I think you're seriously undervaluing what libraries as an institution provide both as one of the few public spaces where people can just be, without having to spend money to justify their presence, alongside being a resource to access knowledge, with people trained in the art of suggesting good or at the very least not terrible resources to start people's inquiry into subjects they aren't familiar with, as well as being a unified voice acting in the public interest, to retain and expand those same offerings.

At least in the US, libraries are a major resource for homeless people, children without access to computers, etc. Libraries also serve a social/enrichment function in many communities.

I agree with the premise that ebooks can be a better experience than paper books, I don't agree that pirate libraries can replace, or even serve a similar purpose to physical libraries though.

You are absolutely right about the searchability aspect. I want a PDF copy of every book I read now (I still prefer to read actually the deadtree copies) so I can find something again later.

But until we can demonstrate that digital libraries can preserve works themselves and access to them for hundreds/thousands of years, I would hesitate to suggest that libraries should be left to die on the vine.

This reads like that awful take a few years ago that libraries need to be replaced by private bookstores. Like the author of that, I don’t think you are familiar with the role that libraries play in their local community and probably should not prescribing a technocratic solution on an institution that you fundamentally do not understand.

Awful take dude, you don't realize that libraries are currenty on the front lines of America's problems where in a alternative universe, the nation should have done the job not to mention that libraries are under attack by mostly all fronts (governments, politicians, publishers, copyright cartel, right wing zealots just to name a few).

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/18/libraries-ebooks-hoopla-lib... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474151

You do realize that most people still borrow physical books, right?

> A pirate can run a local LLM for natural-language queries, and find a semantic needle in a thousand-page haystack; or select a dozen excerpts and present them side-by-side for immediate comparison. How can the clunky system of DRM-locked lending e-book readers compete? Near-future. A personal LLM could track a researcher's progress page by page, and pro-actively recommend reading suggestions for an individual chapter from an individual book from a million-volume library—and instantly display it, highlighting special lines, glossing words, annotating jargon, hyperlinking (other) books, writing explanations in the marginalia, translating languages. Transformative creations. What's the poor schmuck stuck in Andrew Carnegie's library doing?

Almost all these capabilities exist. Yet we do not have pirate libraries doing this. I will not simply assume they will happen if/when libraries disappear.

At the moment, the library offers more utility than these pirate libraries. Perhaps not more features, but definitely more utility.

> I think it's fine if libraries die out.

Honey, a new copypasta just dropped! This made me laugh almost as much as the first time I read the navy seal 'nothing personnel, kid' copypasta. Amazing.

I genuinely cannot tell if this is sincere or satire (a hallmark of satire!). It's peak HN. I don't know what's funnier, this being sincere or it being a well crafted satire of the utterly insane beliefs of the deeply out-of-touch rand apologists (who genuinely don't seem to be aware that other people experience the world differently than them) that plague the tech industries. Beautiful.