Z-Library to let users share physical books
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Allowing out of print, difficult to get books to be lent or shared freely means that you can't reprint them to turn the money machine back on, or try to modernize them. It's the age of books as "IP" instead of books.
If an obscure out of print book costs $500, because (my hypothesis is) it is priced for the single most desperate buyer in the world, then the market for used books no longer has any relationship to my life or needs.
On the other hand, if there are only a dozen people who would buy it at say $5 then it's not in anyone's interest to reprint it. And if someone did reprint it but didn't do the labor intensive part of editing the scan, it would hardly be worth it - so I'm sure even free isn't cheap.
So, I mean, I will do without. Just like I did without Napster back in the day. But people should ask themselves if this is the dystopia we want, and who is serving who. If the Patent and Copyright Clause verbiage in the US Constitution meant what it said, and if markets serve society too.
"How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon"
Now I absolutely disagree. The primary thing keeping them from suing would have been the optics of the situation: Suing the local library or the small group trying to keep knowledge alive would look bad. That's less of a factor now, and suing the small guys in order to ram through judicial precedent they can wield like a cudgel later would be too tempting.
There's also a whole world of professional texts in law and other subjects which I've had to access by taking the £200 train down to London to physically sit in the British Library and read (and often, photograph). The more interesting the thing you're doing, the more likely it is that you'll need to venture to an actual library, often one of considerable age.
That's not even to mention the historical archives etc, indexes of which are held centrally but the materials are scattered all over.
Part of me dies inside when rare books like that become effectively dead due to loss. It sucks when the copyright holders would prefer that to letting the book be free, but what possible incentive could they have for freeing a book?
Free PR? :) That sounds like the sort of thing that would get a lot of attention and goodwill, and maybe even some new loyal customers.
The purpose of a library should be to give access to reading materials to everyone, and I think the reality is that the majority of people do want to read Harry Potter.
I think ultimately what we need is more funding for libraries so that they can get more books, which obviously include hard to find books. In any case, most libraries allow you to request books and they can get these from the network of other state/country libraries. And if they don't have a hard to find book, maybe you could consider donating it to them, libraries take very good care of their hard to find books.
Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users.
Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book.
Give an incentive based on both the number of requests and the speed of uploading the scan.
Could even allow requesters to set their own rewards. “I’d be willing to pay X to get this book scanned before Tuesday”.
Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement.
Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.
I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation.
For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid.
If we care about research, preservation of materials, having them available for future generations, then really, the sacred holy protection of copyright can take a hike when dealing with those texts.
I frequently have to get on planes and fly off to University special collections and sit in some special room where I can't bring in a camera and have to carefully read through something that can't be digitized because we're somehow not smart enough to see a difference between that and a Dan Brown novel you get at the grocery store.
Pisses me off. Holistically speaking, what the fuck are we doing? This stuff shouldn't be special and precious. We've had photography for over 180 years, this isn't some strange new phenomena here.
I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Imagine Google had asked copyright lawyers if they could build their search engine. Crawling other peoples websites, keeping an index of their content, and then make people come to Google because “that’s where all the content is“. Would have never gotten off the ground. But now that Google exists, and even the copyright lawyers use it, it’s obvious that this is legal.
Lawyers and politicians are followers, not leaders. And much of technology is about circumventing their yesterday-values.
What did Peter Thiel say about the Internet? The world of atoms was over-regulated. So businesses fled into the world of bits. It’s a cat and mouse game. Whatever you do, better make sure you’re the cat.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
Absolutely. Break them and support the people who facilitate the disobedience. Fuck the copyright lobby, fuck publishers, and fuck anyone who gets in the way of me reading what I want in whatever form I want.
The people who are preventing you from reading what you want in the form you want it are not protecting some sacred system of authorship reward. They have no ethos. They are simply protecting the interest of their masters, for pay.
We absolutely do. I'm for much shorter terms, e.g. 14 years, the original term in the US.
But I would be willing to correct for changes in life expectancy since 1790. I haven't run the math, but I suspect it would be 20-25 years, discounting infant mortality. This is a far more sensible figure than "authors death + any ridiculous number". (I do sell books I wrote with my copyright, so I'm not completely unaware of the needs of authors.)
That said, I do want the same copyright protections for the wimpy kid and Dan Brown, because the alternative--differentiating copyrightable material or charging to make it--is am undesirable alternative to shorter terms.
> I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
Amen to that.
I'd like to recommend a book to you:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97804293414...
Sadly it isn't the lawyers who should attract your ire. It is the legislators and the people who fund them.
The cost and delay of shipping are what drives many people to piracy in the first place, I would argue. If I can have a book for $5 in two days as a used physical copy from Amazon, for $20 now as ebook from the publisher, or for free right now from a piracy site, the choice is obvious.
Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner.
Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.
For text that is sufficient. If you want to capture the layout also, or graphics, things get much more complicated. Even just getting headings requires post processing. So yeah, proper ebook vs just extracting the text are two different problems.
It occurs to me that a place where scans and first-pass OCRs of this stuff are shared with the intention of version controlling the resultant epub would be handy, such that small PRs could be applied cumulatively and the result be versioned (and therefore referenced). That's considerable work and legal risk, though.
There's a bit of friction though. It could be much simpler.
But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ?
Digital has lots of advantages. You can have it with you at all times on your phone. You can use text to speech. You can export your highlights. Soon, people are going to want to ask ChatGPT about content from books they read, as well as highlights and comments they added.
A physical copy is the worst format that I would personally consider buying. I only do that when I cannot get a digital version. And the first thing I do once I get it is that I cut off the spine and run it through my scanner.
(Then, I spend hours researching the internet for a good e-ink reader :-D)
For my e-ink tablet/reader, I use an onyx boox and a kobo.
To give those complaining about copyright the $$$ they're after?
Who are "they" that you are giving orders? What difficulties have you found with scanning books that "they" could solve for you? Since you write "just" it must be quite easy? What incentives have you provided for people to scan books?
My wife has constructed, and contributed to, a few of these. I see them around town, even in residential areas; and, as you say, there is almost no vandalism or abuse.
https://nothingintherulebook.com/2019/11/15/listen-to-the-pe...
From a beautiful idea in 2009 to these terrible ideas now. :-(
Has this ever worked out? By "this" I mean some online entity that's only or mostly involved in less than legal activities saying they're going to launch some massive real-world project? I feel like it's less a way to accomplish something in the real world or even to generate press attention, but actually just self-fueling hype. The non-legal project is manned by mostly unpaid activists, who are motivated by a shared philosophy, which must be driven by willpower. That will to continue on is bolstered by hype, and these announcements are a way to self-generate hype.
Like the old e-tree where they would send someone a CD, they’d make a copy and send it on to the next person.
Never actually used it because by the time I got into the jam bands I already had good enough internets to just download stuff but it was still operational circa 1999 — guessing for folks without broadband.
You get your own personal domain/subdomain of zlibrary after logging in
On the connected question of why human societies accelerated their development over time (recently posted on HN) a couple of comments are pertinent (see [0] and [1]).
If one values the continued acceleration of human development (in all its expanding pluralities) then there is a strong case for something like Z-lib to exist for a lot of factual or science-generated information being available for everyone. For such texts, I would guess that what the library contains could lag behind the commercial publication front by 5-10 years without appreciable profit loss to the publishing companies, nor significant losses to the estates of individuals who created them. And taking away some of their back catalogue might actually reduce publishers' running costs... (Ask: Can anyone else on HN put hard numbers to this?)
The debate seems similar to the one regarding taxation vs. inflation rate rises. Governments are currently choosing to raise inflation rates because that doesn't impede trade flows as much as some potential friction coming from moving money through a government bureaucracy for some cause. The particular cause matters, but the choice is about efficiency in essence. The same with Z-lib, as I see it. A Z-lib type free digital library could raise global efficiency in all sorts of areas, but the argument will only pass if various forms of extortive-because-looking-very-obsolete-now old capitalist inefficiences can be demonstrated to be such. Lots of publishing companies are probably holding on to old titles that for them are already digital landfill in their archives. Maybe they just need to see that clearly.
The other catch is that the "for everyone" phrase implies a representative global stakeholder is needed for it to "get legal". UN.org/z-lib anyone?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493797 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495511
Not that there's much the publishing industry could do about it if they wanted to. Apart from leaning stronger into ebooks, where people can't do this. But as it stands that'd mean giving Amazon even more power and money.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/169314-the-justar-journal
The issue is that the relationship is asymmetric. Even though publishers make good money from libraries, libraries need publishers more than publishers need them right now. IMO, libraries need to continue to move beyond being only thought of as places to read the latest NYT best seller list for free.
Libraries typically have a limited length you can keep the books before you must return them. If you really like the book then you will want to buy it.