It's disappointing to see how they cannot see what it means for libgen to exist in the broader sense.
Books should be free for all, and we should encourage and educate people to donate back the value they received from them
Books should be free for all, and we should encourage and educate people to donate back the value they received from them
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
> In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
Most books that are in the public domain today (hence with no legal hindrances whatsoever) are still not meaningfully free or available to all. Copyright turns out to be simply a minor issue when viewed in a larger perspective; actually making works meaningfully available whenever this can be done free of legal issues is actually a lot more important. Note that this encompasses discovery and findability (e.g. through detailed cataloging) as well as practical access (e.g. through availability in a variety of open formats). It's a hard problem and one that's far from being comprehensively addressed.
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.
If it is not enough to live on, then only the independently wealthy can do art, which goes against the exact goal you stated.
Or alternately, millions of people will cease busy work which adds no value - and engage in genuinely productive tasks instead. Caring for their families, locally growing food, building collaboratively, teaching and learning form one another. We only reach for succour and addiction when dispirited and alienated. Graeber was far too conservative in his definition of bullshit jobs. The vast mass of us now work in the production of bureaucratic services so far removed from an actual good as to be incalculable. Our work is bullshit, or worse - actively destructive, and we know it.
Most people want more than this and will work for it. But accepting it as a form of sacrifice to achieve your other goals is hardly a problem -- and then people can create their art or start their own business with sweat equity before it generates any revenue etc.
Artists would then get the UBI and whatever they get in terms of patronage, donations, art sales, etc. Neither of which might be enough to live a middle class life on its own, but both together makes it happen. And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
And importantly, they continue to have their basics covered while they do that. Part of the reason most people end up stuck in bullshit jobs is trying for something better is too risky.
Also the idea that a significant UBI would lead to people just coasting seems patently false. Every bit of evidence shows that when given the opportunity the majority of individuals are driven to improve the quality of their lives; and also, that quality is measured in relative and not absolute terms.
[0]: https://monoskop.org
[1]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
[2]: https://computerhistory.org/collections/
[3]: https://oapen.org/
'Stealing' from a company with 2B in profit (much from publicly funded research), LibGen is looking a lot like Robin Hood to Elsevier's Prince John.
Publishers offer support and printing, but ultimately an author needs a publisher to spread reach (i won't say "make money", because authors sure won't make much). Becsuse it's all about being loud and publishers have resources to be loud. Much better odds compared to a grassroots community paying a fair price when the author is ready to release.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.
Not saying I agree or disagree one way or another, but that's really probably the reality.
The alternative would be to make a request for my university library to get the book, but I don't know how long that would take if it would happen at all.
Would the world be a better place if I stuck to studying only the books in local libraries and what I can personally afford? I personally don't think so.
Also long term, but it'd kill like, 5 birds with one stone.
Isn't that supposed to be the publisher's job? They don't. Just ask the authors.
Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
If books weren't sold for profit, we would have better books, only released less often. Back then, we didn't have so many yearly releases, and I honestly think that isn't needed.
Why would we have better books you say? Similar to how open source projects draw very good programmers. Some do it for prestige, and some weird ones do it for the joy o f doing true quality work. IMHO
you take a few interesting leaps in a failed attempt of.... trying to turn opinion into fact?
> the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate.
Uhhh, wot??
Please provide ANY source for this. Really. Like even if it's a blog you wrote and was a creative writing experiment for you, publish it. Just so I can mock you.
> (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
So at this point, I hope it's clear that you are a bit silly. But...
> For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience
This level of intellectual dishonest is horrible, especially if it's legitimate.
I'm sorry that I called you intellectually dishonest and you got mad, but it's the truth.
Most books make very very little income for the author. So it is already the case.
(In fairness that fee did nominally grant access to read other papers by them as well, but the credentials they sent out didn't let me log in and I didn't bother contacting them to resolve it)
Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.
Can you imagine what the automobile market would look like if you couldn't trade-in or sell your car and just had to trash it? New cars sales would plummet.
It's a tragedy of the commons. Not a commons of the product tho, of the ability to keep the creations flowing.
The real question is: are you willing to build a community around accepting it? Otherwise it's just numbers.
However the only thing I want from publishers is DRM-free e-books (same for music). If you offer a way for me to actually own the digital property I'm buying, I'm going to buy it. If you make it hard or impossible to transfer between my devices, or share with my wife and kids (i.e. how physical media works), you're not getting my money and I'll find another way to get the book.
yes certainly, thank your local library.. your country has them?
> we should encourage and educate people
yes certainly, but many people have had income from a book economy. Some certain books of great quality might increase in price. How can people wish for no-book economy so quickly?
Also, interesting username.