Hacker News: Zonulet

New comment by Zonulet in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

Zonulet — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:21:09 +0000

Based on the prose of the DroneXL piece, I think it would be more accurate to say that Claude adds its own angle.

New comment by Zonulet in "Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site"

Zonulet — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:56:37 +0000

I am an author, I'm published by one of the publishers involved, and I'm very happy that they're doing it.

New comment by Zonulet in "Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site"

Zonulet — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:52:35 +0000

I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:55:58 +0000

Why are you making the assumption that giving our books away for free doesn't affect our sales?

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:49:31 +0000

I think your maths is off. A literary novel is a success if it sells 10,000 copies in hardback. I'm pretty sure that doesn't entail getting the book in front of a hundred million people.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:40:10 +0000

I don't understand where you're getting the idea that books are something "no one will pay for". Sales of books are generally stable or rising. They are not like buggy whips.

I also don't understand how it is that you're describing books as "the most precious products of human toil", but you're simultaneously saying you're happy to sacrifice them if it means you get copyright reform.

And I also don't understand how copyright law is screwing up your "technology". It screws up your ability to get certain things for free. But if someone wants to create a DRM-free ebook and give it away, they are still perfectly able to do so.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:26:17 +0000

2018 was also the first time in five years that overall revenues fell – 2018 was still better than 2014 and 2015. The idea that we should scuttle the entire publishing industry and switch to Spotify because of these minor fluctuations from year to year prove the "business model is dying" is absolutely cockamamie. "Legacy publishing" continues to support the production of great work – that is what counts. (It is also my livelihood as an author, so yes I'm biased.) I shudder at the alternative – say Kindle Unlimited, the closest thing that's been tried to a streaming model, which has worked well for romance novelists and romance readers and pretty much nobody else.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:12:46 +0000

If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:04:00 +0000

Here in the UK, if you go to a library and take out a book, the author does get compensated, it's called the Public Lending Right. Apparently in Denmark they've had it since 1941 so I don't think it took ebooks to make it technologically possible.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:02:45 +0000

You're admitting what most anti-copyright people don't want to admit – if instead of bookshops we only had the Emergency Library, certain classes of works would indeed go away, including most good fiction, not to mention history, biography, reportage etc. You say that's "just what happens" like it's some ineluctable natural process, but none of this is preordained. The traditional model has a lot of defenders – including the majority of readers who are still happy to pay for books – and with those defenders' help it can survive.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 21:48:56 +0000

In the UK, revenue from ebook sales grew 3% between 2018 and 2019. Where is your evidence that the business model of "counting copies" – i.e. selling books to people who want to read them – doesn't work any more?

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 20:31:55 +0000

The percentages aren't particularly relevant to me, because I live off advances, not royalties. Sales are still meaningful, because they help determine what advance I get next time, but in my case the idea that I'm getting a cut of each one is basically just symbolic – I've already been paid. Just one of many reasons I could never have had the same career without my "legacy" publisher.

(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 19:46:18 +0000

I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.

New comment by Zonulet in "Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive"

Zonulet — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 19:32:47 +0000

This exists in the UK, it's called Unbound. They've been around for ten years and they've done... fine. Some decent books. But their business model has not exactly conquered the world. As an author myself, I would never consider defecting from my "legacy" publisher to a service like that, because my publisher has been extremely valuable to me.

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:31:52 +0000

No, this is just my point. Among people on message boards, for whom copyright is oppression and piracy is second nature, paying for media is a voluntary donation. For the average person in the world I am selling my books to, that is not yet the case. They are in the habit of getting stuff the legit way – it's not worth dealing with something a bit complicated and icky when ebooks are pretty good value for money anyway.

Surely this is exactly why the Emergency Library has had such a rapturous reception! Because it's exactly what I described – an (apparently) legit, feel-good, well-publicised, reasonably simple way to get any book you want for free. That has not existed before. Otherwise why would anyone care?

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:01:58 +0000

I can assure you there are a lot of great books that would not have been written if the authors first had to either 1. become beloved enough on the internet that they could crowdfund their income for five years or 2. somehow secure a "wealthy patron" who wanted to finance it (I can imagine a pretty fierce competition for that pretty rare beast).

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:47:17 +0000

Once this change is made, won't somebody just start a website that looks exactly like the Amazon Kindle Store except everything is free to download, and it's legal? You don't think that will hurt our sales at all? I know people online think "Anyone who pays for a piece of media is essentially making a voluntary donation because they could so easily pirate it if they wanted", but that actually isn't true in the real world. Making it legal, convenient and non-shady to get stuff for free would change a lot of people's behaviour.

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:35:09 +0000

Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:21:17 +0000

Wait, I thought the argument from the anti-copyright people was supposed to be that piracy doesn't hurt sales, not that piracy takes away livelihoods?

New comment by Zonulet in "The National Emergency Library is a gift to readers everywhere"

Zonulet — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:19:19 +0000

Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.