Iraqi book market culture
Iraqi book market culture
110 comments
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Me, stealing every pdf I can find:
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But the reader does not steal, the clear logical conclusion is that piracy isn't theft if you read the book.
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Do you read them?
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Sometimes 🥲
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Digital piracy is not theft. You’re not depriving the person who shared the pdf to you of anything.
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This is clearly a indoor Bazar with doors that lock on both ends, they leave them out cause it's not technically outside and ain't nobody breaking in to steal some books, shits heavy and probably doesn't sell for all that much on the black market
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Yeah it's a cute quote but that's obviously not outside. Jeez
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I also don't steal. I download my books from online copies, which is copying, not stealing.
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Cool stuff.
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Cool, you hate creatives and feel entitled to their work on the basis of semantics
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on the basis of semantics
It's not semantics when "stealing" results in the loss of the original by the owner while "copying" just results in a new one being created.
TL;DR: ✨die mad✨
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i often buy books on a DRM'd store or a paper copy, but then download the epub to put on my e-ink tablet so i don't have to deal with the shitty DRM'd app it would be stuck in.
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You don't deserve the downvotes, you're right. If everyone used the "iTs NoT sTeAlInG" argument then no digital works would ever be profitable and everyone would lose.
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Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
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You might call it a shopping arcade. Pretty common in many cities, and likely is a public street, despite having a covering.
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Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
One of those Iraqi shōtengais unoe.
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Just a regular bazaar ;)
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There’s a wet gutter down the center…
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Here people even "steal" books from public bookcases and sell them.
For people who aren't familiar, let me explain: These public bookcases are a weatherproof shelf, old phone booth or something in the streets. The concept is you can take any book and leave any book. There are no written rules and you can keep a book if you like or just read it and put it back. In recent years people started to scan the barcodes and checked what books they can sell. There is a debate going on if people should mark these books or not, so they can't be sold.
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Who tf is buying normal books from the local black market in 2025 is my real question here
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It's more of an online market. eBay, Amazon to a certain extent, there's loads of book specific ones and some that are for used items generally and allow books. And unless marked it's not the black market at all. I mean obviously the book is stolen, but it's just entering the used market as opposed to being sold through a fence or whatever
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The climate isn't good enough for this where I live all the books would get ruined
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I'm in the UK and these are all over the place, especially in more rural areas, and we're famed for our lovely weather! 😂
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I live in SW Finland on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It's wet and cold 90% of the year.
We still have this sort of book exchange in the entrance way to my local shop. A tiny bookshelf/night desk. Not too common though, I can't think of any others right now.
But like the weather shouldn't be the issue, that's just an engineering problem at that point. I imagine like a glass doored fridge with some dehumidifiers placed inside should probably work in most places to protect books.
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We do this at a used book store. It's books that we don't think we can sell inside for whatever reason, and we put them on shelves outside. There's a big awning so they don't really get rained on unless it's raining sideways. We sell them for a dime or a quarter, and there's a slot for overnight drops in case people want to get books at night. Every morning there's at least a couple of bucks from the previous day/night.
We donate the proceeds to public radio, and over the years we've donated over $100,000.
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Which store is this? It sounds like a great place to hang out.
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Can anyone from Iraq confirm?
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Nice try, Dubya
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ducks under flying shoe
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You might say it’s… my racket.
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But what if the thief steals the books not to read them, but just to fill their house with books and make themselves seem erudite and intelligent?
I'm imagining the most extreme version of this, where a man is living in a house that is a veritable library. Yet, they're actually illiterate.
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Sounds like a "truther" or flat earther.
I was about to describe here a world wherein a flat earther glass through a book to call it out on all the "lies", then I realised "oh wait, I literally watched a video on that"
... It was a children's science book 😂
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That's common as a backdrop for offices and stuff, they sell books by the pound for that.
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They should learn to read and find out the shit Sheherazade said about them.
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Yeah but the vandal does vandalize. In my country there are tons of shitheads who like to see the world burn and destroy someone else property when nobody is around. Like in some neighborhoods in certain cities you can’t have a mini library in your front yard, since a certain type of teenager will ransack it and set the books on fire.
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I have stolen books and then read them, so ...
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You suck
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That's not nice. Please don't do that.
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I think that's just one way of saying they're not prints worth stealing
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One persons treasure is another's trash. I have bought books for a dime that I treasure.
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i do think you're wrong, but I am not willing to spend time to prove it so yeah i agree with you.
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The vandal does not read, either.
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And it doesn't rain
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It’s Iraq, not Arrakis.
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But the arsonist, tho...
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At one point you could get swaths of ebooks on pirate bay. Probably still could. With seeders. Soo…we know that’s not true.
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piracy is not the same as stealing. You having a copy of a bible as a PDF is fundamentally physically different from having a physical book.
Publishers have perverted the concept of ownership by hiding the fact that there is no scarcity of digital items compared to physcial ones.
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Middle school me would have taken advantage and proven them very wrong
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Those poor books 🥲
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...Can't tell if this is a repost bot
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The fence? He is friends with the thief and the reader.
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The beat generation would like a word.
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It also has a roof because it doesn't rain indoors 🧠
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Mom says it's my turn to post this next week!
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That's where they hid their wmds! The unknown unknowns were under the books the whole time!
110 comments
That's pretty smart until you learn that "the thief sells"
Or that "the drunkard urinates on books for fun"
Yeah or what happens when it rains? Or someone drops a book into what appears to be an upper gutter running through the middle of the street?
Probably not a lot of drunkards where all alcohol is illegal.
Or even "the bored shithead sets fire to things"
or perhaps "the feathered rat takes refuge in high and low literature alike"
Or that "the nazi burns books"
In this case it would be they scan it for the Amazon price list and take anything that has a positive rating.