Wait, you mean now you can ship the item to eBay and they will reship it to the buyer for you, Amazon-style?
No, but if you sell something, you have the option of choosing who pays shipping, and if you choose “buyer pays”, they let you pick what shipping option, and generate a shipping label for you. They’ll also communicate that shipping info to the buyer once they’ve paid.
So as a seller, all you’ve got to do is print the label and send it. As a buyer, you just pay, and you get a shipping email so you can track your purchase.
Oh, gotcha. Yeah, that is convenient.
Or the company might just go out of business, or stop selling whatever they sold, and stop supporting the DRM.
This is a major reason I stopped using my Kindle (except for library loans) and have moved to a Kobo. There are quite a lot of books sold in epub without DRM. Many of my favorite authors do so. (or sell via publishers that do so.)
oh, interesting. Maybe I could sell stuff, then.
Just curious, where are these books sold? I have a Boox Palma but I haven’t been able to figure out where to buy stuff. Other than bookshop.org.
I have bought some DRM-free books from Kobo, some from the author’s site. Not all books have the option, but I feel like the number that do is increasing.
So is there a Kobo store you can just download books from on Kobo? Can you install other apps on a Kobo or is it locked in similar to Kindle?
I’ve never heard of GOG. They seem to have some worthwhile games, including some classic Star Wars titles. But I don’t understand how it works. If I buy a game there, what am I getting and how am I getting it?
Once you buy it on GOG, you download it onto your computer, and the game now lives on your computer, no matter what GOG does in the future.
Baen Books offers a lot of their stuff not just DRM-free, but free-free. Usually, it’s the starts of series, with the hope that you’ll enjoy it enough that you’ll buy further books in the series.
You can side load any unlocked epub or pdf pretty easily. And if you have unlocked mobi files, I’m pretty sure calibre can convert them and load them on the kobo. Basically, i keep all my ebooks in Calibre, and download the ones I’m currently interested in onto the kobo.
So all the out-of-copyright books are available, along with PDFs i need to read for professional reasons, and anything i buy that’s either from Kobo or Kobo-compatible.
Ooh, something to look into! Thanks.
As Chronos said, you just download it and play it like you would any other digital game from a digital storefront (Steam, Epic, Microsoft, Apple, Play Store, etc.).
What you pay for is a perpetual license for a video game title without DRM. What you get is a copy of that game without copy protection, to do with you as please: play it, copy it, back it up, share it with all your family and friends, whatever.
Whereas the transaction model of other storefronts is “You pay us but we don’t really trust you, so we have to include monitoring software with your games to make sure you don’t abuse your license, oh, and PS, we might take it away your ability to play it in the future”, the GOG model is more like “You pay us, we give you a copy of the game, and… that’s it, have fun! But please don’t give it to too many other people or we won’t make any money…”. Some publishers won’t work with them because of this, but many still do, especially for their older titles.
GOG isn’t some fly-by-night company, by the way… they’ve been around for nearly 20 years (see Wikipedia on their history), though they used to be known as Good Old Games. They were founded partially in response to Steam’s DRM-based system. GOG is part of the same company that makes The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077; they’re just Polish and more activist than most of the American and French conglomerates.
Should we be surprised, happy, or concerned that former Communist countries, warts and all, are more consumer friendly than current capitalist ones, warts and all?
Dem dirty commies and their disgusting software freedoms!! Only a great democracy like ours would properly forbid personal backups to protect the rights of our glorious capitalists!
DRM doesn’t just make it annoying to back up your own media, it makes it outright illegal under federal law (the DMCA). No matter the reason, no matter if it’s for personal, noncommercial use. Decades ago the RIAA and MPAA captured our government and rewrote copyright law in their image.
There’s a reason the rest of the world doesn’t take our IP laws seriously and pirate everything…
I’m a fan of CDs. What little I know of Spotify is limited to music makers commenting on the ridiculously low royalties.
Recently read Doctorow’s Enshittification. IIRC, he maintained that Uber has largely eliminated the alternative - taxis, and has encouraged communities to avoid investing in public transport, since everyone can use cheap Ubers. Now that they have everyone reliant on them, they can exploit surge pricing, and their drivers.
I don’t know that Spotify alone is responsible for the music funding dilemma that we find ourselves in, socially. Certainly they don’t help matters. But before them, iTunes caused an uproar with their 30% cut, before them Limewire and Kazaa and Napster made headlines about piracy killing music… I think recorded music has been predatory ever since businesspeople running labels learned to exploit creative musicians, and that’s not the fault of any one software. And yet somehow we still see music everywhere.
Creative endeavors like that, similar to video games, will always be subject to an oversupply, I think. People want to play music, and with so many people (and AIs) making music all the time, the price of a play of any one particular song is not easy to fairly value.
Personally, while I’d be willing to pay 2x or 3x my current music subscription price if it helped fund artists, I would never want to go back to the hassle of CDs and single-artist albums. If there was a way to donate money directly to favorite artists, I’d do that (and have done that), but I would still choose the convenience of streaming. Especially since most of the songs I care about are from the 80s or before, and the rest is just relaxing instrumental work fluff… might as well be AI-generated; I wouldn’t be able to tell anyway. (Maybe it already is.) A large part of the value prop of a service like Spotify is that it’ll keep playing mindless background muzak for me, without the annoyance of commercials or some DJ’s pointless chatter.
Part of this is probably just me trying to rationalize my cognitive dissonance away, but really… as long as I’ve been alive, music funding has always been in crisis. There’s a reason “starving musician” is part of our vocabulary. At the same time, there is always more music than any one person can realistically listen to in a lifetime.
I assume you are familiar with Patreon? Admittedly may not really be an option WRT your listening taste.
Like I said, I’m a dinosaur who prefers CDs. Streaming is what I consider to be a hassle. I spend quite a bit of time with musicians - some world class. And I consider it a tragedy how hard they work for so little money. But, as you say, that has always been the case.
Heh. I’ve probably listened to more Queen on repeat than all other artists combined… (wait, they’re still active?! I had no idea)
I’ve had many singer-songwriter friends (nobody famous), and I try to support them at shows and gigs, and buy their swag and even their CDs. But as soon as I get home I just put the CD aside and find them on Spotify instead 
None of them expect to be able to make a living from music (sadly). Though it doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy lifestyle anyway… maybe it’s better as a side hobby…
I wonder… among the people you’ve met, have they ever discussed how music is funded in other countries? Is it cutthroat all over the world, or are there music grants and fellowships/scholarships etc. available to the budding indie musician elsewhere?
Dollar Shave Club has pretty much stayed the same in the 10 or so years I’ve been using it. The price has gone up a little, but the products are still as good as they ever were.