I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free.
Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
The big torrent alternative in the German warez scene are direct downloads from filehosters. Which means there is no real "central place" where you can just put it for widespread exposure because it's a whole bunch of different portals/forums with individual uploads.
There's a couple of well known bigger forums, like Gulli, Boerse or Bloodsuckerz, and countless "blog style" ones often specialized on certain media, those can be found on the Raidrush Toplist.
So in practice you would need to sign up to a whole lot of places and post the links to your filehosted books there.
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
A few well regarded authors (Charlie Stross, Cory Doctrow and Peter Watts spring to mind, I'm sure there are others) have been commercially successful despite (or because of) releasing some of their work for free download. Might be worth looking into how they approached it?
There are other websites that allow you to do a static upload, under a pseudonym. Just have a look on somewhere like reddit for a name of such a site. Another option would be getting in touch with a popular uploader on one of these sites or a torrent tracker and have them upload and seed. If they are a member of a private tracker they may get some sort of reward for seeding, as an incentive.
You can just upload them on Library Genesis, though seeding a torrent is also not that hard. Buy a VPS with crypto, and seed the torrent there. Besides, I doubt they would come after you anyway; The PR will hurt them more than stopping you.
Amazon doesn't let you give it away for free? Even as a promotional thing?
You could upload it to the Internet Archive. Maybe ping Jason Scott @textfiles on Twitter and he'll make sure it gets sorted into the right categories so people can find it.
Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing.
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
There are a lot of great libraries for sure, but they aren't in the stdlib and C doesn't make it as easy to use external libraries as languages with modern tooling. Everybody gets grumpy about dependencies and a lot of people probably figure it's easier to maintain their own container code in their application than to deal with that.
You are right in a library-demographical sense, but not in a fundamental sense. There is a 3rd way. Have a look at the CTL I linked to (downvoted..maybe I should have explained more?).
Once you give up the closed source/prebuilt binary library idea and embrace the C++-like header library idea and write implemenations in terms of "assumed macro/inline function" definitions, the problem becomes straightforward with no performance issue and different ergonomics issues than you probably think.
It's a more "manual instantiation" than C++ templates or generics in other languages where just refering to them works, but most of C is quite manual. So, it fits the headspace & the hard parts of data structures/meddlesome hands remain factored out. Since you parameterize your files/code with #define/#include, you have to name your parameters which can make the instantiating client code more obvious than C++ templates with many arguments. OTOH, there is no/poor type checking of these parameters.
I had a look, and it feels like template programming but with even worse guarantees.
Having a type declaration dependent on #define P whether it is plain old data or not, and needing to know what that means, is not the kind of ergonomics I'd want. That requires learning a whole new paradigm to ensure I am not doing wrong things.
In my mind it is so big an extension of the C language, that it leaves the C headspace and becomes its own headspace.
Yeah. It's not for everyone. I think "different ergonomic issues" may cover that and I did mention the type checking already. :-)
It is a smaller learning curve from pure C than "all of Rust" or even "all of C++/STL". You got the basic idea in short order (that may be for ill as well as good..I was never trying to make a normative claim).
I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently:
1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.
2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).
3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.
4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.
Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.
Here's an alternative form of the "NYT/CNN should be canceled" argument: they should be held to the same standard as a private citizen when they behave poorly.
If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this.
In US law, there is a different standard for libel against "public figures" than against other people. The NYT gets to take advantage of this much looser libel law whenever they write a hit piece because they can argue that anyone who does something "newsworthy" is de-facto a public figure.
As far as I have seen, the "cancel NYT" crowd is arguing that the NYT should be held to the standards that it pushes into others and obviously doesn't follow.
In almost all cases I can think of I'm also against canceling individuals, so I agree with you. If NYT openly spread hate speech or called for murder and violence, then they should be "canceled" (boycotted).
> It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?
Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."
What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.
Well, if you start arguing this way, then you can also go all the way back and muse about what the word meant in Proto-Indoeuropean.
It's still obvious that the modern use of the master/slave combo comes from centuries of slavery, not from any prior meanings. As OP said, that can be shown by studying their meanings outside the technical context. The original meaning was retained in Academia but merely as jargon. Magister artium is a "master degree." There is no "slave degree", though. There is also "mastery", master/apprentice, and so on.
In other words, the offensive component of the combo is "slave", not "master." You can safely continue to use the master/apprentice combo.
It's not just for legacy purposes. I've written a few useful personal tools in Purebasic, for instance. BASIC dialects tend to provide the functionality needed and can be handy for quickly throwing something together when you don't have the time to deal with GUI frameworks and complex libraries. You can also use Python or Go, of course, but they do not have integrated IDE and do not have a rich command set in the core language. Easy deployment and compact executables are also a plus of some existing BASIC dialects. If I had the money / the investment in a license would give me a good ROI, then I'd also pay for Xojo, for example.
> Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.
Completely agreed. My point isn't that these tools can get the job done, but that I see too many people praising them because they can get the job done. There is a difference between done and useful. I can throw together a market model in excel quite fast and easily, its "done". It might even be useful in your case, but please don't give high praise to it because no real world task has ever ended with that task. Everything you will create, especially software will be reused. That's the whole point and power of software. These tools make it incredibly hard to reuse anything. I think we should have higher standards for our tools, especially when whole companies are being built on it (don't think google here, think portfolio management companies and Excel).
Edit: I would like to include an example of a spoon. I can bash in a small nail using it, it will not be good, but it will be done. It will stick one piece of wood to another. but would you praise the spoon as a hammer replacement?
In a life sciences research center I worked with, the work was definitely not done after those scientists got their csv processed files out of the cell reader own data format, generated using their home made VB.NET tool.
It didn't matter, those files were done used as input data into Tableau for further processing, where they could carry on doing the work that actually mattered to them.
I never said you cannot do stuff using VB.NET. Why is this so hard to understand? My point is was VB.NET the best way to do it? Should we praise the tool as good? How do you know that this excel thing, which does not support testing, does not provide feedback when stuff goes wrong will not blow up in your face like that COVID excel[1] from UK did? Please go back and re read my example about the spoon.
I think you are misinterpreting my point. I am not saying it cannot be done. I am saying it has higher risk and we should not normalize it just because it gets stuff done. I would like you to actually address the point about the public issues posed by these setups like I pointed out in the COVID case.
Also, you said
> asked IT for VB.NET and were able to quickly proceed with the work that actually mattered to them
I have already addressed this.
> We just make it work not because its possible, but because nobody wants to go through the requisition forms.
Edit: Also just insisting that whatever makes it work should be used sounds like a carpenter who is proud of using a spoon as a hammer. Even if you are not a carpenter, I don't think anyone would feel good about using spoon as a hammer in a DIY project.
I've listened to one or two and would say he's a very good interviewer who is always well prepared. The ones I've listened to were about the philosophy of AI and related issues. For me personally, his podcasts are too long, I lack the time, but I was positively impressed.
So, no, not a bullshit artist at all in my opinion.
Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(