cold 90% of the year.
We still have this sort of book exchange in the entrance way to my local shop. A tiny bookshelf/night desk. Not too common though, I can’t think of any others right now.
But like the weather shouldn’t be the issue, that’s just an engineering problem at that point. I imagine like a glass doored fridge with some dehumidifiers placed inside should probably work in most places to protect books.
Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
You might call it a shopping arcade. Pretty common in many cities, and likely is a public street, despite having a covering.
Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
One of those Iraqi shōtengais unoe.
Just a regular bazaar ;)
There’s a wet gutter down the center…
They should learn to read and find out the shit Sheherazade said about them.
Can anyone from Iraq confirm?
Nice try, Dubya
* ducks under flying shoe *
You might say it’s… my racket.
But what if the thief steals the books not to read them, but just to fill their house with books and make themselves seem erudite and intelligent?
I’m imagining the most extreme version of this, where a man is living in a house that is a veritable library. Yet, they’re actually illiterate.
Sounds like a “truther” or flat earther.
I was about to describe here a world wherein a flat earther glass through a book to call it out on all the “lies”, then I realised “oh wait, I literally watched a video on that”
… It was a children’s science book 😂
That’s common as a backdrop for offices and stuff, they sell books by the pound for that.
The fence? He is friends with the thief and the reader.
