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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sale was great while we had it, but digital makes it obsolete? When you die, screw donating your collection of “licenses” to somewhere productive; those contracts died with you? Everything is streaming, so you never purchased anything anyway?

It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.

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I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them to. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.

As society's repositories of knowledge, I feel like AI should fall under libraries. Especially considering how AI utilizes others knowledge/text they don't legally have rights to. The carveout we made slightly similar (in that they have special rules for their use) is for libraries.

An 8-bay Synology costs about $1000. It'll hold an eighth of a petabyte pretty comfortably (with sufficient redundancy). It's bizarre and disturbing to me how few of you seem to be interested in having your own libraries, even though technology has finally delivered that ability to you. You'll come on here once every 3 months and whine about how we have to do more for public libraries, even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts, and you don't even want libraries for yourselves.

The "library" is dying for the same reason the newspaper (and the book!) is dying. Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds.

I don't need a carveout. Some large fraction of my internet bandwidth is downloading books and whatnot off of Libgen and Anna's.

The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.

This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.

> price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices...doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.

Absolutely. To get 1/8 PB = 125 TB home library "easily":

We'll use 8 disks in the 125TB library. Between RAID 5 (1 disk lost OK to recover) vs RAID 6 (2 disks lost OK to recover), choose RAID 6 (our disks could fail at same time if of similar production or unlucky). RAID6 means 25% of space used for parity overhead, and 2-5% used for metadata/filesystem.

So looking for about 163TB. 163TB / 8 rounds to 21 TB. This pushes us above 16TB disks. Between 20TB and 22TB, choose 22Tb to feel safe.

Napkin math:

  Synology 8-bay DS: $1150 (Amazon price)

  8x 22TB Seagate 22TB external 3.5" = 8 x $390 = $3120 (also the #1 least expensive disk per TB for 3.5" external at https://diskprices.co currently)

So we're at $1150+$3120 = $4270 for one library.

But something cvan happen to that. Fall, fire, water, theft, party. We could lose everything.

So following 3-2-1 we'll have 3 copies, on 2 media, with one offsite.

Copy 2 can be same as first (RAID is for disk redundancy not backup -- we still have one copy only).

By now, 2x Synology 8-bays, plus 16x 22TB disks, puts us at $8540 for what we can keep at home.

But disks only really last about 5 years. They're getting kinda better, but in reality those disks can fail and should be replaced about every 5 years, some people get 10.

So every 5 years, we can want to shell ou;t about $8540. But wait, disks about doubled in the past year. Maybe it'll be $16,000 next time? Hard to say.

We still need a 3rd, off-site copy for 3-2-1. Recent reports indicated Backblaze silently lost data, some people exodused I believe. To where? IDK, but let's pick Amazon Glacier deep storage. At 125TB (just useful data), at $0.00099/GB/mo, that puts it at, over the same 5 years: $0.00099/GB/mo * 125000 GB * 12mo * 5yr = $7,425/5yr

(For the remote copy: can your ISP actually handle uploading 125TB? How long does that take to do once, even half? Is ISP transfer capped? Will 3rd party storage provider change prices or lose data? That's why we have 3 copies, maybe change providers when needed.

In any case, add it on 3-2-1 for 125TB would cost, at the easiest/cheapest: $4270 * 2 + $7,425 = 4270+7425 = $15,965, good for about 5 years.

So, every 5 years, spending $15,965.

At these volumes, are do even have ECC RAM? Are we scanning for and correcting errors with correct data when they occur? We don't want a hobby, we want an appliance, for this library, often especially if we work 99% of the time in tech and have life to live, quite likely.

Let's try another formula: on a shoestring and a hope, one could do it "cheap on RAID 5 (only 12.5% lost to parity and metadata/filesystem) and under-storage without 3-2-1" by going Synology 8-bay ($1150, Amazon) + 8 * 16TB (8 * $410 per https://diskprices.co = $3280) = $1150 + $3280 = $4430

---

  In grand summary, roughly every 5 years:

  Done "right": $15,965
  Done "cheap": $4,430 and only 112TB usable.

You know what, 112TB starts to feel like not that much, when we look at the size of some of the libraries out there.

Averaged over 5 years (though it's not) these are:

  - Right: $15,965 / 5yr = about $3,200/yr (plus tax) for 125TB usable library
  - Cheap: $4,430 / 5yr = $886/yr (plus tax) for 112TB usable library

If a techie makes $150K, that's about 0.6%-2% of income, if we forget taxes (sales or income) entirely.

Maybe doable. But it's like owning another car in more ways than one (cost, maintenance/ongoing-care). Some individuals can swing it without even thinking. Most can't.

IMO, if the AI industry or any players would like us to become more computer centric, and make use of all the data that tech now lets us have, its constituents should do something (anything) to drive the cost of disks DOWN, not UP.

> But it's like owning another car

Well, yes, but it is in fact owning a copy of approximately 10% of all human knowledge ever produced. Someone doing this is clearly doing it for reasons other than personal consumption.

The same argument could be made about any public service. Certainly, if libraries were funded to the tune of $1000 for every household, they would be very different places.

> even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts

And, of course you know this to be objectively true and hence can produce a valid source for your claim?

Libraries serve a lot purpose than you are giving credit for.

Libraries are a general facility for the public, they offer the standard books and other rental type arrangements although they are so much more than that!

- Access to computers

- Access to internet

- Access to printing

- Access to 3D Printing

- Access to Meeting rooms

- Access to Mental Health Services

- Access to Archive Rooms (newspapers, seed archives, etc).

They serve as a repository for everything physical. Most libraries have archive rooms with various artifacts from the region, including newspapers, publications, recordings, etc. Most of this stuff isn't available online.

Visit a library near a University or School and it becomes packed full of students researching and studying, even if most aren't accessing the books, the rooms, desk and facilities themselves are important.

Not everyone is willing to pirate books, willing to setup Synology devices, etc. A library grants an official place to access things in a legal way, easily (and for free!) among many other things.

>Not everyone is willing to pirate books,

Practically no one is willing to do it. They'd have to be interested in books first. And no one is. Not only is "books" not the first thing in your list, it's not even the last thing. Books might have once been seen as luxuries, and the idea of a lending library allowed those in poverty to get a taste of wealth, so to speak... but they get dumped into landfills by the truckload today and can be had for pennies (or fractions of pennies, actually). So you don't want them anymore.

It's bizarre that it hurts you so much to tell a truth about you which couldn't be more plainly obvious. You don't like books. The book publishing industry is literally dying, that's how little you like books.

>A library grants an official place to access things in a legal way, e

But none of you want to access them. You just like the idea that, if somehow you suddenly did want a book, that you'd be able to go get one for free, effortlessly. Because even if you did want a book, you sure as hell wouldn't want one badly enough to expend an iota of effort to obtain one.

Books might have once been seen as luxuries, and the idea of a lending library allowed those in poverty to get a taste of wealth, so to speak... but they get dumped into landfills by the truckload today and can be had for pennies (or fractions of pennies, actually).

Well those ones might be, but the ones I want sure aren't. I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending. The library is pretty helpful (reservation fees are more than I'd like, but a lot less than buying); some years I draw a couple of hundred books. But a lot of them I end up buying. Got one in my hand that was just delivered minutes ago (the new partial biography of Jobs about his years outside Apple).

I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist. I do spent a lot on books. I borrow a lot from the library. Your assertions come across very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error. But I assure you, when I'm in the bookstore I'm definitely not the only person there. Between us we appear to be propping up entire publishing industries. Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital (1); if we weren't here there would be nothing for you to pirate!

[1] According to https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/books-ma... "Print remains dominant, accounting for 78% of consumer market revenue"

> I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending.

I sympathize, but do it smarter. I downloaded 500 or so last week, and it was a slow week. Mostly I mine Hacker News and /pol/ (it's actually only half as bad as reddit once you ignore Mein Kampf) for recommendations... but ran a little short on those. Coming up with new titles to procure is tough.

>I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist.

I know! There are half-dozens of you out there! And I know I struck a nerve, because HN hates "my anecdote counters your intended generalization" except when you have to examine hard truths about yourselves.

>very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error.

A rounding error on a rounding error.

>Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital

Physical sales are dead. If you listen to anyone who writes and has written for the last 20 years or more, you'll hear all sorts of heartache stories about what sales are like now compared to back before it all fell apart. It's dead. And it's never coming back. Your grandchildren, if you have any, won't even know how to open a book.

Physical sales are dead.

Well, 80% of sales are physical rather than digital. In what way is that dead?

The evidence indicates that you are incorrect, and while I appreciate your passion, if I must choose between you and reality, reality wins.

And you'll have your nice library and can read whenever you want from the comfort of your own home, and while most people will pirate shit libraries can be great for making things accessible without a $60/month mobile charge, especially when people can't afford shelter.

> Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds.

Its funny to me how the people who so readily declare certainty about the future constantly demonstrate their utter ignorance of the human spirit. Whats the whole basis for this country again?

> They don't share much

Why not?

it's gotten scary out there for purveyors of truth and knowledge. book burnings, banning, retributive use of the judicial system, etc..

Most libraries are currently operating under "the donors don't know how they're being used" if you get the drift - checkouts of actual books are way, way down, the vast majority of checkouts are videos, etc; many library users are just using the computers or using it as a study/work/play area.

This may or may not apply to university libraries, but many of the public libraries around here are morphing into indoor playgrounds.

> many of the public libraries around here are morphing into indoor playgrounds.

If this is said as a negative thing, maybe we could mitigate it by having more free, publicly accessible third spaces. Or accept that libraries can also serve that purpose: as a place for community members to gather as well as the other services they provide.

It’s not a bad thing at all, and I think libraries do need to evolve, even if in sad that they’re doing so.

I’d rather see their money go to robust inter-library loan setups and children’s sections than spending it all on overpriced e-loan junk.

The format mainly, I think. Due to loss of a grant and poor market conditions we have shifted our annual meeting with the board to a virtual format. Which gives me less informal time for discussions.

Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Physical vs. digital is a red herring. It’s about access to copyrighted works. The benefit to authors/publishers comes with a benefit to the public. We’ve lost the latter.

Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.

But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.

can I donate my ebook to them?

They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.

The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.

Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is.

A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?

The difference it's that in the physical case the choice is up to the library, in the other it's forced upon them by the publisher.

They sell them at the end of their life, sometimes, so you recoup a bit of the cost there. And you can also get books donated which reduces the up front cost.

I don't see a good way to do that for digital copies, and of course the expiry would be wholly artificial scarcity for them even if it was only a little bit more expensive than physical.

It really comes back to IP law. In the past, the idea was you own the content for 20-30 years and then after that... It is owned by all of society.

Digital content is a great example of why we should fight back for old IP timelines.

Without it, we stagnate as a society. Our stories don't evolve, they just rot on the vine.

> Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality?

The main difference I see is the centralisation of censorship vectors. Pulling physical books off library shelves is visible and rightfully prompts a shitshow. Bullying a publisher into not renewing lending licenses strikes me as way easier to pull off.

I think the practical difference is that the rates that publishers charge libraries for ebooks are significantly higher than what either consumers pay for the ebook or what a physical book costs. See https://archive.is/Ha3VQ for one example:

> To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)

One complication with e-books and e-audiobooks (as opposed to on CD) is that since you do NOT have to go in to "get" the book there's really no penalty for putting yourself on the waiting list, and it's long, and I've "checked out" more than one e-book that I never read (it had to be "returned" before I could begin).

1) library has control of the decision-making; 2) they can resell or donate the book when it's exhausted its shelf-life

The difference is that the books value, even reprints, become lower over time. Until they hit a minimum margin for the construction of said book.

Digital books/content requires little to no cost to replicate, unlike printing new books. But we have seen that the price of that content follows the "physical goods" model. Why should a 30-40 year old movie cost you $20 to steam?

My library was recently asking for donations and they said the reason is more people are loaning out digital books which are significantly more expensive. I don't recall the details on the flyer though.

>just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.

Any digital asset that's on a hard drive I own, in my own home, is more owned than any most other kinds of properties that there are. The government may not protect my ownership of it, but the government doesn't even know about it... nor does anyone else.

People who are truly worried about this issue shouldn't sit around whining that they don't own their digital purchases, they should instead go out and own everything, whether they purchase it or not.

What made libraries not work is that you stopped wanting to own things. With no one wanting to own things, people and the governments stopped worrying about whether anyone could. And once they stopped doing that, libraries too found out they couldn't own anything either. Without meaning to, maybe, you all did this.

Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...

We need to create libraries like Anna's Archive that are impossible to take down.

Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.

This right here is why I either (1) still buy physical media [my preference], or (2) make sure all digital media I purchased is DRM free. With my physical media, I digitize it, then store the media for any future use.

I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.

> It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.

You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.

That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-

That's a shitty kind of a deal. There are other options, e.g. Greg Egan sells his books on SmashWords - you get full text of the book (epub) via email, no DRM, most money goes directly to the author. Getting unencumbered full text is much better - you can use it with TTS read of your choice, search, summarize, whatever you want.

So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers

It’s crazier to me that a number of Anthropic managers and executives aren’t in prison.

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