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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

If I can access a book for free at a library.

Why can't I read it online for free?

Ultimately the answer will be about rights and really suggesting the author can put arbitrary restrictions in content that's been purchased.

Those restrictions exist for financial reasons not moral. As such this is not theft in any ethical sense but a quirk of the laws. A law apparently many people disagree with...

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It's not free at the library, the book was purchased with your taxes.

It was purchased a single time, just like the original e-book that you pirate.

Every person in the world doesnt use a single library with a single copy. Every local library purchases one or more. How many did Zlib purchase? How many Zlibs are there?

That's a logical race to the bottom that makes me think you have never checked out a book from a US library. If you were to calculate how much an author makes from their book being in libraries it's miniscule. For starters most library books are donated secondhand and not purchased new by libraries. Secondly, most libraries only have a single copy of a given book unless it is a major title (It's not uncommon for waitlists to be booked up for months where I live). Additionally, most titles are shared across multiple libraries in a state or city. Where I live you can return a book to any library because they just circulate copies around the state. Regardless, there are roughly 9,000 public libraries in the U.S. let's pretend that every single library purchases 1 copy of a given book new (an extremely generous estimate). Most authors are not self-published and earn 10-12% royalties, but let's pretend this author is self-published and earns around 40% from their printer before operational expenses. Let's also pretend it's an absolute banger of a book and is selling for a whopping $20/copy. That means they make $8/copy before taxes, bookstore fees, shipping, and other expenses that the self-publisher does not pay for. Let's be generous and say they somehow make $8/copy after all of that. If every library bought 1 copy (which, again. They do NOT) the author would earn $72,000. That's absolute peanuts compared to what they earn on Amazon from people who can afford firsthand books. The point of libraries and piracy is not to stop people who CAN afford books from buying them. It's supposed to enable those who CANNOT. A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.

>A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.

That's how you get books written by authors who are good at filling out government forms, not books written by good authors. See the many terrible pieces of public art that is required in many places as part of public construction projects as an example of what I'm talking about.

Couldn't you give people emailed tokens to give in token to authors?

One nit to pick. In my experience (NYC and Boston areas), libraries almost only buy their books new and specifically request for people to not donate their used books to them.

Other libraries I've been in have used book sales with donated books to raise funds for the library.

I think you need to specify what context you're talking in.

Do you see it as... 1. Criminal 2. Immoral 3. Having downsides

I think we agree it's not criminal (as scale doesn't apply to a binary criminality judgement stealing a penny is as criminal as stealing a pound though punishment will vary).

Are you suggesting it's immoral? Because I can't see where you make such an argument.

Or are you saying well it has downsides as authors may earn less? It's likely book purchases are affected by libraries. I don't think the effect is as profound as people think.

Without that context it's quite hard to discuss this topic.

Scale is a thing though, right?

The library book might get borrowed dozens or hundreds of times. The pirated ebook is copied anywhere from dozens to millions of times.

It goes back to opportunity though. Most people who pirate books don't have the income or ability to purchase them new. The scale is irrelevant if the per-user profit opportunity is 0. The only thing that changes is more people read and further their education.

* copy

What people fail to realize is that ebooks sometimes cost libraries more money than physical books. The libraries buy them with cost of degradation in mind, so after x number of lends, they have to repurchase the book in order to keep making it available to their patrons. This is how they're able to make an agreement with the publisher in order to legally provide you with a digital lending library.

IMO (having worked at a public library) the vast majority of inventory is donated second-hand books.

Careful there, you might burst the libertarian-leaning conceit behind the "difference" between libraries & unregulated e-books: if libraries didn't already exist today with centuries of tradition in their foundations, the very suggestion of an institution like them would be met with howls of the inevitable destruction of the written word and bankrupting of our already starved wordsmiths.

But for ebooks there is no such thing as second hand.

If I give a friend a copy of a DRM‐free copyrighted ebook, delete all of my own copies, and he pays me, isn’t that equivalent?

It may be impractical to verify that all my copies are gone, but is there any reason it wouldn’t hold up under first sale doctrine?

Any 17 U.S.C. § 109(d) experts in the house?

I'm pretty sure that the law does not permit you to re-sell digital copies. As when you purchase a digital book (DRM or not), you don't own the digital copy - you're only granted a license to use it for your own use. This license does not extend to reselling it (what your suggestion would be doing).

Physical books fall under a 'property purchase' model while ebooks fall under the 'license based' model. A good (albeit basic) read: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/this-is-the-big-rea...

In some cases, every time someone checks out an e-book, the publisher and author are paid again.

Careful. They'll come for the libraries next.

It's already happening:

<https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...>

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