It’s all a matter of disposable income and your principles. I will pirate most software if I can. If I’ve used it for a few years I’ll buy them official version. I only own a few movies, like Reservoir Dogs and The Big Lebowski. Sometimes I’ll buy a record I like on vinyl. Now a days it’s not really about getting the content, it’s about wanting to support and contribute to the artists and creators who built this stuff.

seedhost.eu

I use Usenetic as my client (I’m in a mac). Incredibly easy to set up. I use Newshosting as my provider. You paste a URL and your credentials into a field in the app and off you gib. I like that usenetic has a search built in rather than trawling binsearch for nzb files.

I’ve used it for 15+ years and it’s a huge downside. Older content used to be widely available, but more often then not anything popular is removed within a few months of posting. It is actually pretty great for obscure content that won’t get taken down. It’s cheap but a whole new thing to learn. It is faster than torrenting directly to your own computer but a seedbox blows usenet out of the water as far as speed. 50-100 MB/s easily (at least using private trackers).

Yes but have you combined private trackers with a seedbox? You can’t get much faster than like 100 MB/s download. You still have to xfer it to your computer but can do that at your leisure. I find my ISP throttles me if I download more than 1 TB in a month so I keep it at a few hundred GB usually.

Usenet was great 10-15 years ago but nowadays it’s flooded with fake / private downloads and retention is shit simply because the few remaining backbone providers comply with takedown requests. Absolutely useless for older content by any major studio. It’s all new stuff which is mostly garbage anyway. We were able to get a ton of “this old house” recently though.

my seedbox provider (seedhost.eu) supports that stuff out of the box I think (you do have to turn it off on). I just use ruTorrent as well though.

It turns out if you have a library card you can get tons of free audiobooks. I don’t think it counts as piracy but there are other ways to get free books.

Nothing for me. Not sure how historical their data is but I’ve been using a VPN (exclusively) for about a year and a half and about 6 months ago switched to a seedbox.

No but this isn’t really limiting sales of the book in any way. I buy real used books, I buy new books sometimes. I go through a few audible credits a month. I also pirate books if I feel like it. I’ve had books I bought and gotten rid of, then years later decided to pirate it and read it again. Anyway used books are so ridiculously cheap it’s very rare for me to buy a book new, often it’s a gift for a friend.

I also use ChatGPT almost every day, and while I have asked it for the summary to a book I didn’t feel like reading, it has never once replaced “reading a book” in my life. You can also get the summary to most books on wikipedia if that’s all you want.

My gf got several letters and I started using a VPN. Easy peasy. No problems.

Now I’ve moved to seedboxes (seedhost.eu) and private trackers. First I buy an invite to a private tracker (if you spend like $20 you can get an invite to one of the less prestigious ones and like 500gb of quota). This is kind of a process since private trackers are 1000% against selling invites so it’s kind of a “marketplace” forum type deal. Not a 1 min paypal transaction. Took me a couple days to get my first invite.

Then use that tracker on the seedbox which has a few tb disc. Then I sftp in (I have used the app Forklift for many years and highly recommend if you’re on a Mac, it’s amazing) and transfer down.

I get like 7 MB/s through VPN which is alright for me and even without a VPN, it’s just random traffic coming from a server. You aren’t torrenting from your machine so there’s no issue.

To get quota on the trackers, you can either buy an invite that includes some quota or build it up yourself. The seedboxes I use have like 100 MB/s upload speed so you’d just download some super popular (freeleach if possible) torrents and then seed for a while. If your invite comes with some quota, likely you’ll have more quota than you know what to do with. I bought an invite with a 100gb quota and now I have like 4tb of quota.

The downside is cost which might defeat the point of pricy for some. I pay like $6 a month for my instance. But if you’re willing to pay for a more powerful instance you can run Plex directly and stream everything if you wanted. I download locally and put it on my local Plex server.