Hacker News Reader

>I sometimes dream of starting a company that does something similar to Google Books

There is a company that does this, but only for out-of-print Sci-Fi books, it's called Singularity & Co: http://savethescifi.com/

They vote for one out-of-print book each month, get the rights-holders permission (if applicable), digitize it and publish it as an ebook. It's great! Check out the list of current candidates: http://savethescifi.com/index.php/books

I likely can't start reading it for a few days

Is this really that big of a deal? If you haven't read it in the 20,000 days since it's been published, what does it matter if you have to wait a few more?

offering the book's original copyright-holder a deal to become their digital sublicencee

Yeah...good luck with that

> Is this really that big of a deal?

It is if I only had the barest whim to read the book in the first place. Of course I'll spend however long it takes to track something down if I'm absolutely sold on it. If I need to look at the book to decide whether I'm sold on it, though -- then being unable to do that means I stop caring.

As someone who did some theater in college, the same thing is happening to scripts. You can't really get a look at them without buying them off Dramatists Play Services or Samuel French. It's hard enough to get people interested in Theater without this kind of wall.

And yet, it is in the Google books database. And in some weird and twisted way, Googe is not allowed to give you access to it. So we have exactly the situation where the rights holder chooses 'no' revenue over 'some' revenue which is incredibly counter intuitive to me.

I bet the prospect of losing control screens off any prospect of money making.

It probably works the same way as in Hollywood. It takes enormous personal risk and responsibility to the "that guy" who decides how much to sell something for. It takes none at all to simply say no and "protect" the rights.

I suspect that in many organizations, it is quite literally impossible for anyone to authorize the assignment of limited rights for a cost because that much responsibility does not concentrate on any single individual. Even if it did, that person would be loath to take the risk of being "that guy who gave the rights away for pittance", when he could safely make no choice at all and "protect" the rights.

That's not how it works in Hollywood. If you're not sure then you just sell an option for a few thousand and give the other person a year or 18 months to pull a development deal together.What you're describing is the exception rather than the rule, in my experience.

The problem is finding the rightsholder and getting them to agree to a new contract, on a budget of less than a dollar. If you find a scalable solution to that, great. Google's solution was to just abrogate all the copyrights and see what happened... and what happened was a lawsuit, reminding Google that just because it would be inconvenient for them to negotiate contracts at scale did not mean they could accomplish a contract of adhesion by public notice.

It's even worse than the phrase "finding the rightsholder" would suggest. Most authors pass away without clearly designating a single literary heir, so the rights often get split among heirs, which is bad enough when it happens once, but by the time grandchildren start inheriting fractional rights, getting the legal ducks in a row is economically impossible.

Or maybe the rights end up in the hands of someone who is happy to see the work lost forever. Authors themselves are sometimes happy to help their old work get lost forever.

Your business plan for the Google Books-alike is pretty much what Google did. They scanned in-copyright books as well as public domain ones and offered to become a storefront for them, if you recall (it didn't turn out so well, alas, I would far rather it had).

Honestly, if your interest in a book is so little that you can't be bothered to even remember the title or wait three days for it to arrive from Amazon, why are you even bothering to read it? It sounds like these recommendations don't actually carry much weight. And if you do value highly a friend's recommendation, is a few bucks and a few days really such a high toll? Really, your objections don't seem add up to much if, as you say, you are actually interested in these books.

There are ways to get the books cheaply and quite quickly, just not instantaneously. If you require everything to be delivered to you instantaneously and must abandon everything that cannot be, then I don't know what to tell you.

>Your business plan for the Google Books-alike is pretty much what Google did. They scanned in-copyright books as well as public domain ones and offered to become a storefront for them, if you recall (it didn't turn out so well, alas, I would far rather it had).

The publishers might have responded differently if the creator wasn't Google.

"Google" Books is an existential threat to them. Somebody "not google" books is less so.

The world is not binary; there is a large space of interest between "recommendation from a friend I trust" and "no interest at all." The usual position in that space is "recommendation from an article on HN with uncertain providence." HN recommends the article; the article's author recommends the book; does this mean HN recommends the book? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The best answer is "read a bit of it to find out." If I can't do that, I'll assume no.

I might be able to order it from Amazon/eBay, but that's a high toll for something that I'm not sure has any value at all yet

Realistically, it's probably available for $1 + shipping. Really, how hard is your life that you might need to wait a couple of days to receive a book in the mail or go looking for it in a used bookstore? I'm no fan of the current copyright regime, but complaining that it's not worth even trying if you can't find it as an e-book comes off as lazy.

I upvoted your comment because I agree completely with the core of what you're saying.

On the other hand, overseas customers, like myself, pay a much higher shipping rate for used books purchased from third-party sellers.

If I buy a little out-of-print paperback from an Amazon Marketplace seller, I will pay the listed price, plus $16.95 for shipping. If the weight of the book is over 1lb, then I'll be paying $23.95 for a single book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_2...

It used to be a single rate, $13-something. Before that, it was $11-something. I can remember it being $9-something not many years back.

That hasn't stopped me from buying used books from Amazon altogether, but it has made real impulse, curiosity-driven buys less frequent.

Ah, I assumed you were in the US. I've actually bought some more second hand books from Amazon because it's now typically $3.99 for the handling and that includes the seller's profit - the book itself may cost as little as 1c.

That said I still prefer haunting second hand bookstores, which are far more fun that browsing online. I'll sometimes spend a year or two looking for a book even though I know I could find and order it in a 2 minutes on Amazon...but there's no satisfaction in doing so, whereas finding a book through diligent searching is enormously rewarding.

Then you aren't being terribly intelligent about finding said books then.

There's this thing called Interlibrary loan. That free technique can get you a book for free for a period of time... enough for -you- to scan it and do as you see fit.

Of course, if it ends up pirate bay, oh well. Its not like some rights holder is going to starve because an out of print book is pirated.

If you get caught and don't accept the reasonable plea bargain though, you may spend a decade or two in jail. You should factor that in your risk assessment somewhere.

That should be bloody simple for anyone here to avoid.

  1. Run TOR
  2. Use a proxy server in opposition to the country you are in.
  3. Use public wifi
  4. Use a dead-drop
  5. Use Mega or MediaFire
  6. Find random anonymous FTP
  7. Overseas VPS

If you get caught, you were being stupid. Anybody here worth their salt would know about most of these methods above, along with how to implement them.

All good points. But this is now a significant barrier to just casually checking out a book. The OP was fretting about ordering the book on Amazon because they "can't start reading it for a few days".

Suggesting he get the book via interlibrary loan and then OCR'ing it themself would surely take longer than Amazon delivering it. And then I still maintain that distributing it illegally over Pirate Bay is risky. Yes, you can take a few good security steps. But all they'd need is the public library assistant to notice you are uploading to Pirate Bay or something. Yes you can take steps, but this is already way beyond a casual look through the book.