Book publishers won't stop until libraries are dead
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
If you ask me, the publishers want to move to a "rent model" like many software companies and even some Auto makers are moving towards. That means every time you read you electronic book, you pay them a small amount. With Libraries gone, that could be the next step.
Plus its seem, just by accident, they are getting help from extremist in many US States. Those extremist are also conducting their own war on Libraries, but for different reasons. If they "win", the results will be close to what publishers want. From what I have seen, none of the big publishers have come out against the extremists (are there any small publishers left?).
They already enforce this on libraries. Unlike physical books which can be kept until they physically wear out or are destroyed (and even then they can be rebound and most libraries have some kind of book binding tools or access), the ebooks that libraries 'buy' are often artificially limited in terms of number of times they can be used. So libraries 'buy' an ebook that can be lent X amount of times with 1-2 'concurrent' lends. It's all so stupid.
It just results in very silly situations where the library buys the terrible copies and just happen to also have information on how the DRM works and which programs can bypass it and since libraries exist to provide information, if someone asks for it, of course you tell them. Same way as there tend to be copiers that are out of sight (and camera) range. At least a couple of libraries I worked for had information by the copiers on exactly how much of a book you could copy before it was considered copyright infringement, thus informing people that they could copy the books.
It's very kayfabe-esque.
You're right that it's a fundamental values mismatch. Personally, I'm an extremist who would crash every F500 company to prevent another Library of Alexandria. Knowledge > money.
So they help people follow the law?
Lawyers and librarians fighting is always fun because each group is very detail-oriented, very pedantic, and amazing at malicious compliance.
Tolkien deserves much more of my money than the author of the cookbook I bought a Costco and never read, but with single purchase they get roughly the same amount of economic value from me.
(For the purposes of this example, Tolkien is still alive)
I might be ok with renting a book if more of the money went to the author. Theoretically it could work out well for everyone. A lot of cookbooks would be a great option. Rent them for a month or do for, say, $1? Cheaper access to books for a period of time, like O'Reilly's Safari for technical books.
But I don't think that's how it's going to work out if renting is the only way to get books. I think that everyone will for forced into onerous terms of the publishers get too much power.
Cookbooks if anything seem more useful to buy since they can sit in or near your kitchen and you can grab them and use them. Whereas you read a novel only every so often past the first read?
But even if you're on the rational consumer mindset and want to give the JRR estate an extra penny shaving per word you read, are you really comfortable with the level of intrusive monitoring of your habits this will entail? You want the publisher to know how many times you open their book, which passages you read most, what time of day, etc. to charge you appropriately? What if JRR wants you to pay extra to read about Tom Bombadil because you can't just watch the movie about him, isn't that fair if people are willing to pay?
Perhaps so but why?
Tolkien was educated at mainly public expense and his wherewithal and worldliness that enabled him to write his novels came from the society in which he lived.
That is, he was intimately coupled to his society without which he would not have been able to write his books. He owes society some payback for what it gave him.
Tolkien has rights that need protection but they are not exclusive morally speaking. That the law gives him full and exclusive rights is an unfortunate product of history when Victor Hugo and cronies forced the Berne Convention in the days before the reading public had any idea that it was about to be shafted.
That unfair treaty has to be made fair despite protestations from greedy publishers. If not, they will eventually lose out because every new computer technology only makes it easier to copy works. Even now it's a cinch, in 20 years it'll be so easy that if any text or video has any public exposure it'll be copied by consumers as a matter of course—copyright holders bedamed. (Think Google Glass—like tech that captures everything a human sees in high definition. If a human sees it then it will be copied automatically. Right, copyright is on the wall without major reform.)
What we are witnessing from these greedy publishing bastards are the last gasps of the old elitist copyright order. If they were smart they would realize that they need to be much more reasonable and consolatory to even survive.
So that economic resources get directed towards creating books that people actually read and enjoy enough to keep reading.
At present, writers and authors are incentivised to merely sell as many copies as possible because that's how they get paid. If they were directly incentivised to create books people enjoy reading we might have more books that are enjoyable to read.
> Tolkien was educated at mainly public expense and his wherewithal and worldliness that enabled him to write his novels came from the society in which he lived.
That can be addressed by using the tax system to pay back society from his wealth, but it's a separate discussion.
> That the law gives him full and exclusive rights is an unfortunate product of history when Victor Hugo and cronies forced the Berne Convention in the days before the reading public had any idea that it was about to be shafted.
I'd also prefer a world where books were more open because I reckon the increase in creativity from millions of people modifying stories would outweigh the loss of economic incentives for original authors.
But that's not the world we live in. To the extend that hard copyrights exist that force us to pay to read we might as well structure the payments in a way that motivates the authors to write in a way that is more beneficial to us.
Policing copyright in its current form will become such a burden that it will force change, and with coming AI advances even publisher's editors will become redundant. Technology will make publishers much less important.
Authors ought to see the writing on the wall and start planning to deal directly with their readers. As you say, that would aid in creating books that people want to read.
My personal opinion is that authors will have more to fear from AI than copyright violations. I'm not against writers being given their fair dues but I am against unfair copyright laws.
What concerns me most is that if we're not careful we'll end up reading books and viewing videos created by AI—and I don't want that nor would author/creators. I'm defending human creators here, I don't want them replaced by machines. That's why it's more important than ever that authors and readers have a more solid and direct relationship—one that's much more than just a monetary alliance.
That is, until your phone apps start scanning works automatically to detect copyrighted material before allowing you to store it on their cloud-storage
And why use a phone and locked-in apps? I suggest you read how I use my phone now, in 20 years I'll have even more control over my data: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=35243759
Also check my comment underneath in reply to a commentator.
You're obviously of the smartphone generation, I'm pre that so I think outside that box. In 20 years things will be very different and that doesn't necessarily mean that Big Tech will still rule the roost.
You're perfectly free to send him a check for the additional portion of your money you think he's entitled to.
I think in a thriving society it would be fine for consumers to enjoy a value surplus from the products and services they buy. Having every bit of value a consumer obtains from a product monetized by the producer is a great way to move wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top; it's a society of scarcity and not abundance. How did the popular imagination go from bountiful societies like the one in Star Trek to ideas like "You will own nothing and you will be happy" where you pay rent for everything you use.
It's particularly galling that these ideas are spreading to information products, which would be freely copyable and available to everyone - a public treasure like no other - if not for artificial restrictions on such activities. I remember the "information wants to be free" attitude of hackers in the early 2000s. But now it's ok if we pay per instance for reading a book? Crazy stuff.
“You‘ll never guess what Mrs Jones told me about Agnes’ husband“
“Go on?”
“Well, she was sitting at the table next to him in the cafe and overheard him saying he wanted to make Agnes happy!”
“No!”
“Yes! Can you believe it?”
“The bastard!”
For example, if I told said "you will live naked in a ditch and you will be happy", the "you will be happy" part reads like a dictate about how you should feel about the "living in a ditch" situation. The obvious disconnect between telling people they will be paying monthly dues to a bunch of rent-seekers and that they will somehow feel happy about this situation even though it sounds, frankly, awful has the same effect.
I haven't noticed this at all. Where are people talking about being happy as an evil goal?
The phrase "you will own nothing and be happy" is dystopian because it's not really saying that you'll be happy. It's more like a threat: "we will monetize every aspect of your existence and you better like it".
Only if they're priced the same. They don't have to be. Tolkein could charge much more than the cookbook if he wished.
I don't see that your point is dependent on renting vs buying. It's just about pricing.
To me it's one of the most fascinating examples of how the wiles of human nature change concepts over time.
Sure, you can imagine a society with capitalism and no regulations. But that would be a wish, not something you can bring about (or that ever occured for long).
In fact, when unregulated capitalism is left free things get even worse for the little man and the small business or upstart: they can be crushed with no regulations to protect them. People not liking this doesn't matter. The power is on the ones with the money and the connections, which would be the capitalists, not with the masses who think voting means they rule.
And if we restrict it purely to copyright laws, who said removing them only makes things better? Million creators getting paid because of copyright - authors, recording artists, session musicians, illustrators, movie crews, programmers, etc would beg to differ.
As for ordinary people's opinion not mattering, it matters because it affects what the capitalists, and more generally the people in power, can get away with. That's why capitalists like the camouflage of people confusing capitalism and free markets.
Why should capitalists love it when people think that regulations (which also include copyright, patent law, trademark law, ...) are opposed to capitalism?
"Capitalists" are just people living in the system, and some of them would seek such positions if available, and love it if they successfully occupy them. Those are the people that think it's ok to demand money from people singing "Happy Birthday to You". Why wouldn't they love it? Yes, it's not good to everybody else, but it's good for them.
To the extent that private property is an essential component of capitalism, and that intellectual property is a component of private property, your classification of copyright as a regulation rather than capitalism itself makes little sense.
That is precisely the question that is disputed in discussions of copyright. "Intellectual property" in itself is an ambiguous term: does it mean the ideas themselves, or particular expressions of them? Copyright law says the latter: ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted (or patented), only particular expressions of them can. That is because ideas are non-rivalrous: people can give them to others without losing the use of them themselves. That takes away the justification for private property rights, namely, to avoid conflicts over who gets to use the property.
Prior to computers and the Internet, one could argue that particular copies of a particular expression of an idea, such as a book, were rivalrous: I can't both give a book to you and read it myself at the same time. But with digital copies that is no longer true. So the same logic that makes ideas themselves not private property, now pushes us towards not treating copies of digital works as private property either.
The original justification for copyright law was to encourage people to create works. But that was always a questionable claim, because nobody creates works in a vacuum. From the standpoint of creation, the Internet has made clear that many more works get created when there is free sharing of digital copies. And the Internet has also enabled other ways of paying people whose creative works you like, besides having to pay for individual copies; that's what systems like Patreon are for. So that original justification for copyright law has now lost whatever validity it once had.
The best piece of evidence for who really benefits from copyright law, though, is who is pushing hardest for draconian enforcement of it. Is that content creators, i.e., actual authors and artists and musicians, etc.? No. It's the media companies, whose business model depends on being able to, not to put too fine a point on it, exploit content creators by convincing them that working through the media companies is the only way to get them a large audience--and then siphoning off most of the profits for themselves instead of paying them back to the creators.
As I said, this is precisely the point that is disputed in discussions of copyright law. You certainly can't just assume it as a fact. But the capitalists who are exploiting copyright law to their own benefit would certainly love it if everyone would just take it as given that "intellectual property" is private property. That's an example of the general pattern I have described elsewhere in this discussion, that capitalists want people to think regulations are for the people's benefit, instead of for the benefit of the capitalists. That is the capitalists' ideal state of regulatory capture.
Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit. There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward.
You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism. I’d posit that is not how the system is structured nor is it how it is intended to be structured. That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is. You can’t just take out the parts you don’t like and treat them as a separate entity.
The problem is that you are assuming that "intellectual property" is property. You cannot assume that.
> Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit.
Enclosure of parts of the commons that are rivalrous--only one person can use that part at a time--was, yes. But as I have already said, "intellectual property" is non-rivalrous, so this argument does not apply to it.
> There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward
This is quite true; it's why we have a complex system of private property common law for physical property, and some kinds (such as real estate) have even more complexity in the law attached to them.
But "intellectual property" is not physical property, and you can't just assume that all of the law that has been developed for physical property is automatically applicable to "intellectual property" as well.
> You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism.
I am doing no such thing. Indeed, the feature of capitalism I have been describing, namely regulatory capture, is not for the benefit of society; it is a net loss to society. But it is a benefit to the capitalists who buy the regulations they want. That's why they buy them.
> That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is.
In the sense that regulatory capture is a common end state of capitalism (where "capitalism", as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, is not the same thing as "free markets", although capitalists would love for people to think it is), yes, it is "inherent" to capitalism. That still doesn't mean it's a net benefit to society. It isn't.
Intellectual property is property.
Whether or not it should be is a different question, but it factually is property.
Why? Is there some natural law that gives me ownership to the meaning of the words I say? That bars you from repeating that meaning in those words?
You are literally inverting the facts (actual law that exists) and subjective preferences that are not facts (“natural law”).
What natural law gives you the right to own land?
There isn't one. It's an arbitrary social construct. The argument that IP is property is built on a circle of quicksand.
In the case of land, at least, exclusivity of use can be an argument one could make (Only one person can physically use any one plot of it for any one particular purpose, and gosh, maybe it's in the social interest to have some set of rules for ajudicating disputes between two people who want to use it for different purposes, and one of many solutions to that question is private land ownership), but that's not even an argument that has any applicability in the IP space.
What's most interesting is that the IP commons can be freely plundered, at no cost, to build IP that is owned by someone. If we're going to treat IP as property, why does the creation of new IP not require a tax, levy, or dividend to be paid to the collective owners of the IP commons? All ideas are, after all, derivative.
No, works that are copyrighted in accordance with applicable law are by law the private property of the copyright owner. To the extent that is "factual", it's only that way to the extent that we all agree to respect the relevant laws.
But in any case, "intellectual property" is a broader term than that--indeed, as it is used by the capitalists (e.g., media companies) who advocate for more and more expansive and draconian regulation in this area, it is much broader. Capitalists want to claim copyright over particular words or particular symbols. They want to claim copyright over ideas. And they invented the term "intellectual property" precisely in order to try to trade on the implicit (but invalid) analogy with physical property, which is rivalrous, whereas "intellectual property" is not.
Or, if you want to get more technical, "private property" is an agreement we all make with each other to assign an owner to every rivalrous good, and to respect that owner's right to control how the good is used. We do this because a society in which this agreement is made and respected will be much wealthier than a society without it.
What western legal system is based is such a way that it doesn’t consider IP to be private property? I am not aware of any. The notion that such a narrow definition is the basis of most actual property law runs contrary to empirical evidence.
> There are edge cases--for example, multiple people can ride in a car even if it's only considered the private property of one of them--but they aren't relevant to the discussion we're having here.
But that's not just edge cases. Jointly operated objects and co-habited houses make up a huge fraction of what we commonly consider to be property. I don't think you can brush this away as an edge case.
I mean, come to think it, looking at what objects currently surround me, most of them can be used by more than one person at same time.
It is explicitly a property right. Hence the phrase “intellectual property”.
In many ways it resembles a property right, but it is missing fundamental aspects of property rights.
What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right. When it expires, the creator of the work loses that "right". It exists not for the benefit of the creators of a work, but for the benefit of the public.
Copyright is a temporary restriction on the rights of others. As a society, we deem that acceptable because it's temporary and because it encourages people to make their works publicly available, thus enriching culture and society.
If it were a property right, then it would make no sense that you lose that property at the expiration of copyright.
Copyright may be owned, bought, sold, transferred or otherwise discharged in the same manner that any other form of property is. Nothing about property inherently implies such claim exists in perpetuity.
I was interpreting "property right" at a different level of abstraction than you. I was thinking it was referring to the thing that is copyrighted as being the "property", not the copyright itself.
Changing my frame of reference up a level of abstraction puts us in agreement, I think.
No, its not.
> What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right.
Limited time monopoly rights are property rights. A life tenancy in real property is a property right.
(Copyright lacks what some consider essetmbtial features of ownership of the subject matter of a property right, as opposed to ownership of a property right in that subject matter, but ownership of the subject of property rights is not the only kind of property right.)
"Capitalism" revolves around maximizing what can be owned as capital, including by divvying up what would otherwise be the commons by creating various types of imaginary properties.
One type of capital is government-created privileges obtained through regulatory capture, that keep upstart competitors from entering a market. If you're arguing for having fewer regulations, then you're actually advocating against capitalism! Contrast with focusing on "free markets", which at least keeps the emphasis on the competition mechanic rather than the suffocating dynamic of rent seeking.
The definition you're using seems to be clearly a far-left, anti-capitalism interpretation which has essentially inverted goals/motivations with side-effects/externalities compared to what a pro-capitalist, market-oriented type of person would suggest.
Basically, you're suggesting that regulatory capture is a goal of "capitalism" and while most people would say that's an anti-capitalist failure of government.
Everyone agrees regulatory capture is bad, so maybe we could all work together to fix that badness regardless of abstract differences of opinion.
Consider how copyright itself is strong demonstration of the distinction between markets and capitalism. When expressing anti-copyright opinions, one often gets labeled an anti-capitalist even though they're expressing a free market opinion - why is this?
Fundamentally, a free market does not have copyright - if I have series of bits A, and you have series of bits B, then in a free market we can trade copies of each. It's only by creating a privilege of imaginary property that party C can force themselves into our voluntary exchange, declaring that me and you cannot trade our series of bits without their permission. C's privilege of dictating that you and I cannot freely trade is a form of capital that has been created out of whole cloth with the deliberate economic purpose of creating an income stream - aka rent seeking. Arguing against the existence of this privilege is simultaneously anti-capitalist and pro-market.
The distinction between capitalism and markets becomes ever more important as more capitalist activity shifts from direct application to managing intrinsic problems of the natural world (eg facilitating investment in a machine that produces widgets), to the circular application of inventing new forms of intermediated rent streams. For example, the freedom-destroying trend of companies "selling" physical products while retaining control over them through software backdoors makes perfect sense from a capitalist perspective - the ongoing right to control the device is a form of capital that can be separated and retained to create a revenue stream. But from a pro-market pro-freedom perspective, the chipping away of individual autonomy in favor of centrally-owned control is abhorrent.
In short when having informal conversations a person referring to "capitalism" should be assumed to be talking about free market capitalism unless they indicate otherwise, Not to be assumed to be referring to corporatism, crony capitalism, mercantilism or any other types of capitalism
>One type of capital is government-created privileges obtained through regulatory capture,
Copyright was not created from regulatory capture, copyright was expanded and abused will beyond its original remit via regulatory capture
I agree that people want to think of free markets and capitalism as being intertwined and inseparable, but I'm pointing out how they end up being in conflict. And as capitalism continues to evolve, this conflict continues to grow.
> Copyright was not created from regulatory capture, copyright was expanded and abused will beyond its original remit via regulatory capture
Sure. And every time it was expanded, the amount of capital increased while market freedom decreased! Capitalism and free markets are not one and the same, but rather two different qualities that can end up being in conflict.
Ultimately if one wants to advocate for freedom, one needs to focus on advocating for it directly, rather than for an economic system that is increasingly in conflict with it. You can still think of economics in terms of capital (and I think it makes sense to). But the desires of capital need to be made deliberately subservient to freedom rather than vice-versa.
Not all capital markets are free...
You explain to me how a free market would work with out capital
Rather I've pointed out that some forms of capital are directly at odds with freedom and free markets.
You pop off the book supply and disconnect russian piracy websites and suddenly we only know what Amazon editors, pricey Scientific journals and extended university courses, allow us to know.
The internet is excellent for technical knowledge around STEM subjects, primarily computing... but it routinely deletes valuable information from all media types. The popular http sites are a curated garden. Half of all youtube videos from 2015 onward, have been deleted.
I don't really care about paying $20/month to access all the rare and good books. Keeping it on the map is more valuable than rent-seeking.
Just another example of capitalism destroying resources that make us a civilization (instead of just a bundle of subscriptions).
Deleting it from the customers devices is the wrong way to handle it, but I can genuinely see how the mistake would happen as they remove the bootleg copy from the server and then the e-readers would update and see the book doesn't exist so delet it from the device.
A dumb event, but I'm not really seeing it as evidence of the publishers desire for licensed only books, something I agree is happening.
But I remember it was due to something odd, but forgot what. But the point is, they sold you the book. So if they were scammed they should eat the cost, not delete it from your device.
At the time I was getting interested in these readers, that activity turned me off every getting/using an electronic reader.
If there was ever an argument for an analog library, this is it.
https://mashable.com/archive/amazon-remote-delete
> The statement, from Amazon's Drew Herdener, reads:
> These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books...When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers....We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.
My Kindle is jail broken because I prefere using KOReader over Amazons own reader software. But even before it was jail broken if I ever brought books from Amazon I would use the "Download book to your computer" function and then run it though the DeDRM plugin for Calibre. https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
That way even if Amazon decide to no longer host the book (so you can't redownload them) or go back on their word about not remotely removing content I still have a DRM Free copy of the content I can put on the book. However it is a shame we as consumers have to go though these steps, our other option is to buy content from store that do not apply DRM to the books, but that as decision that is basically forced by the publishers.
This isn't exactly comforting since they've since done things just as abusive, like remoting into people's devices and replacing their purchased products with different products.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/03/04/0521244/roald-dahl-e...
If an app dev did the same, completely rework their app into a completely new product and allow auto update replace the app installed on users devices, would you lay the blame on Google/Apple or on the publisher?
IMO its not a black and white case and I would say neither party are completely in the clear, more an assignment of blame, but I would put more blame on the publisher than on Amazon, but that doesn't mean Amazon are in the clear either. Amazon should have either a) required the publisher to issue the new book under a new ASIN b) give the owner of the book the ability to choose which revision they would like to read.
Then Amazon had a problem. What to do?
They couldn't give the 99 cents from the US customers to the American publishers because it (A) belonged to the publisher outside the US and (B) the American copies were $9.99 so it wouldn't have been enough.
They could have prompted the American customers to pay the difference, then compensate the American rights holders.
They could have done nothing.
But in the end they said 'we didn't have the right to sell you this in the first place so we are taking the book back'.
Gross but similar to what happens when you change the country code for your Apple ID and things you bought disappear.
Instead what happened was the digital equivalent of Amazon breaking into your house during the night, removing the book from your shelf, and leaving the refund on the kitchen table on the way out.
I don't think it's similar to the Apple situation since in that example you (in theory) know you're getting a region-locked product.
This happened in 2009, Orwell hit the public domain in 2021.
Amazon should not be able to retract a book from your device. Why they did it or whether or not it was a good response aren't relevant. It should be impossible.
Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF, in the book "The Great Reset".
Of course they do. From the image in the article:
"This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only."
Key word being licensed. You don't OWN it.
The wealthy don't want you to own anything. They want a nation of renters so that they can continue to see revenue off of everything in perpetuity.
Is it anywhere close to the cost of providing the services your library provides, or a nominal fee to print the card?
Everyone wants to move to a "rent" model. It's the easiest way to fleece the largest number of people.
Why not just interleave ads inside the book and monetize via standard CPM/CPC/affiliate business models?
Imagine if you could tap a single button to sign up for horse-riding lessons after you've just read about the ride of the Rohirrim. Or maybe you could tap a button to get a tasty sandwich delivered to you — in the exact moment that you're reading about Frodo and the gang surviving off lembas bread.
Especially with the advent of LLMs, it seems like in-stream advertising for classic literature (especially books that are already out of copyright) is a massive opportunity just waiting for someone to pick it up. I'm genuinely surprised it's not already being done.
I will gladly support more of our tax money going to libraries so that anyone who cares to can read books uncluttered with advertisements.
> This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
> This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it wasn’t purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
They apologised after getting criticized¹, but as Mike notes, someone consciously put that text there. Was that some experiment by their publisher? To get young adult readers to get used to such silly stipulations in order to turn it into law later? If I was one of the authors I would be pissed at the publisher² for slipping that in and damaging their reputation.
1: https://www.facebook.com/100063768668342/posts/pfbid02WRJwn8...
2: I am hoping this was not actually put in at the author's behest.
My bet it was put there by the author (who blames their "formatter"), because wording and sentiment are amateurish. I'm also getting strong vibes that that book is self-published. For one, it's a looks like it's a trashy romance novel, and I understand self-publishing is pretty common for those, and the apology Facebook doesn't mention a publisher and makes it sounds like the authors are running the show.
In any case, the inclusion of that example give me a poor opinion of this article. The author isn't above digging up stupid stuff done by some random ignorant boob to fuel the outrage machine.
I say that as a user who LOVES reading digital books from the library. I got a Kindle ~a year ago, and have read around 25 books, all but one borrowed from the library. I would have paid for those books before, but now get them instantly, for free. It's amazing! Even getting/managing holds isn't a hassle- I check for my next book a few days before I finish my current book, and that usually results in getting off any waitlist by the time I'm ready to read it.
Obviously, I could get the physical books from the library before, but I didn't find myself doing them- the logistics were slightly annoying, if I'm reading a physical book anyways, I tend to want to just grab a copy for my collection, with Amazon I can get a book the next day. Digital book distribution does feel different in a tangible way to me.
So as a result, I am now not spending $250+ a year on books. I suspect I'm not the only one in the situation. Currently- I love it. But I'm wondering if it is sustainable.
It's the gatekeeping by default, even for things that have been out of print for 50 years.
It greatly hinders research unless you have the luxury of constant plane flights to arrival libraries and purchasing things on Abe books.
You know this already, but just a kind reminder that you didn't get them for free. You paid for the library with your tax dollars, and continue to do so. Which means you are absolutely right to utilize this!
I make this statement to remind others that libraries are public goods that you pay for and should utilize. This sends a market signal. This matters!
Reminder: Legal lending from libraries has artificial restrictions on how many digital copies can be "checked out" at a time, and libraries are paying for the privilege of lending out books. I don't know the details or if those lending privileges are perpetual the same way a physical copy would be, but that's what's happening.
If you are viewing books legally, someone somewhere is getting money. Who gets what is another question (Kindle unlimited, for example.)
Scientists write them for free, to embellish their resumes (often their grad students do the work) - the publisher sells a thousand copies, mostly to libraries across the world.
Rinse and repeat.
The problem with that idea is that there would be very few copies, concentrated in the urban areas that are likely to get nuked. A book like one of those is also likely to be extremely specialized, so it would be unlikely to be used if that specialty ceases to be of practical values for a generation or more. Even physical books need care to be preserved for long periods, and wouldn't survive in an abandoned library with a leaky roof and flooded basement.
I agree, but "in in near-apocalyptic circumstances" they'll only preserve the stuff they value or find useful. I don't think redundant, low-print volume academic specialist works will fall into those categories. Unless there's enough surplus that the university continues to function as such, those books (along with dissertations, most academic papers and archives) will rot on the shelves.
In the aftermath of a full-on nuclear war, I'd expect the English-speaking word would experience huge, unrecoverable losses in areas beyond the undergrad level. Advanced work that's famous and highly-cited enough to be in a South American or African university probably would be an exception, though.
That's a separate problem. You pay to submit the paper and then people pay to read it.
I really wish we could expand human knowledge without gatekeepers milking both sides
Learning is good, knowledge is good. Giving people the ability everywhere to learn at their own pace is important. More important that paying authors. I'm not saying MUCH MORE, it is very good to compensate (actual) creators.
Now, people can get just about as much knowledge as they want for a very cheap price, and the barriers to that are so utterly artificial. An E-book reader can contain just about as much knowledge as one might ever need.
Priority ONE, enable learning. All other priorities fall WELL below that, law be darned.
That's your core idea.
The core idea of capitalism is "Priority ONE, get all the money".
Those core ideas are not the easiest of fellows.
The distinction from what GP is saying is that somethings should not be "owned" or "fully owned", ie, not have all the kind of rights that you would expect when you say "I own this". In the particular scenario of publishing, is questioning if "owning distributing rights" make sense (in the way of, I have the rights, you don't. I can do what I want as it is mine, you can do what I allow because it's mine not yours). In which he claims that "easiness of learning" is more important than profit, which in this scenario means that your freedom of doing what you want with your ownership, ie: selling rights to very limited used of your valuable (book, etc) is less important than sharing/acquiring knowledge, ie: i should be able to lend you or maybe even give you a copy of a book.
The dilemma is incentives to publish/share knowledge: Capitalism works in hand with incentives due to everything having "value", so you can own things like "intellectual property" and have rights over it, so can sell it, or sell its use, giving you an incentive to "produce knowledge", the drawback is that anyone else has to use "value/capital" to access it. (same applies if you decide it's the governament that subsidies, still, something is giving back that "value/capital". Also, because of your rights to own, you can also share it without need to be rewarded, as it is your inherent right.
But, the thing about all this is "measure". Not everything is easily measurable, but to facilitate using ownership rights and their transaction/use, you have to measure. That the big problem of capitalism, plenty of things can't really have a price tag, and value of anything is not only subjective, but also hard to know for sure without full info, so "easy" measures are used.
This notion of "hard to measure value" is also a reason for not everything to have full ownership rights, using the current example, it's hard to measure to value of lending a book, including it's secondary effects (author getting more famous, a person getting more knowledge and its implications), so treating all these very hard to measure things the same way as more easily measurable things can and does have nasty effects.
This is basically the issue of our current ways to measure value is mostly "what are you able to trade it for", ie: tossing into a free market, which can and suffers the "tragedy of the commons" and other issues like trading with someone with lacks the necessary knowledge to give a decent assessment of value.
People are already doing this.. but it's a lot more work than wikipedia edits and typically people only do this when compensated.
B. I'll see your "books" and raise you "virtually all academic writing"
How much of that is typically directly compensated?
Virtually none.
Again, I'm not saying "no one should get paid." I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals via a system that relies heavily on intellectual property and/or classic "capitalist" ideas to do so.
Universities and libraries are a thing, and have been for some time.
> I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals...
It doesn't. People publish things for free all the time. See your own example of research papers and open access journals.
im respected, and have everything i need; if i want something im somewhat credited by my community
Agreed.
> More important that paying authors.
It's the same thing as paying authors. Stuff that is worth reading is rarely written for free, out of the goodness of the author's heart. It is written because the author expects to make money to at least somewhat repay the effort.
So if you want the material that allows people to learn at their own pace, you need a way for the authors to get paid.
You do NOT need a way for authors to get paid and this idea is already thoroughly disproven. Wikipedia gets written. Academic articles get written, fan-fiction gets written.
Now we can discuss particulars about volume and quality and distribution. But we already see that a GREAT DEAL of EXCELLENT KNOWLEDGE has been created, written and distributed without strong, or occasionally ANY, expectation of "payment."
Fan fiction I will give you. It's not paid, but it's also often not excellent. Some is; most isn't.
Look, I generate free content too. I'm doing it now. I think it's worth doing. It's not worthless. But it's worth less in terms of passing on knowledge than professionally-written books.
Do you really want to learn, say, differential equations from Wikipedia? Or would you do better with a good textbook?
Yes, it could well be that publishers would like to kill libraries and controlled digital lending—but AFAICT this suit[1] is about UNCONTROLLED digital lending: during the pandemic, archive.org began lending out more copies of eBooks than they actually owned, on the (IMHO morally justified but legally tenuous) basis that, because libraries were closed, it was reasonable to allow people to access electronically books that they were unable to access physically.
I think it would be great if the law allowed that, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't, so while I think the publishers are being jerks here, they seem to be legally in the right, and while I'm concerned that the Internet Archive's liability will be devastating to that organisation's future (losing web.archive.org would be an abhorrent consequence), claiming that this suit is about CDL or trying to shut down libraries seems to be rather disingenuous.
[1] https://publishers.org/news/publishers-file-suit-against-int...
Yes and no. The publishers didn't file a lawsuit until the policy of uncontrolled digital lending was temporarily enacted, but the lawsuit is targeting controlled digital lending as well. You can read the complaint itself to find this out, helpfully linked by the plaintiffs themselves in their own press release about the lawsuit.
Were it only about uncontrolled digital lending, the suit would have been tossed as moot two years ago.
You don't think that publishers would have had any case at all against deliberate mass-copyright infringement under flimsy pretences? I don't think "we stopped doing it when ordered to by a court" is much of a sign of good faith...
You can see this in the filed paperwork, where amusingly they also attack the IA by saying they've occasionally incorrectly labeled things as in the public domain, which was clearly done maliciously.
If this lawsuit was only seeking damages over the National Emergency Library, nobody would be writing stories about it. And publishers were openly hostile to CDL before the pandemic, you could see them preparing for this lawsuit in 2019.
I mean, that seems like a reasonable position given the circumstances? I'm sure if a physical library started their own book printing business and handing out unlimited copies of books that they had bought one of, that the publishers would be equally pissed, and not stop being pissed if the library said "oopsie I got caught I've stopped doing it now".
To use your example, if a library started publishing illegal copies of some kind of emergency materials while their town faced a major flood, I wouldn't think the library was trying to replace publishers.
Circumstances matter, and while you can argue the IA overstepped it's bounds I don't think that shows they can't be trusted.
I used to work for a big player in the digital books space.
This article is riddled with unsubstantiated claims. I can tell you for a fact that as digital library lending grows, publisher (and author) revenue declines on a per sale/borrow basis. It is not the same as physical lending. The difference in friction is massive, customers love painless instant book delivery.
Imagine being an author and seeing your units increasing but your earnings not.
Something fundamental needs to change with digital library licensing, it is on an unsustainable path. Macmillan tried windowing (ie for the first x weeks new releases can only be purchased, kind of like movies only being available in theaters at first) but the backlash was fierce and they abandoned it looking like a bully as COVID swept the globe. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
What do you recommend?
The artificial scarcity model they have now is broken. Pay-per-use seems better if the cost per read is adequate enough. All-you-can-eat-at-fixed-price (Oyster and Scribd) have the economics upside down.
Don't have a good answer, I'm an engineer not an economist :)
Er... how exactly does that work? DRM? Or can you simply make a copy of your "loaned out" digital copy before returning it? Because I can see why publishers would take issue with that. I mean, of course you could do that with a real book too (copy/scan it), but it's orders of magnitude more effort...
Controlled digital lending however gets rid of the publisher's license to make loans (where the library pays per checkout or for a fixed amount of time); instead, the library buys the hardcopy book, prepares a self-made ebook version, and pinky-promises that they will abide by the 1 copy-1 loan rule so that they can claim fair use.
It's certainly dubious, but it's not out of this world either. And what's even more dubious, are the publishers' attempts at eroding the first-sale doctrine.
(Adobe Digital Editions is a fairly trivial DRM to bypass by the way—I won't even say crack because on macOS the private key used to be hidden in plain sight in DER format—but it seems to be okay for publishers to use it when they make money out of loans. So the weakness of the DRM is not the issue).
The mere fact that someone is using CDL is strong evidence that they are following the rules and not trying to make an illicit copy.
It’s not much of a stretch to apply modern technology like streaming video, interactive screen sharing, or virtual reality to the established concept of a reading room, and wind up with something like CDL. There’s no technical reason why a patron shouldn’t be able to virtually ‘step into’ a reading room, and peruse something in the library’s collection. This would have been possible one book at a time using 20th century cable television broadcast and a telephone line. The internet just multiplies the number of ‘channels’ or books available concurrently to different patrons.
The API copying in Oracle v. Google was also dubious in the legal sense, or it wouldn't have ended up in front of the Supreme Court. That's just what the situation was like from the legal POV ten years ago, even though it was standard practice in the field and it ended up winning nicely in the Supreme Court. Now it's not dubious anymore.
> It’s not much of a stretch to apply modern technology like streaming video, interactive screen sharing, or virtual reality to the established concept of a reading room, and wind up with something like CDL
That's a good point.
https://indieauthorproject.com/iap-select/
It started in Illinois in 2014 and is now in 17 US states and Canadian provinces and growing. Book publishers just might innovate themselves out of business. Libraries aren't going to die :)
If I were in charge, the punishment for copyright holders who lie about the law like this would be forfeiture of the entire remaining copyright term of the work in question.
I wish you were in charge.
There are many books for which a single CDL copy is probably sufficient to satisfy the entire global demand for that book. They will be referenced from time to time by academics or independent researchers and almost never read cover-to-cover.
If every college/university and big city library needs to own a copy so that their members can get access to it, that's not such a big problem, you can still sell maybe 1,000 copies. But if everyone can share a single copy, that is a big problem.
And if they can do that, it probably means that copy will never be written, or priced at $20,000 or something.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but I am not the only skeptical party: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-...
e.g. see [0]. This confusion about what the suit is about seems common though.
Youtube is free, instant, fast.
I love books, when people spend their life condensing information and you spend a few hours to get the most important parts, but controlling access more and more mean that books will get less and less important.
Books and publishing industries are a result of a technology: paper, printing, binding. Now in the digital age an ebook should cost close the the amount the author get 1$-2$/book.
If they were this price and easily downloadable we would have a massive shift to digital books, completely disrupting the industry. But what we have is stagnation and regulatory capture.
This is a very technocratic view of book publishing. I think you're leaving out a lot of what goes into creating, marketing and distributing a book which is not labour of the author. Even in the digital age.
Sure, authors could contract those services out using their (expected) revenue on a book. But at some point you'll inevitably get companies offering to manage that process for authors because it creates overhead that distracts from the creative process or thought process: Publishers.
There are lean alternatives to big publishers out there, so it's easy to get self-published. But the weight a big publisher can put behind a release, the distribution network they have, can - even in the internet era - still affect a book's success heavily.
- editor, marketing, graphics - brand
if the value created by the author is worth 1-2$ I don’t think the rest of the work on the actual content is worth more.
Leaving much of the rest on the brand.
I think that the brands have successfully commoditized the authors witch is the valuable portion of the book and have mostly monopolised their position. Now they will use their excess capital to keep their position because that is what is most valuable to them.
At the same time they act as a filter judging what is worth putting in a book with their name on it, creating a standard of quality.
It's time to kill these greed-monsters. The only way to do that is to copy and pirate them out of business.
Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, it's the Disney-Life for me! Time to change the channels on these modern day robber-barons. It's time they felt the wrath of the populace, and the righteousness of the Freedom of Information.
They are merely collecting the first payment of some recurring revenue stream they imagine us to be.
Libraries as a repository of knowledge and prose as a concept have existed for millennia.
Copyright is a modern device that was originally designed to protect authors, not publishers. Copyright law being expanded over and over again for the benefit of the publishers, long after the death of the author is far more out of whack, philosophically, than libraries having a few copies of a book on the shelf (IMO).
It's very silly to imagine one can be a staunch proponent of privatizing everything, especially all the popular things, but then try to carve out a niche exception for books and a couple of other impopular things.
The only reason America has any kind of large-scale public property at all is because it was forced to by external circumstances (legacies from feudalism or the pressure exerted by rival socialism). All of it is alien to capitalism, like bolted-on patches.
It seems like this concept of "don't censor books" and "make all the information open to the world" have become openings exploited for activists to push their agenda.
Authors deserve a right to make a living with their work product. Carpenters, plumbers and the like get the right to sign over their work product in perpetuity to any customer. Book authors only get the term of copyright.
Sure, but your right stops at my device. At that point, I do whatever I choose to do with it.
<< EFF, the IA and the tech community here
Really broad brush. You will find a lot of discussion here about both groups on this forum and while sentiment appears mostly positive, not everyone is of single mind. HN is a big herd of cats.
<< No authors means no books.
Somehow I doubt that with the amount of humans on this planet that will ever come to pass. Case in point, I am writing something now ( passion project though so different rules may apply; I certainly do not expect to see a dime from it ).
<< Carpenters, plumbers and the like get the right to sign over their work product in perpetuity to any customer. Book authors only get the term of copyright.
Hmm. I might be misreading it so please correct me as needed. Would you rather the roles are reversed ( plumbers and carpenters getting royalty for each performance on their repair/build ) and you having to write a new book each time for a one time payment of $299 plus tax?
I genuinely do not understand your complaint here. If anything, your legal position is much better than that of a carpenter or plumber. You get to claim copyright over stuff that was already done. As a society, we artificially protect it ( and I personally argue for way too long ).
in contrast to the system libraries all over the world use to prevent paper books from being scanned/photographed
The traditional function of librarians and libraries has been obsoleted by technology for common use cases.
Look at what your local library does now, and you’ll find far much more than ever has nothing to do with physical books or even books at all!
The future of libraries is a ground-up reinvention of their purpose.
Also, no matter your concern about tech, warehousing physical books and providing staff to help us organize books and locate information isn’t the answer.
And they're better for it too. My local library has a makerspace in the basement, with 3D printers, multiple sound studios, computers with Adobe suite (and other things) on them, embroidery machine, sublimation printer, and soon to get a Glowforge laser cutter. It's great.
And I have another friend in charge of library events for young adults (20s/30s). She hosts geek movie nights, board/video game nights, "how to adult" sessions (like buying your first home, money management, etc), craft nights, adult coloring, open mic nights, trivia nights, cookie decorating, karaoke, "art therapy" nights (actually one of the more popular ones), etc.
If you're not in the habit of checking the events and facilities at your local library as you assume it's all book related, give it a try. It might not be anymore.
Words and concepts are not static; they can and do change often?
I just also like the additional roles they've taken on and would like to spread awareness so more people check out their local libraries (and possibly also check out books while they do so).
A few other things I've done at my local library include foreign language conversation sessions, tutoring an ESL student (that was only a couple of times, pandemic started soon after), attending various lectures, early voting, renewing my driver's registration and sticker, and with my local writing group we've done many write-ins and also periodically had readings of Shakespeare plays using one of their meeting rooms (with some light acting and dueling with foam swords).
Also when my previous company closed their office space (before the pandemic), we used to sometimes meet at a meeting room at a library to conduct work meetings. We stopped doing that when the pandemic started.
If libraries didn't exist today or were removed even for an instant can you imagine someone arguing for their creation?
"I want to make a public space where people can go and take home media. All for free. Paid for by the government."
They would be laughed out of the room.
Libraries are the last remnant of a past society where people's needs were considered more important than corporate needs.
The traditional function of librarians and libraries remains to collect and disseminate knowledge.
The amount of critical knowledge disseminated in a society is critical to determine its quality, so there are the fullest grounds to propose the strict opposite of a «Who cares».
An assessment for reform can be proposed, but the problem is not solved with the current snapshot of technology use.