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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance.

Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)

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If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large variety of still-somewhat-recent works would be public domain, and thus creating tools to read them would be profitable. Right now, a "public domain" Kindle would be for what, works that are over a hundred years old or something? Few people will ever encounter public domain works they want to read so it's as if everything fits the rent model.

The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.

> If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them

Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.

Yes, I believe Charles Dickens was the first to near simultaneously publish in both the UK and US.

Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.

A story I heard about Dickens was him landing in the US and finding his latest book already in print there, unauthorised.

That's what I heard, so for his next book.....

It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.

Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot about the absurdity of it all.

Can you get it off SciHub?

Count yourself lucky. Most of us developers cant even read the code we wrote in a professional setting once we leave a company.

This idea that the original authors of the source code don't have any right to that source code (they're not even listed as authors most of the time), seems like a contradiction. If copyright is so important, why is it so easily stripped from its authors in some fields?

It makes more sense when you understand that copyright was hardly ever about protecting authors, but about protecting the interests of the more powerful middlemen.

I think it fits in with the general idea of factories where you work for a salary and the work product you produce isn’t something you can take away. The problem with words or code is they are easy to copy, so one could easily make a copy and take it away. I guess that’s why they make you sign away the copyright

The factory analogy is pretty good. Profit doesn't really goes to the workers, it goes to the owners. And one critical property of capitalism is that owners and workers aren't the same people at all.

Having programmers sign off their copyright has the same effect as classical capitalism: it separates whoever owns the code from whoever works on it. The owners can then enjoy the full royalties, while the programmers are limited to their salaries —just like the factory workers.

Factory workers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they owned the factory. Programmers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they retained the rights to them. And in my opinion, they both should. The means of production should be owned by the workers, not the capitalists.

If on the other hand you agree with capitalism, it makes perfect sense to have programmers sign away their rights.

> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour

That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you personally, but you probably won't succeed and it's very surely not worth the trouble if you're not a very influential or otherwise important person.

In this case, the usual retort would of course be "why didn't you have a backup in 'the cloud'?" I have for part of my stuff, but not for all. I feel you.

Turns out this guys was right:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

NSFW:

FYI if you click that link and the referrer is hacker news it redirects you to a nice picture of a testicle in a cup, first thing in the morning.

(it redirects to : https://imgur.com/32R3qLv )

The link is fine, just don't click it from here -- well, unless cup-testicles are your bag. Pun intended.

That is the best use of a referrer I think I have ever seen. Off to boil an egg now.

I knew about that and tried beforehand to see if I needed to put a warning, but it doesn't trigger anymore for me so I thought this article was exempt, or he removed it. Maybe it's Safari that properly strips the referer.

Firefox on Linux: no trigger either. Clicking was safe for me.

Firefox on Linux: I get the redirect every time.

I’m guessing an inter library loan wasn’t possible?

What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.

The article is Joan Robinson, 'Economics is a serious subject: the apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man' (1932). It's footnote 1 in Coase's 'The nature of the firm,' which I was prompted to read in more depth by a recent HN comment, so it's not an especially obscure document! The university library I spoke to does do inter-library loans, but I need to find a local library that will take one out for me. I haven't got around to doing that since I moved states 18 months ago, and I'm no longer affiliated with a local university. It's a pain, but something I probably would have resolved sooner if there weren't so many books digitised in the various proprietary databases!

Similarly, works published in 1935 & 1941. For at least one, nearest copy is 1000km away.

They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.

>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them.

Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.

The AAA-class games with a budget of a blockbuster movie? Well, I'm fine with them following the movie locked-up route.

New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.

The Doom source code was released, the game itself (notably, the IWAD files) was never released as free software.

I thought all the console games get dumped so they can be emulated?

If/when Stadia and the like take off, and streaming-only games appear, we can forget about that too.

By the way, this is just one of the many reasons why I think that streamed games are very much an anti-consumer move and should not be paid for in any circumstance, to prevent normalization.

That could easily be extended to "streamed media" in general - or, more accurately, Media as a Service. Going further, Software as a Service - or at least the part that falls under FSF's "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS) - is an anti-consumer move too. Related, the trend of tying physical products to Internet services in a blatant attempt to turn ownership into renting is a hugely popular and a hugely anti-consumer practice too.

Some anecdata to counter that idea: A significant part of German movie piracy is done through streaming as it allows the uploaders to monetize through ads.

Piracy as a service, so to say.

Hm, interesting. I always assumed people making money on these streaming services (through both ads and premium accounts) aren't the same people as those who upload movies to them (actually, to somewhere else; these services now aggregate links to players, mostly).

I believe they're more popular than Torrents because they shield from responsibility. At least over here at Poland, your legal problems only start when you're actually infringing copyright - reproducing the work, i.e. uploading - which makes Torrents risky, but HTTP streaming fully in the clear for the viewers.

I’ll lease you a thinclient for 2 years.

Surely then you want them in the public domain sooner to prevent that. Sourcing a 28 year old pc to read some 'ancient' format is workable. Finding a 100+ year old pc to do the same seems less workable.

You can thank Disneys lawyers and lobbyists.

It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.

Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too!

IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.

Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.

Fair point. I agree that the incumbent digital avatar is more of a file and less of a book, a classic enterprise solution for a consumer category of products.

And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!

Honestly, and I dislike admitting it, but paper books instill the same feeling as any other "collection" hobby for me. I take more pride in reading them knowing that my bookshelf is growing.

I find retaining information in digital books much more difficult. I think the lack of a tactile third dimension when reading eliminates a search index in my memory and it really effects how I parse the book. I tried reading the most recent GoT book in digital form and I just could not keep track of everyone (admittedly it had been several years since I read the previous installment in dead tree form, so I didn't have a current index of all the characters fresh in my memory). I gave up about 1/4 of the way through and just watched the tv show :)

I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal.

My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.

P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.

Any kind of book is possible on web. Here's a photobook (only graphics) by Satyendra Sharma, for example:

https://bubblin.io/cover/ladakh-by-satie-sharma#frontmatter

Disclosure: I'm the developer behind the project.

It's the interface and interaction of physical books which is lost.

I can keep my hand between two sections and flip between them, insert colored post-its, or bokmarks or index cards. Dog-ear pages, make marginal notes, star, underline, or (shudder)highlight.

The one thing missing is full-text search, though a good index is a 90% solution (and so: not optional).

Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works. Fluid layout is great for screens, but lousy for recall.

And the interface is consistent across books, authors, publishers, and centuries. Whilst, yes, various ebook formats offer facsimiles of many of these features, they are just that, and mediated to bot. Want to highlight? Better hope that's a rendered or OCRd (and reliably) PDF, or you're SooL.

Source; A tablet with over 5,000 epub-type docs, of various sources and provenance, from single page to multi-volume book length. I appreciate the weight and space savings, but miss much physical books deliver.

> Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works.

Exactly! This results in _referential accessibility_ [1].

You might want to look up for the Superbook format [2] perhaps? Though not everything physics is required to be solved with it.

[1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility

Disclosure: I'm its creator.

No, spatial.

I remember roughly how far into a book, or chapter, passages are. Where on a page, or with relstion to other elements, how or where a line breaks (especially if that's awkward). Where the book itself lives within my collection. Where I was when first reading (or later re-reading) it. Etc., etc.

Spatial associations.

Consistent pagination is useful, but it's a small subset of the whole.

I generally print out research articles because I can write all over the figures and take it with me to lunch and not be bothered when I spill on it, or fold it up into my back pocket. I feel like I get better comprehension too. For textbooks that's a no go for me and probably most students, because this thing is getting resold once I'm through.

> For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great.

E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaking lines that have been around for ages. Some poetry ebooks are in fact preceded by a publisher’s warning to this effect.

Agreed generally, but this one is on the publisher or whoever is in charge of making a digital copy. I was recently reading some of Bukowski poems on kindle, and the "weird" formatting intended by the author was relayed just as well in digital as it was in paper.

Most very recent editions of poetry or plays have decent formatting. It took publishers a while—roughly a decade?—to figure out css. :/

Interestingly, I find I'm the other way. Reading for pleasure, I want a physical book. Anything where I'm flipping back and forth, I prefer an e-book, so I can quickly make bookmarks and have a clickable table of contents/index.

Relative niceness of ebook vs. physical book depends a lot on the actual ebook hardware. i.e. An ereader is much nicer than a tablet/PC for reading text, but nearly unusable if you need to flip around or do anything interactive other than turning pages from front to back.

I find the opposite. If I just want to read, I prefer a book. If it's a text, I want to be able to read and search, and I want to be able to scale the graphs and footnotes. Not all eBook formats support color and scaling, but some do.

It's nice although our preferences are reversed to find someone else who has preferences for both in different circumstances.

I really like the books that include an eBook with the print copy.

For me textbooks are best consumed as a pdf. I don't kill my back, I don't kill my wallet, and I can ctrl-f through the entire book and annotate as needed. I throw it on a flashdrive on my keys and I can pass it around to classmates.

Any other kind of book and I'm reaching for print. It's much more satisfying to bang out 50 pages in a novel and see the bookmark move deeper into the book than to scroll scroll scroll through an ebook.

I agree with this sentiment when using a paperwhite tablet (glowing screens with stuff formatted for paper is painful). Serial reading, ebooks are fine.

There are a few cases where a PDF/djvu textbook with strategic bookmarks can also be used. When I'm on the road I have a decent reference library in a rooted Kobo H2O running koreader. Not an ideal solution; something with an 8x12 screen would be much closer to it, but nobody makes these any more, and if I need to look something up in Golub, it can be done.

FWIIW the only thing that makes this doable is koreader does reflow on columnated text.

That's just familiarity. You could get used to digital books if you had to.

Have no idea why you're downvoted. Books are quite fragile and very difficult to duplicate in book form.

If you actually want to preserve something, it is valuable to have production of both digital and hard copies.

The one in Washington DC is now an Apple store.

Wow ... that's .. is that irony? I don't even know.

It's straight up dystopian that's what it is.

The yearly ALA (American Library Association) conference was in the conference center across the street from that library last weekend. I wonder how many noticed the metaphor to what is happening to libraries in general?

Ha! Walked by it when I was there, I thought the same thing.

To be fair, it’s not like DC doesn’t have public libraries. Also, the original DC Carnegie building sits on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

What better way to signal the importance of libraries than to have one on that expensive real estate?

Or what better way to signal a change in values than to stop having one on that same real estate.

They moved due to overcrowding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library_of_Washington....

Not the one in Mount Pleasant!

IDK, 15m of early 20th century dollars for a sound like it could finance buying a lot of books.

I've found this website very useful:

https://archive.org/details/texts

My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).

I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.

The question is what will stop working earlier: archive.org or the 18th century book?

TBD.

Books have lots of failure modes too. Wide distribution is one way to protect them.

Shift the balance: https://archive.org/donate/

Nice shout-out. Truly, the world owes railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie a huge debt.

My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.

Andrew Carnegie owed the world a huge debt.

Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.

Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.

> Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here,

I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse.

It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia

Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.

Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.

The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)

> Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices

Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.

Eh, Google's system is born out of a compromise because of the DMCA. Simply put most large publishers dropped their suits and do not file actual complaints with this compromise.

> They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure

That system is such a scourge. No fair use, no distinction between different countrie's legislations, no appeal.

If you make an educational video, no matter how much effort and skill you put in, if you use some musical excerpt or images or scene, it doesn't matter how short it is, or what you're using it for. Your video will be "claimed", and any add revenue you used to have will go to whoever owns the rights to the excerpt. And if you didn't enable ads, the claim will do it anyway.

I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…

> I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…

That is a technique that's been used in the past, though I'm not sure if it's still effective. As far as I know, it was popularized by Jim Sterling who named it the "copyright deadlock"[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_copyright_issues#2015%...

My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.

As I understand it, the number of copies is enforced using DRM (which isn’t the best, of course), but the books are free and there’s usually a pretty wide selection.

Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.

That's plain naked rentseeking. I'd get them charging a nominal sum to prevent abuse (like "why I'd buy any books if I can just check out everything for free in the library" - virtually nobody ever says that but maybe they're afraid of it) but $55 is way over the cost of an average book, let alone ebook, and expiring them makes zero sense since popular book stops bringing substantial income quite soon so they literally lose nothing allowing the library to keep it.

Wow that is repulsively scummy.

It's surely competitive with physical books, including the cost of storing and handling them, otherwise libraries wouldn't buy them. A random on the internet says about library books: "Very popular hardcover books have a lifespan of around 20 circulations, which is around a year or less, depending on how well bound they are and how well the patrons treat them." Other books are regularly thrown away because they're not popular enough. So I presume publishers account for the short life of a library book in their pricing, and if they actually lasted forever, they'd cost more.

Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime.

In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.

The idea is that a physical book has a lifetime before it has to be discarded due to wear, so they want the e-book to be the same. I think that's dumb, and don't feel we need to be tied to the durability of paper books, but that's their justification.

By that logic we could have made every maker happy by selling a buggywhip with every automobile.

I think mine also allows you to watch movies online, but I never tried it yet.

I think most libraries offering this are doing it through Hoopla. It works fine though you can only play them in a browser and the video quality is roughly at the level of a DVD.

I'm super, super grateful to our public libraries and the amazing resources they offer— coming from an immigrant farm-laboring family in a tiny (<1000 population) town, our equally tiny library introduced me to computers in the 8th grade (which later got me in trouble for, um, "exploring" our police and school district's networks) thanks in part to a grant they received by the Gates Foundation. I wouldn't have the career I do now, or honestly even been aware of it, if it were not in part due to it.

My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.

I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.

Project Gutenberg is really a modern day equivalent and is one of the better things created on the internet.

I prefer Library Genesis.

PG has the advantage of being legal.

Except in countries where copyright terms are longer than in the US: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

Meh, as long as their servers aren't in those countries, they can't do anything except censor the website. And most countries with long copyright terms don't censor websites.

Project Gutenberg self-censored themselves to all German users in protest of the lawsuit.

If they did not have servers in Germany couldn't they have just ignored the lawsuit?

They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my site if they want -- same goes for Germany.

That's one of my go-to examples as well. I mean, even excluding porn and soft porn, the vast majority of Western media is likely illegal in Saudi Arabia.

> they can't go meddling in foreign [thing]

... GDPR? Granted, extraterritorial enforcement can be quite difficult.

They explain all this in the notice I linked above:

...

Because PGLAF operates as a legitimate non-profit organization, however, it is appropriate to act as the German Court ordered - pending appeal - even though it disagrees with the order.

...

The decision to acceed to the German Court's order to make items inaccessible from Germany is intended to be a temporary appeasement, while the appeal occurs - this is because the German appeal Court will likely look disfavorably on PGLAF if it shows contempt for the German Court. Ultimately, PGLAF seeks to establish that any complaints about copyright must be brought either to the US Courts (where PGLAF operates) or WIPO processes (as guided by international treaties).

...

Much of the material on LibGen would be legally accessible under the copyright terms in which it was originally published, but that their exclusivity has been retroactively extended.

That's arguably more of a limitation than an advantage.

If your OPSEC is adequate, legality is irrelevant.

And if that seems shocking, consider that legality <> morality.

THANK YOU! I lost the name of the web site and was having trouble Google-ing the right phrase to find it again. Much appreciated.

I recommend bookmarking the Wikipedia page, people keep it updated with working domains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

Don't forget sci-hub, too.

NB: LibGen has all Sci-Hub content as well. Searchable by author, title, journal, etc., and not just DOI / URL.

For what it is worth I love my local libraries.

I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.

I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.

I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.

Once a month I bring back all the books I got.

And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.

From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.

On the flip side, people all over my neighborhood have put considerable effort into building awesome tiny sharing libraries. Perhaps without the issue being "solved" we'd see even more and varied institutions formulate organically.

So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?

Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.

Sure, but in a community where there wasn't an actual public library, I do believe one would inevitably come into existence as the effort of the community, in the same way those tiny libraries do. "People have spare books; community centres exist; so why not put the spare books in the community centre?"

Very possibly, yes. The original modern libraries in the west were effectively subscription libraries, as in, they weren’t free to use, you had to pay to become a member. It was only later that they were run by the government. That said, there is a vast gulf between them and a little box people put outside their homes with some books inside.

Further reading: The Library Book by Susan Orlean

But you'll be constrained to the old spare books of that particular community. Public libraries have a much broader selection, and they also buy new books.

Also I'm not sure they'd actually come into existence everywhere, even if the internet is a poor substitute for a library it is cheaper and may be enough for many.

But only a certain kind of book; government approved books.

Definitely nothing interesting.

In the alternate reality where public libraries didn't already exist, I suspect the law would make it illegal to loan books. It would be a direct response to these small informal libraries trying to share books and "violate the license."

Except communities that under-privileged will be unlikely to have the bandwidth or know-how for activism at that scale.

Unfortunately reality does not "inevitably" progress towards utopia, any more than the life of any individual does.

Wouldn't the small sharing libraries also be at risk under a system with more power held by copyright owners?

No copies are being made, so no. Keep in mind we're talking about physical books, not filesharing.

Of course there are no physical restrictions with books, but legal restrictions can be created at any time.

Just imagine physical books suddenly having EULA-like first pages that would forbid you from loaning them out. In fact, this has been tried before: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/2059/why-were-books-...

Insofar as copyright owners are empowered by the system currently in place (e.g. DMCA) a system with less authoritarian power available to lobbyists may have the exact opposite effect. Same caveats as above apply.

Do you use these libraries? I see them around from time to time, but I've never been tempted to borrow from them. Usually there's nothing more than a random selection of popular novels from the last 20 years.

I wasn't really trying to make a qualitative point, but to that notion I have had considerable trouble in some public libraries as well.

The first memory I have of a library was in school where I wanted desperately to find out how one "writes" software. After lots of probably very annoying begging, I was given a book on either COBOL or FORTRAN from the ~60s. It wasn't super helpful.

The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin. I was fined $104, and upon contacting them was given customer service rivaling comcast's. Until I pay that ridiculous cost I can't borrow from any city library, and can't get a card anywhere else that I'm not a resident. So for me, the tiny libraries are already way over a very low bar.

I've had some generally good experiences, too, but nothing that's convinced me that the current model is either the only way or the best way.

> The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin.

This frustrates me no end. After several such incidents, and comparable customer service, I now take pictures of myself returning the books. I'm sure it'll do no good when it comes down to it, but it lets me feel that I have some agency in the matter.

What really frustrates me is that our library just re-jiggered its return system so that it's metered, counting how many resources have been returned, perhaps in an effort to address (for them if not for me) concerns like this; but there's still no way to get a receipt indicating that you have returned any particular resource. When I try to get one from the front-desk staff by returning it in person, I'm told I have to drop it in the metered chute and, basically, hope.

the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen.

The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.

There are a lot of things that wouldn't exist if they weren't grandfathered in.

I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.

And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.

And then there are guns.

At the risk of sounding too conservative for HN, this 'grandfathering' is an invaluable means of insulating societal infrastructure from the tyranny of cultural value shift.

I'm mulling over "cultural value shift".

Maybe some of it is that. But a lot of traditional rights of the general public are too easily overcome by dedicated funded interests via lawmakers and regulators.

Like or hate trump, but his "to make a new regulation, you first need to repeal two regulations" thing was pretty interesting.

I think there need to be more checks and balances than simple grandfathering architected into things when rights are lost.

general disdain for most things run by any type of government here

Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

Just because it's good for some people or used to be worthwhile doesn't mean it's good overall that it exists. If you could buy a cheap license for time limited access to DRMd copy of any book, to me, that would be better than a library because it would be cheaper in principle, as long as copyright owners cooperated and it didn't suffer from monopolies and things, and far more books would be available to far more people without the physical constraints.

My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.

Idk, some hackerspaces are like public libraries. cf noisebridge which is open to the public at no charge and has a library:

http://noisebridge.net

The thing you can find a book that is hundreds of years old that is still readable, how long would data in a hard drive last in the wild?

And who is to say you can even open the file? Not many ebooks are being written in plain text or pdf after all. Usually it's something clunky and proprietary with DRM.

Yes, this. I'm surprised they're not labeled as scary "socialism" and replaced with public-private "partnerships" with commercial ads, membership fees and overpriced concessions. It seems the public commonwealth is being cannibalized for vampiric exploitation at every opportunity. You can't sit down anywhere, because it's been replaced with a sterile multi-use zoned commercial areas with a Code of Conduct* without buying something. Remember water fountains and public parks? Not anymore.

*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.

Today libraries would be decried as socialist, when in fact they are a public good. The idea of a public good is malleable, so perhaps the way for left leaning policy makers to advance certain types of legislation is through re-branding as a public good.

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