[HN Gopher] 3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror
___________________________________________________________________
3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror
Author : pilimi_anna
Score : 385 points
Date : 2022-09-25 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annas-blog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (annas-blog.org)
| synergy20 wrote:
| the technical book writing no longer makes financial sense to me
| these days, unless you wrote them to become well known domain
| expert and possibly get more leads for future profit, and you
| don't care about how much you can make directly from the books
| sale.
|
| I think a viable approach is: 1. publish your
| book in e-format, it will be pirated but only those who paid will
| get continuous update such as new contents added, errata fixes
| etc easily and regularly. 2. offer a print-on-demand
| service for those who prefers to have a printed version. 3.
| offer a pay-me-later link to those who read it without pay(e.g.
| pirated version), later realize your writing indeed helped them
| so much to the point they want to "tip" you for a sense of
| rightness.
| randomcatuser wrote:
| This reminds me of serialized novels (new content every
| month?). Maybe that'll be the way, in the future!
| poofmagicdragon wrote:
| Main site: http://pilimi.org/
|
| Torrents can be obtained via their onion site:
| http://2urmf2mk2dhmz4km522u4yfy2ynbzkbejf2cvmpcbzhpffvcuksrz...
| (requires Tor to follow link)
|
| Using onion.ws proxy:
| http://2urmf2mk2dhmz4km522u4yfy2ynbzkbejf2cvmpcbzhpffvcuksrz...
| (doesn't require Tor)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I wonder why these services don't generate vanity TOR domains.
| I can generate about 21 TOR addresses beginning with "zlib" per
| second and it would make bookmarks so much more recognisable if
| they weren't completely random.
|
| I know relying on names to recognise onion addresses is unsafe,
| but so is following random links. Why not add at least a little
| recognisability to the official URL?
| mmastrac wrote:
| How does one actually download this many torrent files? It
| feels quite difficult to do.
| mike_d wrote:
| Many Linux command line torrent clients can be told to load
| "*.torrent"
| [deleted]
| yaddaor wrote:
| That's just about 80. Any client can handle that. Use a watch
| directory or a client that allows to add *.torrent or drag
| them all to a GUI and hold down Enter or sumthin ;-)
| SSLy wrote:
| qBittorrent can handle at least 1500 torrents fine, try that.
| Source? My desktop instance seeding right now.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| If you're going to participate in this, please buy books and
| encourage others to do the same.
| joak wrote:
| I understand that books needs to be financed but why should we
| deprive the poorest from accessing culture knowing that marginal
| cost of ebooks is zero.
|
| We should incentivize reading books not making it harder or more
| expensive.
|
| - E-books should be free and of easy access.
|
| - Writers and editors should be paid according to the popularity
| of their work.
|
| The proposals are not incompatible.
| googlryas wrote:
| They are incompatible as long as a majority of people think
| their appropriate contribution to authors is $0
| daptaq wrote:
| Can you elaborate? E.g.,
|
| > - Writers and editors should be paid according to the
| popularity of their work.
|
| By whom?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Not OP, but their suggestions, ebooks free AND paid according
| to the popularity, are already implemented and working
| excellently on royalroad. All stories on royalroad are free
| and some popular authors make over $10000 a month from
| patreon donations.
| dudul wrote:
| Where would the money come from? Who would decide how popular a
| book is? I agree that in theory these are not incompatible
| statements, but I fail to see a practical way to make it work.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > E-books should be free and of easy access.
|
| They are, via public libraries.
|
| I have two free library memberships, one offered to all
| residents of the state and the other from my town.
|
| Combined, they grant me access to another DOZEN libraries in my
| state.
|
| I have free access to a huge swath of the O'Reilly catalog with
| loan periods of 14 days, sometimes longer, available.
|
| I've rarely waited more than a week or two to read award-
| winning fiction novels.
|
| I can borrow the majority of popular magazines, ranging from
| junky to The Economist and New Yorker.
|
| I get free access to the NY Times.
|
| I get free access to a bunch of science journals.
|
| I get free access to Lynda (now Linkedin Learning.)
|
| I get free access to legal boilerplates.
|
| The list goes on.
| jani565 wrote:
| jani565 wrote:
| googlryas wrote:
| I wonder how many people who support piracy ever did anything in
| their lives worth pirating?
| melvyn2 wrote:
| so are they going to contribute them back to libgen?
| mohamez wrote:
| There exist at least on entity that will bulk upload them to
| Libgen.
| throwaway3b03 wrote:
| Interestingly enough, there are a lot of books on archive.org
| that are not on LibGen, usually high quality scans. That's
| another source that should be mirrored, given the legal trouble
| surrounding archive.
| mhb wrote:
| _We 're not doing this for money, but we would love to quit our
| jobs in finance and tech, and work on this full time._
|
| Are they actually being paid for work in finance and tech? Can
| that be open sourced? In the name of ethical purity, will they
| only be accepting funds from work that is arranging physical
| objects like laying bricks, plumbing, carpentry, etc.?
| svnpenn wrote:
| Next time you want to argue in bad faith, maybe don't be so
| blatant about it?
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
| mhb wrote:
| Yeah. I don't think so. They want the information that others
| have created to be free - whee... But they're 1) being paid
| for their non-physical, presumably proprietary, creative
| efforts and 2) think people should pay them (but I guess not
| from funds derived based on the protection of IP) so they can
| pursue some different intellectual pursuit.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's actually the "Tu Quoque" fallacy (or the hypocrisy
| fallacy).
|
| But it is ironic, at least, that the organization is asking
| for money ...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| digitalengineer wrote:
| For the lazy, this is a blog article. As they say themselves: "
| We only host our own words here. No torrents or other copyrighted
| files are hosted or linked here. If you want to access the Pirate
| Library Mirror, you'll have to find it yourself".
| ur-whale wrote:
| How hard is it to type "library genesis" in Google?
| swarnie wrote:
| Are you arguing against the use of links? Have we really gone
| that far?
| breck wrote:
| It's too bad they are only accepting donations in BTC, and not
| NEAR coin as well.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Lol NEAR coin???
| breck wrote:
| Yes is it bad? What's wrong with it? I'm sort of a crypto
| Noob but have been really enjoying it.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| While this effort is hugely appreciated someone needs to make an
| open source alternative to Zlibrary where books can be freely
| searched without rate limitation. Right now I don't know how to
| even download and sort through 31TB of this data.
| visarga wrote:
| Should be added to the LAION dataset. They already have lots of
| books.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| The first torrent has a 2gb SQL database called index
| usefulinfo wrote:
| yaddaor wrote:
| Why is this not distributed in a more private (onion routed, I2P,
| retroshare,...) way and in a way that can automatically sync?
| milkoolong wrote:
| The same way many empires fell to obsoletion were their inability
| or lack of foresight to adapt from Blockbuster to Borders to Toys
| R Us. Music streaming and Cable TV too.
|
| Authors should shift to paid newsletters and drip content over
| time. Imagine a book with 250 pages would keep your subscription
| going for a year or two while you work on the next. And once
| you're about ready to launch the next book, you can compile the
| "old" content to physical book for a flash sale. Ofc lack of
| distribution channel and exposure might hurt sales. OTOH, you'd
| likely see more profit than publishing it whole unless there's a
| marketing / branding / political advantage.
| dageshi wrote:
| Your model exists, it's called royalroad.com coupled with
| patreon and kindle unlimited. But it's fairly genre specific to
| Fantasy.
|
| But, it's not a model that really supports high standards, you
| get typo's, grammar errors, bad prose and quite a lot of filler
| pages due to the pressure of maintaining the 5 x 1500+ words
| per week many of the most popular authors work too.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| It's not specific to rrl, it's pretty much what webnovels are
| - it's the same at the other platforms too. And there are
| also some really successful writers that just do it on their
| own pages.
|
| There is also another source of revenue for them you've
| omitted: Amazon unlimited.
|
| But besides that I think you're overstating the quality
| issues. Most successful webnovel authors write really well
| and have proofreaders before the chapters get released to the
| general public. Sure, there are extremely bad works too, but
| they're not really getting money either.
| dageshi wrote:
| Is Amazon unlimited different to Kindle unlimited? Because
| I did mention that.
|
| In terms of typo's, one of the biggest on RR is Defiance of
| the Fall which has its fair share.
|
| I should be clear, I frankly don't care about typo's or
| grammar and have about 15 active follows on RR, but it is a
| major criticism I've seen from other readers who have a
| harder time tolerating such things. The thing I do have an
| issue is that often stories are stretched out with tedious
| filler content because the web serial model relies on
| regular updates to work, even if the author is stuck or has
| nothing meaningful to say in order to move the story on.
|
| That being said, I still expect this model to significantly
| eat into the traditional fiction publishing model because
| it just has too many advantages for both the readers and
| the authors.
| screye wrote:
| The manga model ?
|
| I'm not sure I like that idea. The best books are edited over
| multiple times after completion.
|
| I like it as a way for the most hard-core fans to track a work
| in progress. But not weekly progress as canonical record of the
| book actually was.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Manga writers and artists often redraw or rewrite major
| portions even after initial online publication. For example,
| One Punch Man comes to mind which has many redrawn chapters
| published online before the artist puts it down on printed
| manga.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Always saddens me when people who take the >2000 year old concept
| of a library into the digital age have to do so in the shadows,
| oftentimes under threat of persecution.
|
| Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they
| please?
|
| Google Books was 90% there, I wish it would have been allowed to
| succeed.
| googlryas wrote:
| Because it frequently isn't knowledge that is being spread,
| it's a creative work.
|
| There's nothing intrinsic about Harry Potter that the world
| needs access to it. An encyclopedia would be a great thing to
| be freely available. But why would someone _need_ free access
| to Harry Potter?
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think a major advantage of these online libraries is that
| many books go out of print, and these archives are often the
| only way to read them. Some books on Permaculture come to
| mind...
| lkbm wrote:
| I was just trying to find "The Search for the Elements" by
| Asimov.
|
| It's annoying to me that obscure 1980s children's books from
| authors no one's heard to are out of print and hard to find,
| but here's a science history book by one of the most famous
| authors around, and it's out of print with no ebook ever
| published. I can buy a used trade paperback for $35, use
| OpenLibrary, or pirate a PDF.
| [deleted]
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Author here. One of my books was pirated and wide spread some
| time ago within the community I'm in. My income dropped almost
| immediately, I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month. Not
| motivated to write another book.
|
| The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my
| work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I
| hope you have a good answer.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _The question is - why should you have a right to spread
| _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the
| book. I hope you have a good answer._
|
| My answer to this is that authors (and other creatives)
| should have a right to recoup the costs (including time) of
| their efforts, but currently the time period for doing so is
| ridiculously (too) long.
|
| We're talking decades:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyrigh
| t...
|
| In the US, the original copyright term was 14 years, and if
| the author was alive after the end of that there was another
| (optional?) 14 year extension:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_t
| h...
|
| Later, the initial period was set to 28 years, with an
| optional 14 year extension.
|
| IMHO, if one couldn't make a go of one's work after 2+
| decades, then other people really should be allowed to have a
| kick at the can.
| mtmail wrote:
| Those are good arguments against the length of the
| copyright, but not copyright itself. I assume the author
| got their book pirated in short time (shorter than 14
| years) after release.
| yencabulator wrote:
| If copyright didn't always extend to cover all of Mickey
| Mouse's existence, would piracy be as popular?
| trasz wrote:
| Can you tell how much would you normally make on a book, ie
| what's the expected amount of money for those two years? I
| wonder if it could be made back by eg Patreon instead of
| traditional copyrights?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Probably you shouldn't write a book in this age if you are
| motivated by making a profit from book sales.
|
| Or you need to find a different business model other than
| revenue from sales. If you have an audience of a few thousand
| people, especially in a narrow professional field, you can
| monetize it.
|
| Book will help you to establish your authority. Then, you can
| use this authority to make profit. Sell courses, lections,
| offer consulting services, etc.
| gayn1gga wrote:
| prezjordan wrote:
| I think there's a distinction between vocational materials
| (your book is one I should absolutely have to pay for - which
| is why many places of work have an education budget) and
| literature. I don't quite know what, though.
| gizmo wrote:
| The flipside: why should people everywhere in the world be
| asked to give up a large portion of their discretionary
| income to get access to educational materials that can be
| reproduced at zero marginal cost? What is the loss to society
| as a whole when we make pointless time sinks like Netflix and
| social media free but college textbooks unaffordable to many?
|
| The internet allows us to give everybody on the planet access
| to world-class educational materials at practically no cost.
| This is so obviously a good thing for society as a whole that
| we should strive to see this future materialize. Yes, some
| authors will lose income, but society as a whole gains
| greatly when we fight artificial scarcity.
|
| For what it's worth, I think authors should get compensated
| by some other means, especially when they write great books.
| But artificial scarcity isn't the answer, it never is.
|
| (The current model is also unfair to authors because book
| sales follow a power-law curve where a handful of authors
| take practically all the winnings)
| novaRom wrote:
| There are many more examples of good things for society as
| a whole vs rights of minorities/individuals.
|
| But somehow it doesn't work as intended and the end result
| is poorer less developed society, tyranny, war, etc.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The only book you ever published is
| https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun/ which, according to the
| website, has 460 readers, despite being available for free.
|
| Not only are you not losing thousands dollars worth of sales
| a month right now, you also never were, even when it wasn't
| available for free.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| I would probably reply to your statements (that you believe
| are true), but first you have to learn how to be nice :)
| Plus, not only your communication is broken, but also your
| ability to make your way to final and correct conclusions.
| But don't worry, it's a common thing today, you're
| definitely not unique here
| stereolambda wrote:
| I would try by saying every author is a compiler (as in, a
| collector of sources). They use someone else's ideas, either
| as building blocks or as a subject. The rules for when and
| how the people down the chain should be compensated are
| arbitrary. For a long time it wasn't a problem anyone cared
| about in societies (the pre-copyright era), then we got sort
| of a "verbatim" standard, but we're seeing more and more how
| silly it always was with better tools of automatic
| rephrasing.
|
| Publishing books in the current model is like planting
| flowers in a public space, with seeds you've just taken from
| a bunch of other people's houses, and then requiring people
| who walk there or look at the flowers to pay you. I mean, we
| should be encouraging caring about the commons in some way.
| But the creators or copyright holders for cultural creations
| don't inherently have the power to dictate the schemes they
| like.
| shellami wrote:
| Given the choice, many people would rather get something
| for free rather than pay for it. Rather than simply
| admitting that there is something at least a little immoral
| about benefiting from someone else's work without paying
| for that work, they come up with elaborate
| rationalizations.
|
| There's a sort of virtue in embracing the intellectual
| honesty of saying that you took that work because you
| wanted it and had the means. Call it the Genghis Kahn
| justification.
|
| Even if the work is completely derivative, someone still
| put significant effort into compiling and organizing it.
| And their immorality of taking the work of others doesn't
| obviously justify the immorality of taking theirs.
| stereolambda wrote:
| The point is, it wasn't immoral of them to "take the work
| of others" to begin with. This is how culture works:
| mythology, classic stories like the Arthurian cycle,
| fables, lots of classic literature etc. came to be by
| just taking the stories and characters people liked and
| doing whatever the next artist wanted. (Today's
| equivalents are all owned by Disney, for example.) This
| is also how science and philosophy functioned for ages.
|
| The worldview holding the modern copyright system to be
| the moral reality _is_ the elaborate rationalization,
| ingrained into people by the interested parties. You can
| research the history of copyright law if you want.
|
| This is a separate issue from caring about compensating
| and nurturing the artists, which is often what people who
| are mindful about this stuff do. Just not necessarily
| inside the "traditional" framework.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Where did the original ideas come from, if every author is
| just compiling pre-existing ideas from other authors?
| stereolambda wrote:
| It isn't that there is no original work in using the
| existing sources. Just more stuff is, by necessity, re-
| used that created (otherwise people wouldn't understand
| you), and the exact boundary is arbitrary.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month._
|
| I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you
| never had it in the first place. The RIAA's members tried the
| same propaganda and it didn't work then either.
|
| I've published a few short stories and made $27.00. Like
| 99.999% of authors cannot live off of writing. It's like
| acting. If you include all the actors the average yearly
| salary is like $2,000. Some fields are just like that, and
| I'm not convinced that there's anyway to change that for
| either career. Nor am I convinced it should be. With
| programming I'm not paid for the work I've done, I'm paid for
| the work I continue doing. Why is writing supposed to be any
| different? Because publishers like it that way? They pay the
| author once, and get paid for 120 years?
|
| And honestly as an author my biggest issue isn't that I'm not
| making much money, it's that almost no one is reading my
| work. I didn't do it for the money. And if I could charge
| less than $1 on amazon, I would.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| "I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you
| never had it in the first place."
|
| That's a silly and obtuse take. By this logic you can never
| lose a job or source of income.
| synu wrote:
| What would it mean to lose a job or source of income you
| never had? I'm not sure I'm following but curious what
| you mean.
| lkbm wrote:
| This is obviously not the situation under discussion. The
| book wasn't released before he earned any money on it.
|
| He clearly states "My income dropped almost immediately",
| which makes it clean that he _was_ earning money from it,
| and that a specific event--the piracy--coincided with a
| drop of "$Xk worth of sales" per month.
|
| The analogy being drawn is to losing a job and
| consequently losing the income you would have earned from
| it. You've switched from "you never had that income" to
| "you never had that job".
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| No, the notion that you can lose something you never had
| is the silly obtuse take.
|
| It's like saying "I lost a Tesla because Elon Musk hasn't
| given me one." It's a pathos appeal by trying to paint
| the speaker as a victim to generate enough sympathy that
| you stop reasoning logically. Claiming to have lost money
| you never had is exactly as absurd when you eradicate the
| appeal to emotion embedded within it.
| absolutelynobo wrote:
| It's exactly what happens when someone who's experienced
| the "biweekly paycheck lifestyle" hits it big on a non-
| salaried income source and expects the music to keep
| going forever.
|
| YouTube videos that hit ~1M views famously rarely keep up
| the pace beyond a week or a month. Hard to find data, but
| what I've heard is that after a year or two, looking
| back, most popular videos get 75-85% of their views in
| their first month after release.
|
| Unless you have a contract to be regularly paid $X, or
| constantly put out new and engaging content, you really
| can't get mad when your income peaks and then nosedives.
| breck wrote:
| > The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my
| work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I
| hope you have a good answer.
|
| Oh interesting question. I could probably answer but need
| some information first. What % of revenue went to you and
| what % went to the people who printed the book, chopped the
| trees, made the pulp, delivered the books across the world,
| etc? My guess is probably 10-50% to you, and the rest to the
| others. Am I close? That's probably fair.
|
| Now, what % of your proceeds did you send to the creators of
| the letter "A", the letter "B", et cetera? Or did you use a
| different alphabet that you yourself created?
|
| Was the book written in American English? If so, what % of
| your revenue are you sending to the widows and orphans of
| American soldiers killed in the wars who died protecting our
| freedom, language, and values?
|
| Once I get those data points I can probably answer your
| question.
| mod wrote:
| I don't have an answer to your question, but how do you feel
| about traditional libraries sharing your work for free?
| cavalierfrix wrote:
| In your library example, the author is still paid by the
| library system for their work.
| josephcsible wrote:
| In both this and a traditional library, one person buys
| the book and then a bunch of people read it for free.
| What are you saying is the difference between those
| scenarios?
| suriyaG wrote:
| It is not possible for a single physical book to be read
| by hundreds of thousands of people, concurrently. an
| ebook enables this.
|
| I think a more apt example is, if the library started
| printing the books and giving it out themselves.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Most libraries have ebooks these days.
| ok_dad wrote:
| They're limited to a certain number of loans before the
| library has to buy another license, or a per-checkout
| fee. Physical books have about a 50 to 100 checkout
| lifetime and ebook licensing is similar.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Not the library I go to for ebooks.
| matwood wrote:
| There are quite a few different purchasing and lending
| models libraries use today. Outside of the big 4/5
| publishers, many publishers will sell ebooks to libraries
| using a sim use model (pay 1 subscription fee and
| checkout as many times as possible over the period), and
| some will even let the library buy in that model
| perpetually.
| aftbit wrote:
| Not once per person who reads the book though, only once
| per library, or more accurately, once per concurrent
| check out.
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| On an annually recurring license. So the taxpayer doesn't
| just buy hundreds of books no one asked for and will
| never read, he buys them ten times over.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| In what country do libraries work like that? Not in
| America. In America, libraries do not pay annual
| licensing fees for books. A book is purchased or
| otherwise acquired, and then lent out as many times as
| the library pleases. When the book wears out, the library
| may rebind it and continue lending it.
|
| This is covered by first sale doctrine. After the library
| owns that book it is _theirs_ and neither the author nor
| the publisher is entitled to anything when the book is
| lent.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > In what country do libraries work like that?
|
| I believe most former Commonwealth countries work like
| that.
|
| Here's the info for Canada:
|
| https://publiclendingright.ca/
|
| It's not a huge amount... minimum $50/book/year, maximum
| $4,500/book per year, but I suppose it's significant if
| you have, say, 20 books, each bringing in the maximum.
|
| It's a flat rate, though, not a per use charge.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Damn, I'm glad the American library system isn't held to
| such asinine rules. I can buy a second hand book from a
| shop that pays nothing to publishers, donate it to a
| library for free, and the library is now allowed to lend
| that book as many times as they please, never having paid
| anybody a single cent for that right.
| cinntaile wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a good system. They should pay a
| fee each time a book is lent out, to reward the author
| for writing the book.
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| > In America, libraries do not pay annual licensing fees
| for books.
|
| We're talking e-books ("concurrent check out"), and they
| certainly do.
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/blogs/sta...
|
| > While consumers paid $12.99 for a digital version, the
| same book cost libraries roughly $52 for two years, and
| almost $520 for 20 years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How many libraries are there? Libraries might be the
| biggest customer demographic of some books.
| cinntaile wrote:
| They pay some sort of royalty no?
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| I'm fine if you want to share my book with your friend or
| with a group of friends. However, library !== the entire
| world.
|
| Moreover, libraries buy book(s) so they can share more
| copies if there is a demand.
|
| Without authors getting paid for their work there won't be
| any books at all, except books from those authors who are
| willing to write them for free of charge. But I assume you
| don't like online libraries with free books online for some
| reason.
| mod wrote:
| In many places in the US, anyone can get a card to a
| library.
|
| So, if everyone had that knowledge, it actually would
| mean the entire world.
|
| In the county I have my card with, they give a card
| number over the internet without any kind of address
| validation, so anyone willing to lie about their address
| can get a card there. I'm sure that's true for countless
| counties.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Without authors getting paid for their work there won't
| be any books at all, except books from those authors who
| are willing to write them for free of charge.
|
| You mean except for authors who are willing to write them
| without charging each reader for a copy.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How do libraries get their books? When was the last time
| that you checked out a book at your local library?
| mod wrote:
| I have not checked out a physical book in several years,
| but I use my library card to rent digital media
| (primarily audiobooks) all the time.
| mym1990 wrote:
| NPR did a good and brief piece on digital lending
| economics which also talks about how those economics are
| different from physical lending. Libraries license
| materials, and the license for a physical book will
| typically last as long as that book can be
| circulated(basically until it falls apart).
|
| I've started going to the library more often(and using
| Libby for e-reading), they might not have the exact book
| I want, but there is always _something_ I am interested
| in there.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118289764/the-surprising-
| eco...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Libraries license materials, and the license for a
| physical book will typically last as long as that book
| can be circulated(basically until it falls apart)._
|
| Libraries buy books, which are then covered by first sale
| doctrine. When a library book falls apart, the library
| may rebind it and continue lending it.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I find it unlikely that people who pay for technical books
| were ever going to be your customers. There could be other
| explanations - maybe once people could flip through your book
| without paying for it they realized there wasn't any value
| there for them? Maybe you had sales for a while and then they
| dropped off like sales do.
|
| I don't think people have the right to spread work that isn't
| theirs, but i also don't think you can assume the book will
| always make the same amount of money, or that book pirates
| were ever your customers.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Talking about recent works, released in the past few years
| getting pirated specifically:
|
| First is the unfairness of the system. Disney and other
| publishers have lobbied to push copyright up to the
| ridiculous life + 70 years using their political power.
| Publishers collectively have a totally ridiculous entitlement
| to governments being compelled to spend public money on
| enforcing their monopolies. So if you're say living in
| poorsville, you have no realistic opportunity to wait for
| your book to be published for free, because any work that is
| copyrighted during somebodies lifetime will be copyrighted
| until they're dead. Sure there's libraries but if your book
| is obscure enough it may not be available in one.
|
| The second reason I'll give is accessibility. If your book
| isn't offered in a free electronic format from a library, and
| somebody is blind, and they can't afford the kindle, they're
| out of luck. The publishing industry has no problem being
| exclusionary towards disabled groups so long as it enables a
| better profit model, pirates on the other hand are totally
| inclusive and scan everything making everything OCRable.
|
| So besides accessibility/fairness arguments, I'll also bring
| up that paying for books is a really shitty way to support
| authors. I paid $250 for physical books this week. Am I a
| hero to authors? Not at all. Maybe $200 of that went to the
| estate of some authors and most went to the publishers. $50
| of it went to authors maybe closer to scraping by, for whom
| piracy can mean not putting food on the table, it means
| having to give up authorship. However of that $50 maybe $5
| went to such authors. So I paid $250 and gave $5 to authors
| who really needed it. Does this prove I give a shit about
| authors? I think it proves that I don't, if somebody cares
| about authors they'll pirate the ebook and directly donate
| $250 to them.
|
| Finally there's the issue of how books are secured. Frankly
| the legal methods for acquiring books are frequently broken
| and bad. DRM that auto-deletes books from people's devices is
| an abomination. Waitlists for ebooks are the stupidest thing
| I have ever seen in my life. A huge reason people use
| zlibrary is their local library has broken software and it's
| like 8 steps to download something. Most of the money is in
| Amazon, so that's what gets funding to make the
| ebook/audiobook experience as seamless as possible for the
| wealthy of the world.
|
| My proposal to fix all these issues would be for public
| libraries to require public ID authentication to download
| books, for copyrights to essentially ignore copyright, and
| then based on which books are being downloaded to compensate
| authors out of a public fund. This would not come with any
| enforcement efforts to shut down pirate sites (due to
| censorship/privacy concerns and concerns with the library's
| software being broken, not everybody has to use the library
| just a good number of people do), the libraries would
| essentially act as a voting system to direct monies to
| different authors which you could also use as an e-book
| distribution mechanism. This makes the availability of books
| for the wealthy contingent on them financing books for the
| poor, the disabled, and compensating authors.
|
| Until such a day happens, if somebody pirate $100 of a books
| and donate $30 to some random author I think they're a better
| person that somebody who buys legally. We're in times where
| lawlessness enables the most ethical option available, so you
| know, maybe the law is screwed up.
| joak wrote:
| I would add one more point, as a general policy you might
| want people to read more not less.
|
| If ebooks can be distributed at no cost why make people pay
| for reading? It makes no sense.
|
| This cannot be the right way to incentivize and provide
| income for writers.
|
| I think Zlibrary and scihub (for scientific publications)
| are heroes: how do you think poor people get access to
| books? How do you get access to books when you are poor in
| a poor country?
|
| For billions of people this is the only access to books.
| Otherwise they wouldn't read... What a loss for human kind!
| brazed_blotch wrote:
| You are relying on unenforceable government incentives
| (copyright law) to create an income for yourself. Find a way
| of commercialising the information in your head that makes it
| technologically difficult to propagate without yourself being
| paid. Books aren't the answer if you want $$$.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Copyright law is actually enforceable though. At least
| enforceable enough to keep book piracy more inconvenient
| than Kindle for most people of any means.
| senko wrote:
| > I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month.
|
| How do you know how much you're losing?
|
| From [0]:
|
| > The average U.S. book is now selling less than 200 copies
| per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime.
|
| It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact
| people do not buy books, period.
|
| 0: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-
| publish...
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| > How do you know how much you're losing?
|
| I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can
| easily prove that.
|
| > It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact
| people do not buy books, period.
|
| The fact you're saying "period" means you're not ready to
| listen, but like to stick to your point of view. This will
| only affect your ability to see the truth.
| akaij wrote:
| > I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can
| easily prove that.
|
| Unless the billing system tells you explicitly "you see
| the lack of people here compared to last month/year/some
| other time period? well, we actually possess the
| technology to find out who these potential people would
| have been, so we reached out to them and asked if they
| were going to buy your book. they all said 'yes, but not
| anymore, since I can now pirate it' and that's why your
| book stopped selling as well as before", how can you be
| sure you were going to make that money?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| My products also were affected by the pirating of your
| books.. Revenue dropped 80% for one of the saas products
| asutekku wrote:
| It's pretty easy to attribute the drop if the sales dropped
| at the same as the pirated version was released
| akaij wrote:
| Ah, yes. _Post hoc ergo propter hoc_.
| asutekku wrote:
| Yes, there might be other variables affecting it too, but
| a blanket statement of "Piracy doesn't reduce sales" when
| it's primarily studied in the higher volume form of video
| game sales which are often pirated immediately after
| release and thus the effect is not clearly visible is not
| a good argument either.
| emkoemko wrote:
| those people would not have bought the game period... so
| its not a loss
| akaij wrote:
| I feel blanket statements are generally not a good fit
| for serious discussions. We have to keep asking the
| questions that will guide us closer to better data.
|
| I can't imagine the only good studies being on games. I'm
| sure similar studies for other forms of entertainment/art
| exist too. Games are also harder to pirate, and has its
| own problems that are virtually non-existent for books.
|
| And if we were to go down that route, we can further
| divide the affected people into publishers, authors, book
| stores etc. and only then can we figure out how the moral
| compass of each of us is really adjusted :)
|
| Big movie studios/publishers making billions of dollars?
| Hard to feel sorry for them.
|
| Indie authors/studios? I definitely have a soft spot for
| them.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Not necessarily. Wouldn't most book sales (especially in
| small niche interest groups, which is what this sounds
| like) be expected to come very quickly after the release
| date and then drop off very quickly?
| yencabulator wrote:
| You might also have hit a cliff in sales as a function of
| time after publishing. You can't really extrapolate from
| your sample size of 1.
|
| Most book authors simply don't make money from books.
| Especially if it's a technical book.
| antiterra wrote:
| Bookscan numbers are highly inaccurate and represent a
| floor.
|
| https://www.comicsbeat.com/just-how-accurate-is-bookscan-
| any...
|
| https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-
| sell-...
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| If I check out your book from the library, do you consider
| that theft?
| 300bps wrote:
| Well first a shameless plug for what appears to be your book
| based on a quick Google search:
|
| https://leanpub.com/u/romanpushkin
|
| I wasn't able to find your book in any pirated source. Do you
| think you're losing at least 50 sales per month from piracy
| since you sell the book for a suggested price of $20 each?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I think this is the wrong question to ask. To me, the answer
| is rather obvious: because knowledge and culture costs
| nothing to spread and benefits everyone.
|
| The actual issue is about getting paid for work. I would ask
| another question to address that instead:
|
| why does getting paid for author's work require limiting
| access to it?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The entire framework we have for paying authors is through
| distribution cost. Now we have zero distribution cost!
|
| The entire business model you are relying on for income has
| been completely broken for 30 years.
|
| You aren't losing sales. You are missing them. They aren't
| being taken away from you, they are passing you by. The
| result may be the same for you personally, but it's still a
| critical difference.
|
| You - and every other author - need a new framework to
| attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or
| even if such a thing could exist. I do know, however, that
| pretending the old system can still work in the digital age
| isn't fixing anything for anyone.
| googlryas wrote:
| Let's just hope people remember how to write books by the
| time you figure it out.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I agree that this is a huge problem to be solved, but I
| don't think it excuses piracy in any way.
|
| On another note, one emerging new framework is patreon.
| Instead of paying for printing/distribution, you're paying
| the author directly to continue writing.
| amadvance wrote:
| > The entire business model you are relying on for income
| has been completely broken for 30 years.
|
| Many people have their lives depending on that business
| model. They just cannot realize that such system is dying,
| if not already dead. It's a false hope dictated by self-
| preservation.
| tsol wrote:
| You just kind of handwave the whole problem away. Why
| aren't authors paid for the work they do? You can that like
| it isn't true and that it cannot be true.
|
| >You - and every other author - need a new framework to
| attract income. I have no idea what that would look like,
| or even if such a thing could exist.
|
| So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book
| writing is broken and needs to be entirely re-created BUT
| you also don't know how or what it should even look like.
| But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the
| work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of
| living, because it has been decided that the old system is
| beyond functioning.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > You just kind of handwave the whole problem away.
|
| No, that's what copyright does. It demands we all play
| the game, then it's totally unprepared for that not
| working out. Someone used a computer and an internet
| connection to share data without paying me money?
| _shocked Pikachu face_
|
| I'm at least admitting there's a problem. Just because I
| don't have a solution does not mean I don't understand
| the problem. Not all problems are that easily solved.
|
| If I _did_ have a solution, I would be implementing it.
| After all, a solution to that problem would be one of the
| most valuable contributions to society I can think of. At
| least one of the most highly valued.
|
| > So basically you're deciding the entire industry of
| book writing is broken
|
| I didn't decide. I was speaking descriptively, not
| prescriptively; something the copyright industry seems
| rather unfamiliar with.
|
| > But until then we should all just be okay with pirating
| the work of others and thereby robbing them of their
| means of living, because it has been decided that the old
| system is beyond functioning.
|
| It's not a matter of being OK with it or not. We can't
| _compel_ every person to follow the rules. We 've been
| trying that method for 30 years, and it's been blowing up
| in our faces the entire time.
|
| The reality is that copyright is a false promise. We
| can't force people to add a monetary transaction to the
| distribution of information, when information can be
| distributed anonymously at next to zero cost.
|
| You're so worried about the ethical implications of
| piracy, but what about the ethical implications of the
| false promise that is copyright?
|
| We are telling authors every day that they can make money
| selling books, but that is only true _occasionally, by
| chance_. We have no way to guarantee that will happen. We
| can 't attribute every successful book sale to copyright
| enforcement, because we know copyright enforcement is
| broadly failing.
|
| It's time to stop treating this like a game of good vs
| evil, and recognize the failure of the game itself. Even
| if that means recognizing that we already lost.
| sosborn wrote:
| > The entire framework we have for paying authors is
| through distribution cost.
|
| This isn't true through. The price in funding creation of
| the book (there is value on having the author focus
| exclusively on writing the book rather than finding time
| while doing a full time job), editing, marketing, etc.
|
| It's like saying the price of a phone is simply a tally of
| the cost of each individual component, where you have to
| factor in engineering, R&D, etc.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The price of a phone is paid when you buy the phone.
| That's when and where the transaction happens.
|
| If that transaction doesn't happen, then none of the
| other things you mentioned get funded.
|
| You can't get the phone without a transaction happening.
| It's a physical object, so moving it has a distribution
| cost.
|
| You _can_ get the contents of a book without doing a
| transaction. You can share the contents of a book just as
| freely as I 'm sharing this comment.
|
| Because there isn't a transaction happening, there is no
| source of income. There is no time or place to ask
| readers for money. Money isn't even involved in the first
| place; neither are goods or services - apart from a
| trivial amount of bandwidth.
|
| Treating arts like they are _singular_ objects to be made
| _only once_ (or services to be performed once) doesn 't
| work anymore. Now they are _instances_. They can be
| recreated or performed for free. By anyone. Anywhere. At
| any time. Without anyone else watching.
|
| You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a
| transaction. You can never stop the signal.
| sosborn wrote:
| >You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a
| transaction.
|
| IMO, you shouldn't hijack someone else's work to make it
| free. If the person creating it wants it to be
| distributed freely, they have the option to make it so.
|
| > You can't get the phone without a transaction
| happening.
|
| This is also the case (not always) for a book, because
| the creation has a cost. Again, the author can choose to
| make it free, but they should also be free to charge a
| fee for it. It's pretty arrogant to take that choice away
| from them.
| dageshi wrote:
| It exists already, dependent on genre.
|
| royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres
| of fantasy that are available for free.
|
| The business model is, the author builds up a substantial
| number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when
| they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon
| which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons
| can read.
|
| Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they
| remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish
| it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read
| service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move
| onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes
| well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.
|
| The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or
| editing or prose they just want the story.
|
| I expect this will become a fairly standard model in
| multiple genres going forward.
| RainaRelanah wrote:
| Definitely a fan of this model. Anecdotal, but I recently
| subscribed to AMC+ because the pirate streaming site I
| was using didn't have the latest episode of a show I
| wanted to watch. I could have waited a literal day, or
| gone to a torrent tracker, but paying the $9 was just
| easier and shows support for the show.
| StormChaser_5 wrote:
| I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors
| on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining
| when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put
| elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any
| more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the
| models that have gone before.
| lixtra wrote:
| The gp doesn't have a problem. He will make money by
| something else then writing the book.
|
| His readers are at loss. Their book won't come into
| existence.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That might be frustrating for his would-be readers, but
| in the same way that it's frustrating to me that there
| aren't many great small flagship smartphones. It's a
| bummer, but I'm not going to genuinely complain that I'm
| being wronged because there aren't enough people out
| there willing to buy a small phone.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I am happy to complain that we as a society have limited
| ways to reward people who share knowledge that we all
| benefit from. The answer, if you ask me, is to levy a tax
| and let citizens decide where the money goes via
| quadratic voting.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Being unmotivated to write is still a problem even if
| it's not a financial one.
| tsol wrote:
| It's only a problem is he's unmotivated and he wants to
| write. If he just decides not to write then, it's pretty
| simple for him to move not. Not so for the readers who
| pirated his first book, found it expanded their minds and
| now are hungry for more by the same author.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Being unmotivated to work is still a problem even if it's
| not a financial one. Getting paid remains an efficient
| motivator though.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Your logic doesn't make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book
| could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless
| you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I've seen but
| it's always low quality).
|
| Pirate Bay does that at scale--millions of "friends", and
| all at the same quality. It's unsustainable to authors.
| Don't tell the authors to find "a new framework".
|
| What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a
| weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies
| of the chapters each week?
|
| Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the
| mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic
| terms, don't go around shaming the authors.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend
| one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing
| which I've seen but it's always low quality).
|
| Post-digital, a legally purchased book can be shared with
| no friends, none at a time.
| xani_ wrote:
| Well, post digital era we still buy/rent games, video and
| music.
|
| I don't see why something similar couldn't be done, pay
| monthly and you can read whatever your want, and what you
| read depends on where the money from your subscription
| goes. And as distribution costs are lower, higher % of it
| should go to the writers. Hell, amazon could just do
| that, except of course they wouldn't give a fair cut...
|
| At zero cost to try new authors it could possibly be a
| good way for more niche stuff, you can just page thru any
| book that you want with no cost but time
|
| > What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up
| for a weekly subscription and email out individually
| DRMed copies of the chapters each week?
|
| There is actually one guy doing it on patreon but he
| already have YT audience for music gear reviews (book is
| about electronic music ideas and tips). So it is
| possible, just kinda hard as you already need to have
| publicity.
| everforward wrote:
| > Your logic doesn't make sense to me. Pre-digital, a
| book could just be shared with a friend one at a time
| (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I've
| seen but it's always low quality).
|
| Sure, but books also had a much higher value due to a
| relative lack of competitors. Books now have to compete
| with a plethora of free media available on YouTube,
| forums, blogs, etc.
|
| Some of them may be of lower quality, but it's hard to
| beat free. Lots of us have taught ourselves skills via
| free resources that we probably would have had to pay for
| at one point.
|
| It's much harder to charge for knowledge than it once
| was.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > Pirate Bay does that at scale--millions of "friends",
| and all at the same quality. It's unsustainable to
| authors. Don't tell the authors to find "a new
| framework".
|
| I'm not telling authors to find a new framework. Such a
| thing doesn't exist. I'm not even sure it _could_ exist.
|
| And that sucks, because authors _need_ a new framework.
|
| > What do you expect them to do?
|
| I don't. I have zero expectations.
|
| > Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the
| mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic
| terms, don't go around shaming the authors.
|
| I'm not here shaming anyone. I'm just being honest. This
| system is broken. We're all looking at the same shattered
| pieces. It's wild that I'm the only one here who isn't
| _pretending_ everything is OK.
| password1 wrote:
| Are you actually losing $Xk worth of sales every month due to
| piracy though? I remember this author with a wildly
| influential book inside a small online community. He too
| claimed that due to piracy he suffered great economical loss.
| He posted a detailed account of this on his blog and i delved
| on it a bit and I came to the conclusion he was delusional.
| For sure piracy dented his revenue, that was without the
| shadow of a doubt. But the major reason that he lost revenue
| was due to the fact that a book, as with many products, has a
| lifecycle and he wasn't considering that as a factor at all.
|
| His book was considered "the bible" of that subject, but it
| was also starting to become old and the community was
| becoming more established. At that point there were
| tutorials, youtube videos, other resources talking about the
| same thing, explaining concepts of that book and so on. So
| while, in the beginning a user strictly needed to buy the
| book to have access to those niche information, now info were
| more readily accessible (even the reddit wiki had basically
| the same stuff in it). So buying the book was more of a
| choice ONLY if the user wanted to dive deeper into the
| subject. All the rest of potential users that a few years
| back would have bought the book due to the "monopoly of
| information", now weren't interested in it anymore. Even more
| established community users only recommended the book as an
| advanced thing for people that wanted to go to the next step.
| That's quite an evolution for a product that is guaranteed to
| lower sales.
|
| Besides this, the community was still relatively niche and
| this means that doesn't have a huge influx of new users. This
| means that over time people won't buy his book because the
| only people interested in it already have it.
|
| The product lifecycle was clear from the data and kinda
| textbook behavior, with the product having surpassed it's
| mature phase and been declining. On top of this, for sure
| piracy further made things worse.
|
| The point is that the author was convinced that piracy was
| the only reason revenue was dropping. He was convinced that
| his book (being influential et all in the community) would
| give him constant revenue potentially forever. That was
| delusional and so was his analysis.
|
| Are you entirely sure that piracy is the only thing to blame?
| Maybe that's just one factor in a more complex situation and
| writing another book is specifically what you need to do. The
| previous one was successful, you have a brand and an audience
| to leverage. That's valuable and, maybe you just need to
| develop a new product because the old one is, well, getting
| old.
| [deleted]
| joak wrote:
| There is a fundamental contradiction:
|
| - first as an author, want to be read, the more people read
| your books the better.
|
| - second as a human, you need an income.
|
| Imagine a charity (it could be government taxes as well)
| paying you proportionally to how much your books are read and
| providing the books for free to the readers.
|
| What's wrong with that?
|
| You will have more readers and you'll get paid for writing
| books (according to their popularity).
|
| Do you really want to sell your books? (and get less readers)
|
| Or do you want instead to have as many readers as possible
| and get paid for that?
| the_arun wrote:
| If we had Spotify for eBooks, would that solve problem for
| everyone?
| weeksie wrote:
| Just like Spotify solved it good and hard for musicians?
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| You mean a service that pays authors every time someone
| checks out their book? I'm sure there's a term for that.
| Begins with an L. Lib something?
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| Ok but hear me out, what if we embed citations in the
| text, so there's like a colossal graph of publications,
| with regional distribution centers.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _pays authors every time someone checks out their
| book?_
|
| That's not how libraries work. Libraries pay for a book
| _once_ (assuming it wasn 't donated to them.)
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| No, you're wrong. At least in the UK since 1979 [1] Other
| countries have similar schemes.
|
| [1] https://www2.societyofauthors.org/where-we-
| stand/public-lend...
| callmeal wrote:
| >If we had Spotify for eBooks, would that solve problem for
| everyone?
|
| Something like Kindle Unlimited but not limited to just
| Amazon? Count me in!
| randomcatuser wrote:
| Weeksie, did it?? What're musicians' problems now?
| cm_silva wrote:
| Can you tell us what book it is?
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Not comfortable sharing for PTSD reasons. However, if
| you're interested, some people reached out back to me with
| apologies. For example (auto-translated to English):
|
| === Good day. Roman, my name is Alexander. Once a book was
| stolen from you and posted on the net. People then divided
| into two camps, some sympathized, some did not, for various
| reasons. I belonged to the second category. I wasn't happy,
| but at the same time I didn't sympathize. I considered that
| price too high, and then for some reason it seemed to me
| that the book itself was not for the sake of being useful,
| but solely for the sake of profit. Although, even then I
| believed that work should be paid.
|
| Then I released a few comments, I don't remember exactly
| the content, perhaps boorish, I don't think so. You then
| blocked me in the Telegram and chat, said, for the lack of
| empathy on my part or something like that. I think you
| misunderstood me, and perhaps I expressed my thought
| incorrectly. After that, I left a couple of caustic
| comments on the forum.
|
| I somehow forgot about that situation, but then I came
| across your videos on YouTube and remembered. Thoughtful.
| Damn, I myself got into similar situations, which made me
| so hooked on that price list ...
|
| In general, I was wrong and I apologize if I somehow
| offended you. Of course, you have the right to ask as much
| as you like for your work, and the buyer has the right to
| agree to the conditions or refuse.
|
| Sorry friend. I wish peace. ===
| gayn1gga wrote:
| cm_silva wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I am an advocate of "information should be free", but...
| creators have to eat.
|
| I don't have an answer for this.
| Psychoshy_bc1q wrote:
| how about going to work?
| homarp wrote:
| If you want to know, he shared one here (now under CC
| license) a few months ago
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month
|
| You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that
| aren't compatible with reality.
|
| > The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my
| work_ for free?
|
| Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the
| food on your table?
|
| > I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.
|
| Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you
| the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing
| information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't
| write books for living, do something else. That how the rest
| of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into
| something that flops.
| sooyoo wrote:
| I generally agree with this particular point, but not with
| the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's
| problem and he should just suck it up.
|
| It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books
| are an asset for society, and we all should be interested
| in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing
| unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need
| _something else_ that works.
|
| A society in which only those with too much time on their
| hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We _need_
| authors who spend full time on producing high quality
| books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on
| fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to
| sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-
| written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is
| going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of
| the production company as well). We need to find a way,
| otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material
| and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No
| offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is
| a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum
| entanglement just can 't compete with a proper book.
| Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many
| such clips and never consumed a good book.)
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality
| books are an asset for society, and we all should be
| interested in finding a solution.
|
| That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt
| to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to _limit_
| the distribution of information throughout society,
| supposedly to make content creation more financially
| rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to
| _increase_ the distribution of information throughout
| society, and supposedly makes content creation less
| financially rewarding.
|
| The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright
| systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular
| naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve
| it. They're both just choices about whether the
| distribution of information throughout society or the
| financial rewards for content creation are more
| important.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument
| regarding worth. Just because someone works hard doesn't
| mean it's a profitable endeavor. I worked hard at startups
| that failed, it doesn't mean the startup has to be worth
| anything.
| nateoearth wrote:
| Did the startups fail because people were stealing
| intellectual property? (For example, by illegally
| obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source
| code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to
| create offerings that customers valued above the cost to
| produce them?
|
| Until the United States economy no longer recognizes
| intellectual property rights, this is a critical
| distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or
| proprietary software and hardware designs.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument
| regarding worth_
|
| The labor theory of value is obviously complete bunk, but
| it sticks around anyway because it's a central tenet of
| Marxism.
| gjm11 wrote:
| I think that gets the causality the wrong way around.
| I've heard plenty of people express similar sentiments
| without (so far as I can tell) being Marxists.
|
| More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism
| because it's a thing many people find intuitively
| plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be
| rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _" I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded"
| is a pretty natural thing to think._
|
| Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all
| day, pay me.
|
| _" Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive
| was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that."_
|
| But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore
| I am entitled to payment.
|
| Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your
| labor hasn't created value unless you've actually
| produced something other people subjectively believe to
| be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common
| sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It
| might fool children but for an adult to believe it
| requires brainwashing.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _The subjective theory of value is common sense._
|
| This is also the crux of why I cannot understand how
| people follow LTV. It just doesn't make sense upon even
| the slightest introspection.
| yencabulator wrote:
| The miscommunication in that case is that the person
| doing the boulder-rolling/book-writing/startup-
| programming genuinely thought they were providing value
| to society. Your example picks a ridiculous non-valuable
| labor. To understand their point of view, imagine
| something that you would consider valuable, but which
| goes generally unrewarded. To get you started: feeding
| the hungry, sheltering the homeless, volunteering for a
| fire department, cleaning an oil spill, rescuing animals,
| planting trees to reduce man-made erosion, ...
| [deleted]
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| The book market shows people DO buy books, just like OP
| said. Clearly their book was worth something. Just
| because people will take it for free instead doesn't mean
| they wouldn't have paid for it.
| lossolo wrote:
| > Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep
| the food on your table?
|
| If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it,
| we have a law that protects those that do not.
|
| > Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give
| you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing
| information.
|
| He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if
| someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he
| can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid
| for his work.
| weeksie wrote:
| Of course the author is losing something, someone stole his
| intellectual property and distributed it for free. It's not
| your responsibility to put food onto someone's table, but
| it is your responsibility not to steal it. Immoral acts do
| not become moral because they are easy to commit.
|
| It's amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving
| bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different
| than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and
| software. Indie software only escaped because the sass
| model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its
| only saving grace is that it's also a performance medium.
|
| If piracy makes it so that it doesn't make much sense to
| produce novels, it's the world that's poorer. Justifying
| that because it happens or because it's easy is nothing
| more than the naturalistic fallacy.
| xigoi wrote:
| If someone steals your food, you no longer have it. If
| someone "steals" your book, you still have it.
| weeksie wrote:
| begging the metaphor is one approach when attempting to
| defend an indefensible position
| xigoi wrote:
| Who said it's a metaphor?
| nephanth wrote:
| That's not a metaphor. Copyright infringement/ ip
| violation is _not_ theft. When an item is stolen, you
| lose it. When your copyright is infringed, you may not
| even know it happens.
|
| A lot of defenders of copyright often liken ip violation
| to theft. I remember a famous campaign where I'm from
| saying "piracy is theft". This is misinformation and
| fallacy. Copyright infringement is not theft, and there
| is no reason it should be treated as such
| hunter2_ wrote:
| The parallel between SaaS and live music is pretty
| interesting. Seeing a play in a theater (as the un-
| pirate-able version of a movie) also fits in this
| category. Service instead of product, essentially.
|
| I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though.
| The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book
| and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations
| is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie
| and post-book medium alike.
| weeksie wrote:
| Exactly. The form of the novel is tied to text and text
| is fundamentally east to distribute because it is
| information. The problem is structurally tough.
| massinstall wrote:
| > Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep
| the food on your table?
|
| What a crappy comment. Sad that there are people whose only
| apparent ability is to hurt, destroy, and consume.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you just have expectations that aren 't compatible with
| reality_
|
| Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate
| than others. The reality you're describing is one in which
| pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As
| someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with
| that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others'
| authors will find something else to do; they can make
| podcasts or whatever.
| davidgay wrote:
| You are completely missing the point of this thread. Even
| if we morally agree with all your points, the claim is that
| less books will get written and that that's bad for all of
| us.
|
| To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't
| happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get
| written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.
| akaij wrote:
| I'm curious, how can you know how much you're losing because
| of piracy?
| pdntspa wrote:
| Knowledge and information want to be free, know that by
| trying to control its spread -- such as by trying to profit
| from it -- you are fighting that principle. And it is a fight
| that you will lose.
| layer8 wrote:
| By the same token, you should have no privacy, because
| knowledge and information (about you) wants to be free, and
| you will lose that fight. I don't think that's a sensible
| argument.
| absolutelynobo wrote:
| In the long run, nobody has any real privacy.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| You are really losing a huge personal branding opportunity.
|
| Alternatively: people now trust you, there is some way to
| monetize that for sure such as organizing events, conventions
| etc. Make them pay a bit more than you would to recoup the
| cost of piracy.
|
| In the end it's the strategy used by the GOAT. Bill Gates
| knew he couldn't fight piracy and also it just charged
| Fortune500 companies a tad more so they'd essentially
| subsidize pirates all over the world. Ranging from PirateBay
| to CD sellers in Subsaharan Africa
| latchkey wrote:
| The porn industry became easily pirated. They pivoted to live
| shows and pay per minute (micro-currency tokenized payments),
| which can't be pirated and is easy to pay for (buy blocks of
| tokens).
|
| Now, the recorded shows are effectively advertising for the
| live shows.
| RainaRelanah wrote:
| This was the case for a while, but OnlyFans kinda debunks
| that, no? It has been the biggest source of income for
| modern creators, and they generally don't do live streams
| (outside of like Twitch). Piracy is a very common problem
| for them.
| [deleted]
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| I often have this strange dream of a world without monetary
| incentive to produce art/books/knowledge.
|
| Only hobbyists and people that have something to say
| independent of monetary value would produce music, books,
| blog posts, etc.
|
| In this dream I always find weird, interesting thing that
| challenge or move me in directions that I could not foresee.
|
| But then I wake up and see 10 ways I could make more money or
| the best 4K display that will make me a 10x programmer and
| life is back to businesses.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I don't understand why people seem to think that having a
| monetary incentive to do something taints it somehow.
| Rewarding good behavior is half of justice. If someone
| writes books that many people really like, they're doing a
| good deed and in my view should be rewarded.
|
| Another thing you might find in your dreams is a world
| where people can live a comfortable life without working.
| I'd like that world, and I'm sure a lot of good art, music,
| blog posts, etc. would come from it. But I don't see why
| you'd actively want people who produce those things to not
| be rewarded for it.
| massinstall wrote:
| Exactly this, thanks for highlighting this here! I find it
| astoundingly upsetting that the people who run this pirated
| library ask for donations at the bottom of the linked page
| (of course in Bitcoin), citing they can only keep the library
| online if they're getting paid for it... what arrogance!
|
| Like they cannot see that they're inserting themselves in
| between the readers and the authors, whom they effectively
| try to steal the money from. Authors of course can also only
| continue to write books if they're getting paid for it. It's
| truly parasitic behavior.
|
| I'm sorry this happened to you and I share your pain. :(
| falcor84 wrote:
| >Authors of course can also only continue to write books if
| they're getting paid for it.
|
| This is patently false, with the simplest counterexample
| being that most authors write their first book without a
| first getting a publishing deal.
| number6 wrote:
| Your book is free on leanpub. Was this done after it got
| pirated?
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Well, it's only one of my books.
| number6 wrote:
| I googled your name and this is the only book that I
| could find, so maybe this could also be a reason for low
| sales.
| corobo wrote:
| Little bit of devils advocate little bit of Sunday
| boredom.
|
| Im actively trying to find another book you've written
| and am having trouble. Are you sure it's not a marketing
| issue?
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Fun little story goes here, I used pseudonym when I first
| registered my Facebook account ~10 years ago or so. I
| later tried to change the handle to my real name, but
| Facebook didn't let me do that - moderators though my
| last name isn't real. So I ended up using a couple of
| names because of that.
|
| Plus, I bet your googling doesn't work quite right, until
| you translate these names correctly.
|
| I'm happy you found one, but there are 2 more to go. I'll
| give you a hint though:
|
| * The one you're looking for is about computer security
| (that's why pseudonym worked fine)
|
| * The book cover was done by the same artist
|
| I almost revealed my second identity, but if you ever
| find the second name, please don't post it here.
| culi wrote:
| The author also posted the source code to HN twice (both
| times getting very little attention) and stated it was CC.
| Not sure what to make of it
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can legally share and spread everything that's in the
| public domain, which albeit varying by country includes _lots_
| of books. More than anyone could read in a single lifetime.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| A) This doesn't address the idea of a library.
|
| B) Disney would like to have a word about when something
| becomes the public domain.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading
| knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough
| that people actually do it.
|
| Libraries purchase books, increasing payment to authors
|
| Libraries have a limited quantity of books and check them out
| for a limited time, making them _inconvenient_ compared to
| purchasing a book. For very popular books this means there 's a
| high incentive for people to buy rather than wait to be able to
| check them out.
|
| Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly
| technical books. This means that for very niche and valuable
| books the market allows books to be sold at the higher prices
| necessary to sustain incentives.
|
| Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is
| available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Libraries purchase books_
|
| The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that
| that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not
| copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to
| the premise of libraries.
| sen_armstrong wrote:
| That first lowercase "library" formed a garden path that
| reminds me: How (nearly) nominatively deterministic of
| Elbakyan! In a way your comment makes sense there too, when
| considering Sci-Hub's purported use of donated credentials.
| Qem wrote:
| Hope the next Alexandria library is named Elbakyan
| library. She surely deserves. And this time I hope it
| doesn't catch fire. Fortunately bits are not as flammable
| as paper. But on the other side they are higher
| maintenance to last thousands of years.
| swayvil wrote:
| >The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at
| maximum convenience.
|
| Which is awesome if we are striving to optimize the social
| benefits of media.
|
| We want to optimally benefit society, right?
| tsol wrote:
| That doesn't remain beneficial in the long term if people
| don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have
| financial stability.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _if people don 't wanna write books anymore unless they
| already have financial stability_
|
| This is less about want and more about means (people
| wanting to write books but not having the freedom to
| invest their time in it if they don't have pre-existing
| financial stability).
|
| But... this is currently the case. 50% of books published
| by the "big 5" publishing houses sell less than 12 copies
| (source: recent Penguin Random House antitrust case). The
| chances of any writer making any money on a book they
| write is close to zero _even if_ they get a publishing
| deal with a major publisher.
|
| The current system of copyright doesn't protect writers
| (nor motivate them to write); it only protects monopoly.
| yencabulator wrote:
| I think a big part of the argument for Universal Basic
| Income etc is that you can make a meager living doing
| just that. You could make an argument that UBI and free
| information would go well hand in hand.
| swayvil wrote:
| A better society means greater financial stability for
| everybody, including the author. Maybe more indirectly
| than a check in your hand, but still.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This is a really good insight.
|
| Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one
| will ever write books except those who have the privilege of
| writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to
| write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi
| year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do
| it.
|
| If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over
| destroying long term incentive structures that led us here
| with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world
| devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned
| exceptions).
|
| Purchase books. Please.
|
| Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things
| other than books.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Given that any book can now be preserved and reproduced
| indefinitely, and given that there's only so much reading
| one man can do in his life, shouldn't there be a point when
| we have enough books and don't need any new ones? We might
| have reached that point already.
| layer8 wrote:
| The same argument works for HN comments.
| q-big wrote:
| > Purchase books. Please.
|
| The people who download lots of books illegally are often
| also the biggest buyers of books.
| V__ wrote:
| > Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no
| one will ever write books except those who have the
| privilege of writing them for fun or for free.
|
| I would argue this is more or less already the case.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I agree that funding for otherwise unknown authors is
| necessary for high quality books, and I agree that more
| sales mean more money around to fund "risky" authors.
|
| But I'd rather see funding work a bit like science, where
| you ask a non-profit for funding based on a project
| proposal that's judged more on its merits than on its sales
| potential. No author would need an "X Twitter followers"
| pre-requisite anymore.
|
| And then there's the counterpart, namely, reach: when I
| studied Japanese in South America the only textbook
| available in Spanish were photocopies sold (illegally, of
| course) by the University of the only original they had -
| with such a small market and highly devaluated currency, no
| bookstore imported the book anymore. Had it not been for
| piracy, none of us could have studied. And it would have
| been poor consolation to know that our sacrifice in not
| pirating a book would have led to better books somewhere
| else that we also wouldn't be able to afford.
| xani_ wrote:
| Sure but nobody would suffer if say a new fantasy novel
| was not available there.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'.
|
| Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in
| murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are
| talking about is just copying digits.
| [deleted]
| blowski wrote:
| That pirate ship has sailed.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| If we use words to refer to things they don't mean, words
| will lose their meaning.
| blowski wrote:
| You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and
| you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the
| slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of
| the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe
| copyright theft.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the
| copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of
| copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't
| mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of
| concepts.
| blowski wrote:
| Feel free to call it whatever you want. I will call it
| piracy because most people do.
|
| EDIT: Interestingly, the first recorded usage of "pirate"
| to imply copyright infringement is from 1913, talking
| about "pirate broadcasts".
| kgwgk wrote:
| Pirate publishers were a thing well before that:
|
| https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.28173/
| blowski wrote:
| Wow! I took the 1913 date from the Etymology dictionary,
| so I'm surprised it goes back another 100 years before
| that.
| kgwgk wrote:
| It goes back even more, it predates copyright.
|
| https://books.google.ch/books?id=jFMEPUO7LS0C&lpg=PP1&hl=
| de&...
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Why is this pedantry relevant to the original point? I
| don't understand what you're driving towards.
|
| What difference does it make if it is copyright
| infringement or 'piracy'?
|
| We're talking about incentives for authors and how they
| can fund their risk/time for publishing a book.
| yencabulator wrote:
| This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
| q-big wrote:
| > This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
|
| I would consider this actually to be a serious point.
| Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of
| Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.
| blowski wrote:
| I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two.
| Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to
| talk about how the community has changed, typically in a
| derogatory manner.
| q-big wrote:
| This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors
| of, say, communities are a very different breed of people
| than people who join the community in a later phase.
|
| So, it is the behaviour _to expect_ that sooner or later
| these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of
| the community won 't feel home anymore.
|
| See also Eternal September:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| blowski wrote:
| There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to
| feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are
| poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a
| thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong
| (aside from chronological details giving clues).
| kgwgk wrote:
| Who decides the meaning? You?
|
| ---
|
| Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum - 2nd edition -
| London 1736
|
| Pirate: one who lives by pillage and robbing on the sea.
| Also a plagiary.
|
| https://books.google.ch/books?id=O50-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PT181&lp
| g=P...
|
| ---
|
| Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman - First published
| in 1701, the quote below is from the explanatory preface
| added in a 1703 edition
|
| Had I wrote it for the gain of the press, I should have
| been concerned at its being printed again, and again, by
| pirates, as they call them
|
| http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm
| greenhatman wrote:
| I'd love a Spotify/Netflix subscription for books, if it can
| get me almost every book.
| secabeen wrote:
| Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what
| happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went
| from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent
| access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for
| nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary
| income stream of live performance, so they're even more at
| risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40%
| between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those
| numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to
| get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
| Folcon wrote:
| > Books also don't have the secondary income stream of
| live performance
|
| I'd argue with some forms of writing / publishing books
| are the secondary income stream.
|
| There seems to be a growing audience for online serial
| fiction as well as technical books that are written by
| the chapter, where some readers pay for early access to
| chapters that have yet to be released.
|
| The outputs of these are quite long, so at some point a
| block of chapters gets bundled into a "book" as well as
| an audiobook on occasion and then sold on amazon.
|
| Some authors then hide / remove the earlier chapters
| (this is not universal), or add extra bits in the book
| and then publish this for people who are hearing that
| "This story is really good, get the book to find out what
| happens".
|
| Not sure what the actual economics looks like at the
| macro level, but it seems some authors are doing it as
| their full-time gig.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > Books also don't have the secondary income stream of
| live performance
|
| Funny, I was just thinking of this.
|
| In this current world of copyright, the secondary income
| stream for books seems to be selling rights to make
| movies & television shows for the larger audience.
|
| Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of _anything_
| in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers
| make money.
| q-big wrote:
| > Books also don't have the secondary income stream of
| live performance, so they're even more at risk of major
| loss.
|
| Lecture offers _are_ secondary income streams for
| nonfiction authors (actually very similar to what live
| performances are for music).
|
| Also, it would perfectly possible for publishing houses
| to find secondary income streams if they desired, but it
| is easier to complain about illegal copies than to find
| new income sources:
|
| Just to give one possible example that could open new
| secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't
| publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating
| derived works of their published works, for example so
| that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author
| paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being
| in a legal grayzone?
| xani_ wrote:
| > Just to give one possible example that could open new
| secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't
| publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating
| derived works of their published works, for example so
| that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author
| paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being
| in a legal grayzone?
|
| Coz they'd prefer to control the supply and get all the
| profits while giving actual writers a pittance and having
| in their contracts that anything they write belongs to
| corporation that paid them. Similar deal with code
| really...
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, Spotify and Netflix have large gaps in their
| catalogs, so I would expect the same to be true for a
| similar book service. In fact, more than half of the time I
| look up a book on LibGen, I come up empty.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I'm surprised this doesn't yet exist, to be honest.
|
| I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix
| and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions
| on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive
| option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a
| no-brainer.
| blowski wrote:
| O'Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical
| and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for
| fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues,
| not current best-sellers.
| gizmo wrote:
| A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book.
| For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If
| people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm
| not sure it's a big loss.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| That seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Sure, there
| might be a lot of people who want to _write_ a book and may
| do it for free or very little, but the people editing books
| still need to eat.
| [deleted]
| dojomouse wrote:
| I have an innate desire to write a book. But I haven't
| because the effort would be significant and I have other
| things to do, including work. I am glad that the many
| professional authors whose work I've enjoyed had financial
| reward providing them both the motive and means to write
| for me.
|
| You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people
| inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a
| while. But I'm pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and
| paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an
| _excellent_ job of that stuff rather than just assume that
| pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it's
| enormously naive to assume we'd lose nothing if we took
| away art as a profession - especially since it's so obvious
| it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other
| professions.
|
| Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I
| genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and
| giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Maybe the profit motive is the reason why you can't find
| books you genuinely love.
| remus wrote:
| > If people who write books for financial gain decide to
| quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
|
| Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just
| use all software however we like? If people who write
| software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such
| a loss?
| [deleted]
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still
| be work for professional programmers: I want software
| that does X. There is no free software that does X. What
| are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write
| it for me.
| 6510 wrote:
| Then you release it, get modest praise and you've
| contributed to the future of humanity - which should be
| good enough for anyone.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you
| release that software to the public, then I got the
| software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me.
| Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
| __david__ wrote:
| No? I think you're trying to be clever, but literally,
| no, it wouldn't be a massive loss.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >If people who write software for financial gain decide
| to quit would it be such a loss?
|
| When this happens we will finally have the Year of the
| Linux Desktop, and it will be a good year.
| blowski wrote:
| A lot of Linux is built by people on salaries from big
| tech.
| yencabulator wrote:
| And a lot of worst of modern day Linux & Open Source is
| those big tech corporations pushing their own agendas...
| Linux might even be better off being a hobby again.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Which is great for this conversation, because it proves
| that it isn't absolutely necessary for software copyright
| to exist in order for people to get paid to write it.
| tzs wrote:
| > A huge percentage of the population wants to write a
| book.
|
| But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at
| writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut
| back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't
| change the total number of books written each year by a
| noticeable amount.
| more_corn wrote:
| Writing gets better the more you do it. And many writing
| styles people have initially complained about turned out
| to be wildly successful. See Karl Ove Knausgaard.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Yes, but very few people can afford to write full-time
| without getting paid for it. The money isn't the deciding
| factor between writing vs not writing. It's the deciding
| factor between writing 40 hours a week vs 5 hours a week
| after doing their day job.
| theptip wrote:
| I don't think one has to go this far. It's already a hard
| job being an author, and if you make it less well-paid for
| the median author, we'd get less art, and less knowledge
| shared. However I think one could easily make a case for
| making it less well-paid for the big winners head of the
| power-law curve (the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings,
| Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc) which extract huge paychecks
| from the copyright monopoly.
|
| I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of
| say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem
| is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist
| system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the
| length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates,
| rather than the initial authors doing the creative work.
| And the public pays the cost.
| rfrey wrote:
| I would be shocked if the median pay for an author was
| more than $2/hour. I'd actually be shocked if it was that
| much. Not sure what effect lowering it to $1.50/h would
| be.
| joak wrote:
| Most authors never make a dime. Most authors never get
| published. Most authors have no readers. Still they
| write.
|
| I think the point is to pay successful writers so they
| keep writing.
|
| Pay them and distribute ebooks for free. Where is the
| contradiction? The money just have to come from other
| sources than selling the books.
|
| Free ebooks mean more readers. This is something
| desirable, no?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| But a very small number of people want to edit, copy edit,
| fact check, type set, market and fund writing for no pay.
|
| The publishing industry is a whole lot more than someone
| drafting in word...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Academic publishing says this too, and for them at least
| it turns out not to be true, because they insist that
| typesetting be done before they see it. The value-add
| from the publishing industry in general is payment
| advances and marketing. Same as the music industry.
| They're both a whole lot more and a whole lot less than
| somebody drafting in word.
|
| Anybody can hire an editor.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > But a very small number of people want to edit, copy
| edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing for
| no pay.
|
| But not all books need all of those services. The
| editing, copy editing, and fact checking can be left to
| the responsibility of a motivated producer to provide, or
| to a motivated consumer to demand. (Of course, a producer
| might decide to skip those, and serve non-discerning
| consumers who don't worry about factuality. But ... well,
| that's where we are, anyway, and always have been. There
| was yellow journalism well before social media.)
| Typesetting can be handled automatically for bulks that
| never leave the computer, which is probably many of them.
| I'm quite OK if books aren't marketed to me; I think I've
| hardly ever intentionally consumed a book based on an ad
| anyway.
|
| As to funding, the whole point of the claim to which you
| were responded was that there are plenty of people are
| willing to write for free, so that there is no need for
| separate funding. This means that we'll get literature
| that reflects the skills and interests of the people who
| are interested enough in writing to do it for free, and
| who can support themselves while they do so. Well, OK;
| it's not a representative sample, but neither is the
| literature we have now, nor has it ever been
| historically. (Of course, too, some writing is inherently
| costly: travel writing, for example, is costly even if
| you are willing to do the writing itself for free. But
| not _all_ writing needs all of these services.)
| 6510 wrote:
| That we can put under wage slavery. People don't have
| time for it.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Writing a book takes a long time and will take even longer
| or never get finished at all if you also need to work at
| McDonald's to make rent and keep the electricity on.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Plenty of people have produced great works of art while
| working day jobs. It's hardly a new concept.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Sorry but this is such an _american_ trope, that people
| need to write themselves off to prove something to somebody
| or themselves (not sure what exactly, there are other ways
| to gain respect but maybe some folks struggle to find
| other, more effective means of deeper introspection).
|
| Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some
| group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled
| looks from all others followed (few times also from other
| americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard
| anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from
| doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1
| german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just
| went and did it by the time I met her and it was great).
|
| That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we
| all have been young and some still are in our hearts.
|
| I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons
| of time with folks from all continents, cultures and
| religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our
| tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to
| state that _nobody_ wants to write, but "huge percentage"
| is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody
| that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word.
|
| To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort
| and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can
| learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that
| will create tons of memories that will make you smile and
| have that distant look into past when you will be dying and
| remembering them... _that 's_ worth investing some time
| into, not 10 millionth average book
| moonchrome wrote:
| >Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading
| knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high
| enough that people actually do it.
|
| Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Yes, and long before the digital mode of distribution.
|
| I think there's a somewhat irrational fear from publishers
| that anyone with a personal computer can create 1 million
| copies of a book almost instantly (ok, maybe a few hours,
| depending on disk speed), and distribute them almost as
| quickly.
|
| I imagine there were similar fears of the printing press
| from book scribes back in the 16th century.
|
| The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital
| mode of distribution is actually constrained by the
| inherent ability of people to consume new information. You
| can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you
| have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer.
| Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
| panarky wrote:
| _> depending on disk speed_
|
| One copy in memory can serve millions on your website.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. Technically the copy is made
| by the computer you are sharing it with, not the
| original.
|
| My mind was dead-set on the printing press analogy for
| some reason.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Both are making copies, probably multiple, mostly
| transitory, along with any number of intermediaries.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > One copy in memory can serve millions on your website.
|
| But they have to download it, and you might not have the
| bandwidth to service millions of downloads in less than a
| few hours ....
| selectodude wrote:
| A million copies of a 10MB PDF is 10 terabytes. A gigabit
| internet connection could serve that in 22 hours. Pretty
| straightforward to do that.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > A million copies of a 10MB PDF is 10 terabytes. A
| gigabit internet connection could serve that in 22 hours.
| Pretty straightforward to do that.
|
| Yes, just so. The parent seemed to be arguing that it was
| too much to claim that it would take a few hours. I'd
| definitely call 22 hours at least a few!
| tzs wrote:
| That was at 10 MB per book, but that seems pretty high.
| Looking at the most popular books at Project Gutenberg
| suggests that 0.5 to 1.5 MB is where most fall.
| xani_ wrote:
| > The reason why the fear is irrational is that the
| digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by
| the inherent ability of people to consume new
| information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no
| difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen"
| on your computer. Most of them would have never been read
| or even opened.
|
| It's not. They want you to pay them for the book instead
| of just getting it for free.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Libraries and books existed long before copyright."
|
| Yes, back in the ages when you needed a scribe or a huge
| printing press. It's not like knowledge and books were
| magically free.
|
| Now in the digital age we can create as many copies,
| without consuming physical material, as we want and
| distribute it globally.
|
| The realities are extremely different. Perhaps copyright
| could be amended, but I can't envision its complete removal
| being net beneficial.
| david38 wrote:
| Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright. I'll
| take today's world any day.
| xani_ wrote:
| Sure but I think we went too far. Current copyright
| protections are aimed squarely at keeping corporate
| profits, with insanely long protection periods that in
| most cases end up profiting the company insanely more
| than the author.
|
| Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in
| industries moving way faster than patent protection and
| patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the
| competition (or just patent troll).
| derefr wrote:
| There was quite a bit of time between when the invention
| of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing,
| and the invention of the concept of copyright.
| (Specifically, ~270 years -- Gutenberg was in the 1440s,
| and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was
| in 1710.)
|
| Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing
| of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) -- but
| this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-
| government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement
| of any conceptual property rights over published works
| per se.
| btdmaster wrote:
| The introduction of copyright by the royal censor had
| measurable negative effects on literacy in England[0].
|
| [0] https://archive.ph/ybifz
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Copyright wasn't the cause of the dropping price of
| books, copyright was a RESPONSE to the dropping price of
| books. I don't buy the causality you're drawing here at
| all.
|
| I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping
| the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
| Eliezer wrote:
| Assuming it worked as intended, you would not expect
| copyright to decrease the price of books, but to increase
| their number and quality.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Of course. The Gutenberg Copyright. :-)
| pessimizer wrote:
| The way that monopolies make everything cheaper.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
|
| There was even a period (ancient greece to middle-ages)
| where the very notion of "author" did not make much sense
| as books would get copied and augmented many times over by
| new copyists/contributors.
|
| Kind of a sad that we lost this practice along the way,
| where a book was a living, evolving thing.
| danrochman wrote:
| Don't we just call that a "wiki" now? (I'm only half-
| kidding.)
| mafuy wrote:
| Sounds pretty accurate.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This is far outside the Overton window, but I think it will
| be what wins out in the end. All information deserves to be
| free.
|
| The society that used it will grow with the value of the
| information. That value can then be captured through
| increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to
| pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual
| process.
|
| Since all information released in this process is free-to-
| use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system
| behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.
| soared wrote:
| Is this argument saying authors should get a payment from
| land owners based on the value provided by their books?
|
| How do you measure the value of Harry Potter's impact on
| society?
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| That's an implementation detail. Do we first agree that
| the system proposed would lead to a better society? Would
| lead to the pie growing by a lot? Would stop heaps of
| wasteful processes?
|
| Since people already give away information for free - see
| open source software, wikipedia, all sorts of other
| sources, you wouldn't need to be even close to accurate
| to start with. Can we agree that Wikipedia provides at
| least $1b/year in value? Great, give them $100m/year and
| we'll work from there. Linux? Let's go with another
| $100m. Firefox? Stable Diffusion? That guy in
| Nebraska[0]?
|
| I'm sure someone else can come up with a better
| implementation, but a way is through a very small subset
| of people, when trying to download a book or use other
| information, they get entered into an auction shared by
| some others who also want to use that information. Anyone
| who bids more than the median gets to use the information
| and pays the median, anyone who bids less than the median
| doesn't - but gets the median value in return.
|
| [0]: https://xkcd.com/2347/
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| Writing a book is more than writing down information, it's
| collecting, organizing, and refining presentation to be
| maximally understandable.
|
| That will just not happen outside of the rare scholarly
| altruist.
| einpoklum wrote:
| "That will just not happen outside of how it has happened
| with most books ever written and happens with most books
| being written today."
|
| There, fixed that for you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading
| knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high
| enough that people actually do it.
|
| Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing
| books for the interested to read them. Any function they
| provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that
| readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the
| mission of most libraries is to support the publishing
| industry. The history of libraries has been to _defend_
| themselves from the publishing industry, which historically
| has always fought to have them shut down.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _keeping incentives for writing books high enough that
| people actually do it_
|
| Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out
| of financial motivation.
|
| It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to
| every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by
| profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks
| for the craft of writing.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| You make a claim without substantiating it.
| lucideer wrote:
| The unsubstantiated claim is "writing must be financially
| incentivized". That's not my claim to substantiate.
|
| If you think that claim is somehow self-evident, it may
| be worth considering your biases.
| xani_ wrote:
| That's just weird way of saying that writing pays shit for
| vast majority of writers.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >"Libraries are [a] part of a balancing act between spreading
| knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high
| enough that people actually do it."
|
| Not convinced.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| https://openlibrary.org/
|
| So shadowy!
| bluesign wrote:
| I mean it is saddens me more, after same 2000 years, affording
| to buy a book is a problem in this society.
| rikroots wrote:
| Publishers, and the authors whose work they publish, and the
| estates of dead authors - they like money. I don't blame the
| authors: writing a good book takes a lot of time, effort and
| frustration. But when a book leaves copyright for the public
| domain, there needs to be mechanisms in place which allow
| anyone to find, download, copy and read that book without
| paying the full price. We don't yet have robust mechanisms in
| place to make that happen.
|
| My personal view is that the length of current copyright laws
| are a joke, and should be more in line with patents. It's a
| very minority view. At least we still have a few second-hand
| bookshops around where we can pick up used books at an
| affordable price.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Google could also provide free access to their algorithm for
| people to tweak and improve, as well as their raw index for
| others to provide better search on top of it.
|
| But they like free distribution with other people's intelectual
| products, not theirs.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they
| please?
|
| This is my whole problem with the idea of copyright, patents,
| and Imaginary Property laws.
|
| We finally invent ways to share information for basically free
| planet wide, and a bunch of fuckin lawyers fuck it all up for
| the exclusive benefit to themselves and the oligarchs who can
| afford them.
|
| When I was 17 I wrote a TI-85 program for the chemistry class I
| was in, and sold a copy to a classmate. I only charged $1
| because it would have felt awful to chart $50 for something I
| still had after I "sold" it.
|
| Some laws should be broken because they were created by corrupt
| governments at the behest of oligarchs.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Dude's laughing because he sold it on for $50. 7 times.
|
| But I'm with you. Sell it and fuck it. If the guy made a
| million and you're happy with $1, all the better we are for
| it.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I mean, I was the only nerd in possibly the whole school
| with a link cable. So he didn't sell anything. :)
|
| But I get your point. If everyone was that generous we'd
| all be better off. And what better way to spread that
| message than by walking the walk?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Google Books was 90% there, I wish it had been allowed to
| succeed."
|
| Yes, it would be so much better if an opaque "tech" company was
| collecting data on every "patron" to inform its online
| advertising services business and other commercial projects.
|
| While Google might have access to some of the same material,
| not to mention an endless stream of garbage one would never
| find in a library, as an organization, it does not share the
| same principles.
|
| https://cdn.ifla.org/files/assets/faife/codesofethics/united...
| O__________O wrote:
| FAQ for the related project:
|
| http://pilimi.org/faq.html
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| It boggles my mind that people can only mention that this
| resource is illegal without pointing out it's the best library
| humanity has ever made.
|
| It has been the goal of the Google cofounders, Carnegie, and
| great civilizations since antiquity to make something like this.
|
| Are people's thoughts really so moulded by their surroundings,
| that they cannot recognize a wonder in front of them?
| mhb wrote:
| If you invest more than 10 seconds of thought in this line of
| reasoning, its flaws become obvious and it applies to every
| field in which this argument is made - stories, drugs,
| software, movies. Compensating creators based on the marginal
| cost of reproducing their work is not a paradigm for
| maintaining the flow of creative works.
|
| Maybe you have some junk counterargument that creative people
| will work for free as well as for material goods. Or who cares
| about the future, let's distribute what we have now. If you
| think creative people will work for free just for the joy of
| creating, then you've never worked on the last 20% of a project
| which is often not that joyful.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't think they said anything like what you said they
| said. They said it's a Wonder.
|
| Like, I don't think it's _right_ to spend thousands of lives
| and decades of time of slave-labor building the Great
| Pyramids, but it's absolutely a Wonder, and nobody denies
| this.
|
| This library project is absolutely a Wonder, however right or
| wrong you might ultimately believe it to be, and as the
| poster said, it has been attempted many times and never come
| anywhere close to this effort.
| mhb wrote:
| Fair enough. I guess I assumed that in the context of a
| community that surely appreciates the marvel that is the
| internet, there was a secondary objective in mentioning it.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Let me explicitly state this, then. I do not care at all if a
| new movie is never made or a new book is never published. We
| have multiple lifetimes of quality music already, why do we
| need to incentivize creations relevant to the modern culture?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Because not all entertainment is equally interesting to
| you.
|
| The next book never written could have been your favorite
| book. Or game or movie or show or entertainer or content
| creator. With zero substitutes.
|
| "I don't care about future things because someone already
| was paid for making content that I can enjoy today" seems
| like a basic logical error.
| infp_arborist wrote:
| I'd like to start from a worldview of abundance and invite
| you to imagine a future in which we (as a society) will be
| able to answer a related question: What are the prerequisites
| for accomplishing the missing, painful 20% of any project out
| there?
| mhb wrote:
| What you're asking is how to get people to work. The world
| and economics have already provided many alternatives. Pick
| your poison.
| infp_arborist wrote:
| Yes, there _is_ a reality we know. But that does not mean
| that things _ought_ to be the same in the future.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| One day every human will have a unicorn that poops
| hamburgers and pees beer.
|
| Until then we will have to work, allocate resources and
| carry on as normal.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| It seems like it would cost around 2k for the hardware to make
| a complete mirror of this library (31TB for this library, and
| similar again for Lib Genesis). It's a lot, but considering
| what used to be spent on the beautiful buildings to host major
| libraries, it's something that is within the reach of a very
| large number of people.
|
| It does require being OK to fall foul of copyright law in most
| countries though, which I expect keeps a much larger number of
| people away.
| tene80i wrote:
| In the name of that ideal, would you be willing for _your_ work
| to be given away for free and for your income to vanish?
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Anything I've ever done is freely available! I have several
| homes. So yeah.
| system2 wrote:
| Can you teach us how to provide everything for free yet
| still being able to buy houses? I would kill to know this
| unheard knowledge.
| massinstall wrote:
| Great, so if you never needed to be paid for anything then
| you either don't live on earth or we're obviously simply
| born to rich parents and inherited most of what you needed,
| or maybe even everything. Even then you could strive to
| figure out how skewed and subjective your perspective is.
| tene80i wrote:
| Honestly, congratulations on your talent and good fortune.
|
| Did you have the choice in giving your work away or was it
| made for you?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yes, it's called academic publishing.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Yes? I'm working on an indie game in my spare time and I
| intend to upload it to the pirate bay myself.
| tene80i wrote:
| That's your spare time. I'm talking about people's jobs.
| Would you sacrifice your primary income so that people
| could enjoy your work for free?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but if my primary income was
| dependent on people not being free, I'd change my primary
| income.
| tene80i wrote:
| You think books having a cost is a restriction of your
| freedom? Why? And why books, but not your work?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Because copying information from one computer to another
| costs nothing (except for the electricity and internet
| access). Any attempt to restrict that capability is
| restricting your freedom.
|
| The moment my work (I assume you mean work as in "labor")
| becomes that easy to replicate, it will become worthless.
| But there are certain laws of physics which make it quite
| improbable to happen.
| tene80i wrote:
| Pricing something beyond its marginal cost of delivery is
| a restriction on your freedom? I suppose it's true, in
| the way not being allowed to punch someone is a
| restriction on your freedom.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > Pricing something beyond its marginal cost of delivery
| is a restriction on your freedom?
|
| No. Choosing to price something you own beyond its
| marginal cost of delivery is not a restriction on
| freedom.
|
| What is a restriction on freedom is not allowing others
| to take something they have (a collection of words /
| pattern of bits / a SD card / a hard disk) and choose to
| give that away to others. The fact that in an internet-
| connected world allowing that will result in most people
| being able to acquire most files for no more than their
| marginal cost of delivery is a result of freedom, not a
| restriction on it.
|
| It seems extremely unlikely that you can keep the price
| on any widely distributed collection of bits much above 0
| for an appreciable length of time without governments
| intervening to remove that freedom of sharing and copying
| from people.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Copying a file doesn't hurt anyone.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Will you kindly share with us a copy of all your
| computers, devices and digital records? Copying those
| files doesn't hurt anyone.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| No, I will not. Why would I?
|
| Freedom to copy != obligation to copy.
|
| Your arguments are erroneous, at best.
| kgwgk wrote:
| I'm trying to establish what your argument is.
|
| So if I get hold of your files somehow I have the freedom
| to copy, right?
| kgwgk wrote:
| Will you kindly share with us a copy of all your
| computers, devices and digital records or are you going
| to continue to restrict our freedom?
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I don't think that works - the freedom he's talking about
| is the freedom of the person who owns the computers,
| devices and digital records.
|
| In the world of IP and copyright law, the ownership
| rights that go with owning a piece of media with
| particular patterns are restricted. You are not allowed
| to dispose of the patterns on a DVD as you might wish
| despite supposedly 'owning' it. This is clearly a
| difference from previously understood models of what
| ownership was.
|
| > The ordinary subjects of property are well known, and
| easily conceived . . . But property, when applied to
| ideas, or literary and intellectual compositions, is
| perfectly new and surprising . . . by far the most
| comprehensive denomination of it would be a property in
| nonsense - Lord Gardenston 1773
| kgwgk wrote:
| "You think books having a cost is a restriction of your
| freedom? Why? And why books, but not your work?"
|
| "Because copying information from one computer to another
| costs nothing (except for the electricity and internet
| access). Any attempt to restrict that capability is
| restricting your freedom."
|
| Why books, and not his work?
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Why do you think the author of the comment is not
| applying the same principle to themselves? I assume that
| they either have a job where they don't need the
| government to restrict other peoples rights of freedom of
| speech in order to get paid, or that they do apply it to
| themselves.
|
| I don't think anyone is arguing that everyone must make
| all digital information freely available to everyone
| else. Nobody is saying that books _must_ be provided for
| free. The argument is that nobody should be restricted
| from sharing their data if that 's what they want to do.
| That will naturally result in most widely shared digital
| files being made available for free, but it's because
| those with them exercised a right to share rather than
| because anyone was compelled to do anything.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > The argument is that nobody should be restricted from
| sharing their files if that's what they want to do.
|
| Don't you want to restrict people from sharing their
| files - even if that's what they want to do - when those
| files are things like your banking documents or medical
| records?
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > Don't you want to restrict people from sharing their
| files - even if that's what they want to do - when those
| files are things like your banking documents or medical
| records?
|
| Yeah, I'm not strongly arguing for this view, merely
| arguing that it genuinely does represent a restriction on
| freedom (sometimes restrictions on freedom are sensible,
| although in this case I think it'd be better to try to
| find other ways to solve the problems of recompensing
| creators).
|
| If I have to take a stance on it, I'd probably say that
| people sharing personal and private information on me
| without my permission (and by the way credit agencies,
| governments, friends with facebook accounts and
| advertising companies do in fact do this) should be
| treated as a separate issue, and considered much more
| under laws against harassment or libel (which are
| themselves restrictions on freedom of speech too!) or
| perhaps breach of contract.
|
| I'm not even sure banking documents or medical records
| actually fall under copyright - and if they do, I don't
| think the copyright belongs to the patient, so I don't
| think it's copyright that is used in these cases anyway.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Ok. By the way I don't suggest that those examples are
| related to copyright. They were about the more general
| "The argument is that nobody should be restricted from
| sharing their data if that's what they want to do." There
| are many reasons why people is being restricted from
| "sharing their data".
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| The apple tree gives away its fruit so that its seeds
| might spread.
|
| When a fence is built around the apple tree, it is a
| restriction on the ability of the apple tree to spread
| its seeds and on those that desire the apples, both.
|
| I don't personally have a strong stance on this
| particular issue, but perhaps this analogy will help you
| understand the view of people who believe that knowledge
| should be free.
| tene80i wrote:
| It's a good analogy and I do understand the perspective.
|
| But I think it is very convenient that it applies to the
| work these people want to consume (which should be free),
| and not to the work they perform (which should be paid).
|
| Why should the software engineer be paid but the author
| not? Why is the written word information but not the
| code?
|
| I would trust the motives more if there was a general
| coherence to it all, beyond the consumption of media.
| Information comes in many forms.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I generally assume that when people talk like that, that
| they believe that software engineers should _not_ be
| paid, and that they get over their cognitive dissonance
| by saying something on the order of, "but since they are
| paid there's no point in me working for free," without
| noticing that there's still a disconnect there.
|
| There's a very big Open Source / Free as in Freedom / AND
| Free as in Beer contingent on HN.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Usually these kinds of views come along with ideas about
| other models that can recompense creators (including
| software engineers).
|
| For example, the Lawyer example is used often - once the
| lawyer makes the argument, it's in the public domain and
| can be used by others, but you still pay the lawyer to
| compose the argument. There are also models where the
| durable software artifacts are free, but you pay people
| to support your use of them. Then there are the older
| models that used to be used a lot in the music and art
| world. A wealthy benefactor (or in this day and age,
| crowd) pays for a trusted artist / musican / architect /
| coder to create something, both for their enjoyment but
| also for their fame and renown.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Copyright law is a very clear restriction on freedom of
| speech. That's not to argue that it might not be a valid
| restriction, or justified or something, but I don't
| really see how it could be argued not to be a restriction
| of freedom.
|
| And it becomes very obvious that if people can share
| stuff for free, someone somewhere will. That combination
| of freedom to share speech and ability to do so at 0
| marginal cost results in books being shared for no cost.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Its really a false dichotomy that freely available
| information deprived creative people from making a
| living.
| tene80i wrote:
| True, but we're not talking about generally available
| information like wikipedia, we're talking about people's
| work who didn't expect it to end up like this. Should
| they have a say in it? If not, why not? And if you just
| mean information, does that mean you think fiction for
| example should be excluded from this sort of initiative?
| fortran77 wrote:
| Why does Hacker News like to support some industries, like
| Electric Cars, and Rust, and Nuclear Fusion, and wants to destroy
| others like the ability for people to make money writing books?
| absolutelynobo wrote:
| The best way to succeed in a world already dominated is to
| adopt the strategy maximally confusing to the incumbents.
| xigoi wrote:
| Because climate change is bad for society and universal access
| to information is good for society.
| habibur wrote:
| > We do not link to the Pirate Library Mirror from this blog.
| Please find it yourself.
|
| Good. That's why their site has survived this far.
| tomerbd wrote:
| What would I do without zlibrary this project is awesome
| nathell wrote:
| There are ways we as a society could endorse these kinds of
| libraries while also keeping authors incentivized.
|
| Here's how I see it:
| https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
| riedel wrote:
| I like the way Bandcamp works (don't want to talk about the
| business model of their new owner, just about the service they
| offer in general): bandcamp nags me to pay after spending a
| decent amount of time on sth. I could use an alternative client
| app and never pay, but I do not.
|
| I love digital libraries for the fact that I am able to quickly
| look into a book without going through some tiresome payment
| and DRM stages only to discover that I wasted money. Also I
| like that I can buy hardcopies (even limited ones) . Further I
| can support creatoes with subscriptions.
|
| To add to that Bandcamp triggered quite a few archiving efforts
| and releases of remastered obscure music. Artists like atom TM
| are releasing there whole back catalogue easily accessible...
| scorpios77 wrote:
| system2 wrote:
| Mixed feelings about this. I want to have access to millions of
| books and I also support archiving information this way. 20 years
| ago I would be drooling over this. But now, I think about those
| writers who spent countless hours creating their masterpieces and
| their stolen work.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Especially the dead authors who's great-grandchildren might
| have to go four years instead of three between trading in the
| Mercedes.
|
| Keeps me up at night...
| visarga wrote:
| Download only for sampling, buy for serious use.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I buy a lot of books, skip the kindle download and just dump
| the epubs in my sync service.
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