Watching TV/Movies through any device is a bother, I have to sift through all the advertisements/brand placements for that device to find anything, and most of the time it's the same 20 movies repeated over and over in every section.
Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add, and be at the whims of whatever they decide they want to do with "your" device that day.
Cell-phones are a bother, they are just devices optimized for stealing your attention, money, information, or all the above.
Pretty much everything tech related anymore is a bother.
I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want. Think of the novelty of having an interface where you could ignore movies you never want to see, only show the music genres you care about, and not have advertisements for romance novels on your e-reader.
> I have to sift through all the advertisements/brand placements for that device to find anything, and most of the time it's the same 20 movies repeated over and over
That's our new norm too. We still subscribe to a number of streaming services - but we count on piracy to get the experience that we pay for.
> I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want.
It won't happen because the one thing more important than money is control.
In the 1990s, the recording industry choose to leave money on the table rather than allow digital music to risk their gatekeeping power. It took years for Apple to bully the MPAA into allowing digital distribution.
This is why I have 50TB of HDD space and a plex server. We tried watching a show on Amazon Prime and it was brutal, so many commercials. My wife skipped backward because we missed a part and were too close to the ad break so it made us watch a second 1:30 reel of unskippable ads. We subscribe to Prime and I still downloaded it. I’m not going to let them boil this frog.
> I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want. Think of the novelty of having an interface where you could ignore movies you never want to see, only show the music genres you care about, and not have advertisements for romance novels on your e-reader.
This exists, but it's not a VC-backed product or public company because the money to be made comes from all the "bother" you identified.
Reading plain EPUBs on whatever device has been a fairly good experience in my opinion, given that that is more or less just going to be the physical book in digital form. Then again, the only way I think people actually find those are through free online downloads and not any actual store front.
Given the choice between 'tainted digital experience' and 'plain analogue experience', I can't blame consumers for choosing the latter, but the 'plain digital experience' does exist. It's just not sold.
I wonder how long it's going to take before the analogue experience becomes tainted. It's, sadly, not unthinkable to put ads in books. I guess there's little point from the perspective of the relevant people if they can't make those ads personalised, but maybe if the enshittification goes far enough, it could happen.
In my opinion, it’s important to support those publishers and stores that do choose to sell unencumbered media, so that they have some justification to keep doing it.
I cannot relate to this experience at all. I can open up the TV app on my phone/tablet/laptop/TV and watch almost whatever I want pretty quickly, without ad breaks. It is far more convenient than the old set top box situation. I would say I wait a maximum of 60 seconds, and probably 30 seconds most of the time, to start watching what must be a considerably large portion of all professionally produced media in the US.
How do you do that without ads? Every single service has ads, even on paid tiers. And sponsored content that is recommended regardless of my actual tastes.
This is the reason I buy physical media, rip it to my home server and use Plex. No suggested bullshit. No ads at all.
How do you do that with paid services? What does your setup look like? Because I can't figure out how to do that using commercial products.
I read about two dozen books a year, the majority as audiobooks, most of the rest as ebooks, and typically one or two in print. I quite like print books, but favor ebooks for the minimal size and weight. I prefer ebooks to audiobooks too, but have far more opportunities to listen to an audiobook than to sit down and read an ebook.
Even though print books are by far the minority of my reading, I still purchase print copies of books I enjoy, for discoverability. I’ve loved reading since childhood because I grew up in a house filled to bursting with my parents’ books. Nobody told me to read Tolkien, or Heinlein, or Verne, or Jack London, or Greek mythology—I simply took those books off the shelf and read them. And when we visited friends and family, I would read books from their shelves too. None of my young relatives have access to my ebook or audiobook history, and I’m not going to hammer my own interests into their heads… but I’m lucky enough to have lots of space, so I keep my bookshelves overflowing.
We honestly need a new term for listening to an audiobook. But the best part of audiobooks is that you can listen while doing other tasks so they free up many hours a day vs sitting and reading.
Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
Reading a book is also relaxing in a way that reading on a screen is not. It just feels more, I don't know, laid back? I have no idea how to describe that.
I just bought 'Psychology and Life' sixteenth edition and pondered just how much worse an ebook version of it would have been or unbearably clunky a pdf version would be as well.
I read for information and online communication. I mostly consume books via audiobooks which are awesome when combined with good bluetooth earbuds and a local server like Audiobookshelf. Audiobooks are great because I can multitask by listening when I am walking, biking, lifting, driving, or shopping. I've listened to every Discworld novel and the entire Malazan series. I would never had actually sat down and read the malazan series.
I’m surprised to see digital books are still growing in popularity. I notice way few Kindles in airports and on planes in recent years compared to ten or fifteen years ago.
I guess people are reading books on their phones and tablets?
I always buy the paper copies of the books (though I wait for a used version that’s between five and eight dollars) and I will use the paper version if I’m reading on a nice day outside but 75% of my reading happens on my phone and I find I can read much faster on the phone because one, I don’t have to deal with the intricacies of holding the book and the pages open and the second biggest factor is the iPhone screen is much smaller so you don’t really have to move your eyes all that much to get through the content and this leads to much faster reading speeds for me. I can easily get up to 600 words per minute on my iPhone.
On top of all the extremely valid points about the ad-driven cognitive friction inherent to modern device usage: print books can’t get yoinked off my shelf because a rich person with political connections wants that.
Watching TV/Movies through any device is a bother, I have to sift through all the advertisements/brand placements for that device to find anything, and most of the time it's the same 20 movies repeated over and over in every section.
Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add, and be at the whims of whatever they decide they want to do with "your" device that day.
Cell-phones are a bother, they are just devices optimized for stealing your attention, money, information, or all the above.
Pretty much everything tech related anymore is a bother.
I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want. Think of the novelty of having an interface where you could ignore movies you never want to see, only show the music genres you care about, and not have advertisements for romance novels on your e-reader.
> Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add
Sounds like you just chose the wrong device. My Boox does none of this. I just put the epub file in the device and read it.
> I have to sift through all the advertisements/brand placements for that device to find anything, and most of the time it's the same 20 movies repeated over and over
That's our new norm too. We still subscribe to a number of streaming services - but we count on piracy to get the experience that we pay for.
> I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want.
It won't happen because the one thing more important than money is control.
In the 1990s, the recording industry choose to leave money on the table rather than allow digital music to risk their gatekeeping power. It took years for Apple to bully the MPAA into allowing digital distribution.
This is why I have 50TB of HDD space and a plex server. We tried watching a show on Amazon Prime and it was brutal, so many commercials. My wife skipped backward because we missed a part and were too close to the ad break so it made us watch a second 1:30 reel of unskippable ads. We subscribe to Prime and I still downloaded it. I’m not going to let them boil this frog.
> I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want. Think of the novelty of having an interface where you could ignore movies you never want to see, only show the music genres you care about, and not have advertisements for romance novels on your e-reader.
This exists, but it's not a VC-backed product or public company because the money to be made comes from all the "bother" you identified.
Reading plain EPUBs on whatever device has been a fairly good experience in my opinion, given that that is more or less just going to be the physical book in digital form. Then again, the only way I think people actually find those are through free online downloads and not any actual store front.
Given the choice between 'tainted digital experience' and 'plain analogue experience', I can't blame consumers for choosing the latter, but the 'plain digital experience' does exist. It's just not sold.
I wonder how long it's going to take before the analogue experience becomes tainted. It's, sadly, not unthinkable to put ads in books. I guess there's little point from the perspective of the relevant people if they can't make those ads personalised, but maybe if the enshittification goes far enough, it could happen.
> the only way I think people actually find those are through free online downloads and not any actual store front.
The other day I commented about my DRM‐free ebook sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684550
In my opinion, it’s important to support those publishers and stores that do choose to sell unencumbered media, so that they have some justification to keep doing it.
CheapCharts + iTunes Store + Apple TV (non-subscription) = zero ads and offline viewing.
I cannot relate to this experience at all. I can open up the TV app on my phone/tablet/laptop/TV and watch almost whatever I want pretty quickly, without ad breaks. It is far more convenient than the old set top box situation. I would say I wait a maximum of 60 seconds, and probably 30 seconds most of the time, to start watching what must be a considerably large portion of all professionally produced media in the US.
How do you do that without ads? Every single service has ads, even on paid tiers. And sponsored content that is recommended regardless of my actual tastes.
This is the reason I buy physical media, rip it to my home server and use Plex. No suggested bullshit. No ads at all.
How do you do that with paid services? What does your setup look like? Because I can't figure out how to do that using commercial products.
I read about two dozen books a year, the majority as audiobooks, most of the rest as ebooks, and typically one or two in print. I quite like print books, but favor ebooks for the minimal size and weight. I prefer ebooks to audiobooks too, but have far more opportunities to listen to an audiobook than to sit down and read an ebook.
Even though print books are by far the minority of my reading, I still purchase print copies of books I enjoy, for discoverability. I’ve loved reading since childhood because I grew up in a house filled to bursting with my parents’ books. Nobody told me to read Tolkien, or Heinlein, or Verne, or Jack London, or Greek mythology—I simply took those books off the shelf and read them. And when we visited friends and family, I would read books from their shelves too. None of my young relatives have access to my ebook or audiobook history, and I’m not going to hammer my own interests into their heads… but I’m lucky enough to have lots of space, so I keep my bookshelves overflowing.
We honestly need a new term for listening to an audiobook. But the best part of audiobooks is that you can listen while doing other tasks so they free up many hours a day vs sitting and reading.
Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
Reading a book is also relaxing in a way that reading on a screen is not. It just feels more, I don't know, laid back? I have no idea how to describe that.
I just bought 'Psychology and Life' sixteenth edition and pondered just how much worse an ebook version of it would have been or unbearably clunky a pdf version would be as well.
The less screen time I spend, the better I feel.
I read for information and online communication. I mostly consume books via audiobooks which are awesome when combined with good bluetooth earbuds and a local server like Audiobookshelf. Audiobooks are great because I can multitask by listening when I am walking, biking, lifting, driving, or shopping. I've listened to every Discworld novel and the entire Malazan series. I would never had actually sat down and read the malazan series.
I’m surprised to see digital books are still growing in popularity. I notice way few Kindles in airports and on planes in recent years compared to ten or fifteen years ago.
I guess people are reading books on their phones and tablets?
I always buy the paper copies of the books (though I wait for a used version that’s between five and eight dollars) and I will use the paper version if I’m reading on a nice day outside but 75% of my reading happens on my phone and I find I can read much faster on the phone because one, I don’t have to deal with the intricacies of holding the book and the pages open and the second biggest factor is the iPhone screen is much smaller so you don’t really have to move your eyes all that much to get through the content and this leads to much faster reading speeds for me. I can easily get up to 600 words per minute on my iPhone.
Probably scrolling tiktok... With sound on and no headphones lol
I haven't purchased a DRM'd ebook in 8 years.
On top of all the extremely valid points about the ad-driven cognitive friction inherent to modern device usage: print books can’t get yoinked off my shelf because a rich person with political connections wants that.
> print books can’t get yoinked off my shelf because a rich person with political connections wants that.
Yes except where rich people fund political book-banning groups to do that.
ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/books/book-bans-libraries...
Because they are better in almost every way.