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Ahmad Thakur's avatar

What do the ethics say about borrowing an ebook from overdrive and then using Calibre to break its DRM and keeping that file forever? Asking for a friend.

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KoiCantortionist's avatar

Hi Claude!

I have often daydreamed of being able to checkout just a chapter of an audiobook for, say, two hours. I think waitlists could be much faster for everyone this way.

I also think it would be cool if Libby had an option to use AI to read any ebook as an audiobook.

But of course, right now, that would probably just create more licensing exploitation.

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Anna Dallara's avatar

Not Claude. Just Anna. 🙂

That’s similar to the Internet Archive model of letting people check out an ebook for an hour. Realistically, most people aren’t going to read longer than that.

I think the problem you’ll run into with AI audiobook narration is that in most cases, official audiobooks for those books already exists. You’d be infringing on the copyright and undermining audiobook sales. There have been cases of people trying to do this before, even before this generation of AI voices.

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victor szabo's avatar

I don’t do this myself, but I have heard from ppl at work that sometimes if an ebook isn’t available on Libby (or has a ridiculous wait 🙄) the book can be found on archive.org .. not that I would know!

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Anna Dallara's avatar

Ah, the Internet Archive! Enjoy it while we still can.

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Joao Coimbra | Poetry's avatar

Does it count as stealing if you completely forgot to bring it back then moved country?… it reflection, I think so.

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Anna Dallara's avatar

That one is probably straight-up theft, yeah. 😆

It happens, though. We used to get sheepish phone calls from patrons who’d moved and found our books as they unpacked. If they gave us a new address, we’d send them a bill. If not…well, it was their book now either way.

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