Anders429

Of course not. That title belongs to Fruit Ninja.

Most new books I find are books I check out from my local library. While the library did pay for a copy, so it's not quite the same, as a reader I didn't pay anything for it. The barrier to trying the new book is very small, and if I don't like it I haven't lost anything.

Readers finding your book online for free are having the same experience. Maybe not everyone who reads it will want to buy copies, but some will. Just like how some who find your book in a library would want to buy their own copy.

It's like saying someone stole your bike and you don't want to be immoral by stealing it back.

The problem they're addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site's initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I'm guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don't want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension's originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581

Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.

And it works because people buy it.

What the hell are you talking about