[HN Gopher] Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws ...
___________________________________________________________________
Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with
publishers
Author : notRobot
Score : 224 points
Date : 2024-03-16 07:47 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (abcnews.go.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (abcnews.go.com)
| stop50 wrote:
| In Germany the price is capped. Everyone has to sell a new book
| at the price that was set by the author. This also applies to
| libraries, for the usage libraries have to pay 3-4 cent per
| lending to an organisation that distributes the money to the
| authors(the organisation depends on tge type of the print)
| rightbyte wrote:
| That sounds like a price fix, not a cap?
| gandalfian wrote:
| Yeah he means fixed. It's a common way to stop bookshops
| being squeezed out. They abolished it in the UK in the 90s
| which combined with internet sellers emerging led to the odd
| effect that book prices didn't really rise for 20 years.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US, new books were mostly cover price until into
| maybe the 90s? There were some exceptions. It wasn't
| uncommon for larger stores to offer some bestsellers at
| something like a 15% discount. It was sort of an innovation
| when a large independent bookstore opened in Cambridge MA
| and sold most or maybe all their books at a 15% discount.
|
| There was also a larger set of fair trade laws in the US
| because manufacturers didn't want their products to be
| discounted which, among other things, probably got their
| products on the shelves of small stores that perhaps
| couldn't otherwise afford to carry them.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| They want to introduce that too in Poland and it's an awful
| idea.
|
| If you set a price that's obligatory to sell book for, it won't
| become cheaper, it will go up.
|
| And I just won't buy it. I see exactly zero reasons why I
| should care for local bookshops. I'm not made out of money and
| I won't buy stuff from them only to keep them alive.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| To clarify myself - for example, when new book releases, it
| has suggested price of 60 zl.
|
| Online I can get it for 40. In physical shop for 60; if it's
| there. Because most likely it won't be. And I can't order,
| none of the bookshops nearby do this.
|
| Why should I be happy at unified price if all it means is
| that I will pay 1/3 more?
| bluish29 wrote:
| The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks)
| is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market
| value then you still can use a public/university library to get
| it. This became actually more of a cliche than an argument over
| time.
|
| Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in
| general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library
| capabilities and required pay per lend and restrict number of
| simultaneous lends. For papers, many universities canceled access
| contracts because it became too costly. Not to mention that
| smaller universities couldn't afford most of these subscriptions
| anyway.
|
| Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market
| hardly work there.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| If I buy an ebook, can I give it "used" to a library? I would
| like to, but I don't even know if that's a thing.
|
| (Let's assume for the sake of the question that the book I buy
| is also DRM free.)
| jacoblambda wrote:
| For textbooks? No. And nowadays a lot of them also expire
| after a year since by then the student likely no longer needs
| it.
|
| It's a really gross industry
| ghaff wrote:
| I would question that you don't need a university textbook
| after a year. I can't say I remember specific examples but
| I'm pretty sure I referred to earlier textbooks for later
| engineering classes.
| bluish29 wrote:
| I still refer to my undergrad textbooks in maths and
| physics till this day. There are usually the basics and
| you need to review them a lot if you are working in STEM
| fields.
| harshreality wrote:
| In theory, maybe. In practice, no.
|
| In theory, a publisher could sell you an ebook, declare that
| you own it and can transfer it (like a digital right of first
| sale) as long as you don't keep a copy.
|
| In practice, it would be a hassle for libraries to verify
| that permission, so even if you had such a book, they might
| say thanks but no thanks. Essentially all ebooks are sold
| under license that each book is for your use only, and no
| transfers are allowed. Because ebooks are licensed, and not
| sold complete with a right of first sale, retailers can set
| whatever conditions they want depending on who they sell to,
| and the market can't arbitrage. That's why libraries have to
| pay more for an ebook they're allowed to lend 10 times than
| you have to pay for the same ebook on Amazon.
| miah_ wrote:
| Its very rare that "buying" a ebook results in you "owning"
| the copy you bought, at best its a rental. A physical book
| though, if you are holding it in your hands, you own it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, surprised (not surprised?) to see the used-textbook
| market seemingly gone now when I was recently visiting my
| daughter at the University of Kansas.
|
| It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick
| and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the
| university's student union. Never mind the savings for
| students.
| bluish29 wrote:
| Even with paper textbooks, publishers will now provide online
| assignments (which is convenient for universities) and other
| online materials which you will not be able to sell (it will
| expire) with the book. So they force students to buy new
| textbook for each class.
| samtho wrote:
| This is classic rent seeking behavior. The more insidious
| aspect is that this is foisted upon a captive audience of
| kids/young adults that agreed to tens of thousands in non-
| dischargable debt when they turned 18.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The crazy thing to me is that for a lot of the classes that
| use these online materials, nothing has changed in 50
| years. 100-300 classes are largely the same as they were
| before digital learning.
|
| The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination
| problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors
| and departments) are not the people paying (the students).
| I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced
| professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students,
| and for departments to be required to cover the costs for
| scholarship students.
|
| I'll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open
| source textbooks and articles from the library if that were
| the case.
| bluish29 wrote:
| > I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced
| professors to pay the same textbook fees as their
| students, and for departments to be required to cover the
| costs for scholarship students.
|
| What will happen is that universities will pass these
| costs to all students where now paying students will pay
| more.
|
| A better regulation will be encouraging and funding more
| open access materials that can be used and require public
| funding receivers to adopt them or decrease the funding
| and cap the tuition increases.
| beej71 wrote:
| One of my students told me they all pirate textbooks. I
| haven't been a student in a university for almost 30 years
| but I remember what it was like. It was a scam back then.
|
| When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but
| that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore
| out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test
| Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used
| that as a place to sell and trade used books for a fraction
| the cost of the bookstore.
|
| But that mechanism no longer works in the ebook era. So I'm
| not surprised students found another way.
|
| (Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing
| his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he
| wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the
| print shop (pre-internet). I've continued the tradition of
| writing my own books and putting them online for free for the
| students. Greed over educational materials is a poor look.
| Also, AI is coming.)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Is the state of open source textbooks that bad? I guess the
| top link is a U of MN site, which is laudable and a Big10
| school, but not exactly a banner carrier.
|
| It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies
| of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of
| greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess
| biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition,
| but basic math? physics? chemistry? economics? history?
| languages?
|
| Of course institutes of higher learning have well exposed
| themselves as being anything but in the last couple
| decades. So it doesn't really surprise me. The entire "open
| coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges
| realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to
| tuition.
|
| But like your father, I'm surprised some retired teachers
| don't do this as a side project, or an emeritus professor,
| or SOMEONE that wants to leave a legacy.
|
| You could have a site that presents concepts in entirely
| different fashions, so you could choose a path that suits
| you, or if a particular concept didn't stick, have it
| presented a different way.
|
| State institutions in particular should be required to
| produce and use open textbooks and courseware. Rile up some
| republicans to make it contingent on getting their state
| funding (they love doing that).
|
| This is even more egregious since there is the entire
| British Commonwealth of nations/english speakers and their
| educational systems to leverage.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly
| when the colleges realized this might cut into their
| annual 10% hike to tuition.
|
| My sense is that there's quite a bit of "open coursework"
| out there if you're talking about mostly raw materials.
|
| If you're talking about MOOCs, universities started
| pulling back after it became obvious that they had mostly
| "not lived up to expectations." The combination of the
| students most needing them largely lacking motivation,
| the fact that credentials weren't generally viewed as
| valuable, the lack of lab and tutorial resources, and VC-
| companies pivoting are probably just the main factors.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Check out LibreText and OpenStax.
| lukan wrote:
| "Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing
| his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he
| wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the
| print shop. I've continued the tradition of writing my own
| books and putting them online for free for the students."
|
| Thanks for that. My professors were in part like yours. But
| some other professors (I think it was about MBA folks, not
| IT people) apparently urge everyone to buy their really
| expensive book. And if you did not, you would have no idea
| about the weird case in chapter 2, he makes the exams about
| ..
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Free market hardly work there.
|
| You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing
| books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I mean, the free market is working pretty well.
|
| http://libgen.rs/
|
| The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I mean, the free market is working pretty well.
|
| > http://libgen.rs/
|
| Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that
| markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that
| are hardly controllable by the government.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating
| books published by cartels is unethical.
| c0pium wrote:
| Please explain your alternative mechanism for
| compensating the author for their work.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I'm not proposing an alternative mechanism. I think
| people who can comfortably afford to pay the asked price
| for a book should of course do just that. On the other
| hand, for the billions of those who do not have that
| privilege, I wholeheartedly recommend piracy. It is of no
| cost to the author/publisher (since they weren't going to
| pay anyway) and of tremendous positive impact for
| equality and social mobility for the community. In a
| perfect world piracy would be an unfair and unnecessary
| venture. In this one, for many people it is absolutely
| justified.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating
| books published by cartels is unethical.
|
| It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about
| which evil you consider to be the worse.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation
| depending on both the reader and the publishere/author.
| An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published
| by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely.
| For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a
| novel written by a niche author? probably not the right
| thing to do.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| How is this a market if Boone is paying? If anything, this
| is communism?
|
| You can't even have a market of IP without government
| granted ownership of IP.
|
| This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn't work
| here
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The bad communism is when the government takes your stuff
| and you don't have it anymore. This is "communism" in the
| same way that everyone being able to breathe the air or
| speak English without paying a proprietor for the right
| is "communism". This is often a motte and bailey that
| communists use, but you're attacking the motte.
|
| You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for
| air. But there is. This is the market served by
| submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA
| filters.
|
| If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a
| market to supply them, they'd just generally be really
| cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare.
| Likewise there would still be a market for creating
| works, because people would pay for commissions. There
| might not be as many of them, but there would still be a
| market.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You can't even have a market of IP without government
| granted ownership of IP.
|
| Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP
| protections. Business and prosperity boomed!
|
| Consider also the incredible success of open source
| software.
| harvey9 wrote:
| On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a
| novel with the same themes as yours has.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If one company has a monopoly on faucets, another has one
| on pipes, another has one on valves, you're trying to argue
| that there is plenty of competition for "plumbing supplies"
| but that doesn't help you if you need a faucet and there's
| only one supplier.
|
| Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point
| of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all
| fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would
| want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at
| the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And
| sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-
| in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the
| context of lending libraries is for when that _isn 't_ the
| case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local
| library because you can get it for free from the authors.
| c0pium wrote:
| That's not how this marketplace works at all. A better
| analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs,
| yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who
| has their own monopoly on creating Porsches.
|
| There's a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where
| publishers need to get works from creators and license
| them to customers. They want to maximize their own
| profits, but they also need to make a certain amount
| revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Given that book prices are rising faster than _anything
| else in the economy_ the market place isn't working at
| all.
|
| Let them eat competition.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the
| regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less
| stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make
| maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X
| % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the
| fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be
| maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be
| minimizing market disruption to get a chosen amount of extra
| creative production
| ses1984 wrote:
| >Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was
| originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those
| years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in
| libraries
|
| I'm nitpicking but this isn't less regulation, it's different
| regulation. Some would even say it's more. You're reducing a
| number but adding complexity with the percent sales
| requirement.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Plus, if you got rid of or reduced copyright, publishers
| would just find other ways to engage in cartel-like
| behavior and continue to screw everyone.
|
| I can't think of any case where regulation/government was
| _reduced_ and companies responded with something less
| profitable for the company.
| Retric wrote:
| Airlines are often brought up as becoming cheaper with
| less regulations.
|
| While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient
| aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room
| for a cheaper fair. That's exactly the kind of thing
| regulators and the free market may come to a different
| compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Anything else you've noticed the free market compromising
| on re: air travel.
| ghaff wrote:
| Quality generally with many manufactured goods. There are
| health and safety regulations but if there were a
| requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what
| my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would
| probably increase significantly.
|
| In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to
| generally buy a car without modern safety features.
| (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or
| lower safety ratings within the regulatory framework.)
|
| A common thread is that when push comes to shove, a lot
| of consumers will choose the lower price.
| harvey9 wrote:
| The straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but
| I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal
| conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or tools for the occasional household use. You might not
| want junk but that table saw you use maybe a handful of
| times a year may not have to be as high-end as what a
| carpenter might use most days.
| thayne wrote:
| Which would be fine if you could tell if you could
| actually reliably find high quality products. But I'm
| increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between
| paying more for quality and paying more for overpriced
| junk.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The market in question was airlines. US airlines have
| rather a lot of competitors:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_the_Uni
| ted...
|
| How many does Boeing have?
| Retric wrote:
| Luggage. Airlines make quite a bit hauling cargo on
| passenger flights so they are essentially subsidizing
| seats as long as people don't check bags and charging
| inflated prices when they do.
|
| Convenience especially in terms of number of flights.
| This gets into a bunch of economic and logistical issues,
| but airlines are happy to abandon less profitable areas.
| While regulators want regular service even if the demand
| isn't quite there
|
| Service. The minimum number of attendants is based on
| safety, airlines would happily cut those workers.
|
| Safety.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| How they respond depends on whether the regulation causes
| or mitigates market power. for example,Something like
| deregulating the last mile for internet is probably not
| going to end well because the incumbents control that and
| that is the mote that is expensive enough to recreate
| that it causes monopoly. Copyright causes monopoly
| because it stops marginal price being able to equal
| marginal cost by allowing only one person the right to
| provide the copyrighted thing. get rid of it and price
| goes to zero pretty fast because cost of electronic
| diatribution is near zero
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I can't think of any case where regulation/government
| was reduced and companies responded with something less
| profitable for the company.
|
| When the government deregulated air travel prices,
| routes, and schedules.
| ghaff wrote:
| And if we're talking textbooks, I'm not sure what cutting
| copyright to 14 years actually accomplishes. I'm also not
| sure how you dole out X% of sales to libraries that might
| be interested. Especially given libraries are often ill-
| defined.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I don't think anyone would really complain if such an act
| assumed "libraries" == "public libraries", a very well
| defined term that's already enshrined in federal
| legislation.
| shiandow wrote:
| Fine, abolish copyright then, let's see what happens.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We know what will happen. Germany had no copyright
| protections in the 19th century. The country's economy
| boomed, making Germany the industrial powerhouse of
| Europe.
| c0pium wrote:
| Can you expand on this point? Having no copyright being a
| leading cause of industrial expansion seems pretty
| tenuous. Especially given that they now have copyright
| and other countries also had booming economies at about
| the same time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The printers went looking for things to print, and they
| printed anything and everything. The easiest way to get
| material to print, besides copying other printers'
| output, was to commission how-to manuals. Germany was
| flooded with how-to informational manuals on every topic.
|
| Much like the software industry. Free software runs the
| world.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| It is less regulation in that it gets the governmemt out of
| interfering with the market outcome (marginal price of
| dostribution is effectively zero so market outcome without
| copyright is zero price electeonic diatribution). The
| percentage sales requirement is just an easy way to force
| intelligent behavior by copyright holders for public
| libraries to lessen the market failure for the poors caused
| by copyright. I am open to simpler ideas as long as the
| outcome is copyright fuckery does not result in no
| provision of knowledge for the poors and only extractive
| pricing for a short time period that incentizes additional
| content creation for the rest of us.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| What you really want here is for ebooks to be subject to
| First Sale. In general "licensing" should be restricted to
| the rights of the copyright holder, e.g. giving someone a
| license to permanently increase the number of copies that
| exist in the world, as when an author licenses a publisher.
| If someone has bought a _copy_ , that should be theirs, they
| should be free to transfer it to other devices and other
| people as long as there continues to be only as many
| permanent copies as they've purchased, and the copyright
| holder can't impose any further restrictions on that,
| essentially as an anti-trust anti-tying rule because
| copyright is a monopoly.
|
| Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do
| the thing they've always done.
| jzb wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense to transfer the concept of
| first sale to digital goods. Even assuming a scheme that
| allows a library to fully control lending so that only one
| copy is in use at a time, a digital copy is not going to
| wear out. So publishers lose out on sales of popular titles
| when a library would need to refresh a physical copy.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It takes longer for a physical copy to wear out than
| copyright terms should last to begin with. Also, you're
| allowed to repair books -- because it's your book.
| c0pium wrote:
| I own multiple books that are over 100 years old. They
| weren't even that expensive.
| j_maffe wrote:
| If you're going to nitpick on this, fine... some research
| can be done on the number of uses a book can go through
| before it wears out and apply that to the e-book. It's
| certainly more than 26 and absolutely more than 2 years
| (how this 2 years condition is acceptable I'll never
| know)
| knome wrote:
| Being free to share information is the natural state. The
| copyright is an artificial restriction introduced to
| allow authors to benefit from their works, and by proxy,
| the publishers to whom they sell those rights. Perpetual
| rent seeking is not now nor was it ever the purpose of
| those laws. They certainly have nothing to do with some
| sort of physical copy planned obsolescence system.
|
| One of the best features of Valve's Steam platform is
| exactly that it gives users the ability to perpetually
| install the software they have purchased, even if the
| publisher other removes it from the platform. If users
| were allowed to resale their purchased games, it would be
| nearly at full par with first sale doctrine.
|
| Digital systems are a modern bypassing of such prior
| conventions and laws, and it makes perfect sense to
| extend them in that direction with time.
| c0pium wrote:
| What you're proposing would require a literal quantum shift
| in DRM, where it's only possible to use a copy of something
| if that thing hasn't been itself copied somewhere else.
| That world would ironically unite the desires of
| publishers, creators, and actual archivists, leaving only
| the pirates out in the cold. Whoever figures out how to do
| that is going to make a fortune.
| j_maffe wrote:
| No you wouldn't. It's not about DRM, it's about the
| contractual agreements between libraries and publishers.
| They already track the number of times it's borrowed and
| for how long. OP is suggesting that it should be dealt
| with the same as a hard copy, i.e. only one person can
| borrow it at a time.
| c0pium wrote:
| Proposing that any rights holder would accept a solution
| where there is no technical control preventing arbitrary
| copying is an extraordinary claim which requires
| extraordinary evidence. I'm not saying it wouldn't be
| cool, I'm saying it's never going to happen.
|
| Secondly, you should reread their post, it's much broader
| than your interpretation. They were envisioning a world
| where the device and copying restrictions we have today
| don't exist.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I'm not sure we're on the same page. How do you think
| libraries loan out ebooks, currently? DRM for this exact
| functionality is already implemented by most publishers
| elijaht wrote:
| > that it should be dealt with the same as a hard copy,
| i.e. only one person can borrow it at a time.
|
| That's how it works in every library system I have dealt
| with
| j_maffe wrote:
| Yeah same but as the article states, there are extra
| terms in the agreement such as a maximum of 26 loans and
| a two-year renewal, whichever comes first. And the ebook
| is usually 4 times more expensive than the physical one
| just for that period. It should be treated just like a
| hard copy in all these manners.
| 8note wrote:
| In a zero regulation world, you consider either that there's
| no copyrights, or that copyrights have infinite length
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in
| general) become mainly E-books
|
| I don't know about textbooks, but the overall share of
| publishing industry revenue that comes from ebooks is really
| low. Something like 7%, and falling steadily. I had assumed it
| was much larger.
|
| https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I've never actually heard that argument, must have been
| invented by the highway robbery textbook market since I was in
| college.
|
| Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses
| functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling,
| there won't be any free market in specific publications within
| living human lifetimes.
|
| Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the
| video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only
| preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for
| remasters and releases on new platforms.
|
| The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that
| is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you
| simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward
| through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up,
| scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are consumer-priced scanners that are already pretty
| good at supporting de-warping and OCR. (Glossy pages work
| less well.) I'm surprised I haven't seen a better iPhone app
| --at least one without a subscription fee. But we're
| definitely very close.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Free market works fine. You are welcome to write and release
| any book you want at whatever cost you want. Authors require
| lots of money, support costs to create, illustrate, bundle,
| bind, and ship books. And they won't waste their time doing
| that without a profit. Lots of people work for and support
| those companies and it's getting more expensive as minimum
| wages increase.
|
| You are just reacting to this because "free for me". What
| industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try
| and explain in your response when I say the same about your
| "product" needing regulation.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Why do you bring up the authors like they're the primary ones
| being harmed? Most aren't making money to begin with because
| they get such a small piece of the pie. A typical contract
| might see them get 20-40% of the cut if they do the
| distribution and marketing themselves. The vast majority of
| authors are _not_ professional writers as a result, it 's
| just a side gig on top of other jobs. Authors also can't set
| their own prices (publishers and marketplaces have a big say)
| and depending on the terms, they may not get _any_ meaningful
| royalties. This is common in academic publishing for example.
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| > Free market hardly work there.
|
| This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to
| spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing
| industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers
| aren't buying it with their own money.
|
| The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is
| you do not have consumers spending their money on products they
| use.
| 14 wrote:
| For now I will teach my kids to pirate. Not the best solution
| because honestly I did pirate when I was poor then honestly
| tried to move away from those days and got a Netflix account
| and Amazon prime account but the amazon movie site is just so
| horrible. Every movie I click it wants me to buy or rent. I
| never did figure out a way to filter those from not showing up
| I don't know if that has changed but I ditched it. Then Netflix
| disabled the account sharing and I argue I wasn't really
| sharing I bought Netflix for my kids to use and I am divorced
| so that means at 2 different locations. It worked for a bit but
| now seems to detect the location change and I just said screw
| it and canceled. It was much more convenient to just pirate
| which was and still is so easy even my kids know how to find
| the shows they want. And when they get to university I imagine
| I will show them how to access text books and articles for
| free. Sad state of affairs as I really do want to contribute my
| fair share but not when it is pay hundreds of dollars for a new
| revision of a text book that didn't add any new context but
| simply rearranged the pages a bit so they can call it an new
| version. In the end the publishers are the problem no piracy so
| I do not feel bad one bit.
| ozim wrote:
| Not trying to throw a straw man argument, but from what I
| understand in that space is that there is no free market there.
|
| If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go
| to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good
| luck no one will read it.
| briandear wrote:
| Free market needs to be allowed to work. If enough universities
| cancel contracts, then publishers will have to adjust right?
| Why are we going to ask government to regulate publishing?
| Everything else they regulate/manipulate gets far more
| expensive. Health care for instance. Housing (especially in
| rent control cities.) Education. Transportation (note with
| deregulation of air travel, flying places became significantly
| more affordable.
| EvkoGS wrote:
| >Free market hardly work there.
|
| Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from
| Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw,
| FBI seized all of their domains recently.
|
| Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow
| subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something
| up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Free market hardly work there.
|
| Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not
| free market.
| ta988 wrote:
| yep so is buying back bank, mortgage and insurance companies
| pastage wrote:
| When ebooks hit off the public libraries in Stockholm and perhaps
| all of Sweden starting paying (costs of running all physical
| libraries)/(number of books borrowed) with some obvious discounts
| to those values. Not sure how this has changed in the last two
| decades. "Libraries need to renew their leased e-material." that
| is impossible this is not how things should work. Libraires
| should have every book not being bound by publishers. It is
| clearly the case that you need new negotiators and laws for
| public libraries.
|
| We should have an international law that allow libraries to lend
| photocopies of books, like archive.org does, or just a digital
| copy. There has been a rise in really good digital interactive
| books were there is no standard way to make an (pirate) archive,
| so change is comming even if such a law passes.
| derbOac wrote:
| I get so frustrated by these games.
|
| Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer
| in perpetuity with every purchase in every format, and there
| should be no postsale restrictions on any item beyond what is
| implied by copyright.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not
| offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format
|
| If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say,
| 1 billion USD.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| Yeah, I keep seeing suggestions like this and I just don't
| get it. Like the only way people can fathom something being
| available is if it's for sale. We really need shorter
| copyright terms more than anything else.
| derbOac wrote:
| But they don't do that with physical books.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I do know examples where publishers did stop printing new
| editions (i.e. stopped publishing) some books.
| everdrive wrote:
| Because e-books are digital, publishers will use the the
| technology for increased telemetry, control, and ultimately to
| extract more resources. Much like music or movies, there's not
| inherent reason why e-books would need to work this way, but the
| publishers can't help themselves. For the average consumer, the
| solution seems obvious. Pay for physical books, and pirate
| e-books.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| I have consulted in this sector, specifically academic publishing
| and textbooks. My sense is that publishers in the education
| market are biding their time while old pedagogies wane.
|
| Every new paper book soon becomes a used book, worth zero or even
| negative revenue, whereas ebooks are sold de novo to every
| student at nearly full price with much lower fixed costs (print,
| distribute, stock, return). But publishers are wary of being seen
| as interfering with academic freedom by pushing to ebooks.
|
| There are a couple of use cases where students overwhelmingly
| prefer paper. Cost savings with used books is obvious, but also,
| for example, if a prof -might- allow a paper book on an exam but
| -wouldn't- allow laptop ebook access, most students will -never-
| take the risk of being disadvantaged, even if it's only in rare
| cases.
|
| I'd have to think about corresponding forces in the general
| publishing and public libraries realm, which I'll assume is more
| complex but roughly analogous.
|
| Publishers are waiting until there are a few successful targeted
| solutions and generational overturn, then paper will disappear in
| a blink and they will get a fat profit boost. Tech to enable this
| should be a nice little unicorn.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The value of ebooks isn't the content, but that they have
| specific homework problems or codes which are required to
| access online assignments. Particularly the latter, giving each
| student a different code, because otherwise an entire class can
| share one ebook. Otherwise, most ebooks have pirated online
| PDFs, and even without those, all the information is readily
| available in many places online.
| mixedmath wrote:
| This is an interesting problem. I love my library. And I use both
| physical and digital books.
|
| On the one hand, it's probably true that more people can read a
| digital book. Ob the other hand, I have read fewer than 20 pages
| of a bunch of ebooks - enough to see if I might like them.
|
| Do these count as checkouts? Am I a very expensive library user?
|
| (And I also am happy to have several ebooks that I'll read
| sometime, casually renewing them until I get to them).
| xrd wrote:
| This is a very important point. Libraries should fight to
| legislate analytics on exact usage when checking out an ebook,
| especially if they are paying for a set number of usages.
| codazoda wrote:
| I've written and self published a few small books, including
| Publish Your eBook. Maybe we should create an author
| collaborative where we make our books available to libraries
| either free or at a more reasonable price. There must be a
| handful of authors who would be willing to do this and who own
| enough rights to do so. It sounds like even a few books would
| help libraries bolster their collections.
|
| 1. Publish Your eBook by Joel Dare https://amzn.to/49WjVrn
| jonawesomegreen wrote:
| I work at a non-profit organization and part of our mission is
| exactly this. You can find more details here:
| https://indieauthorproject.com/
|
| Another part of our mission is providing libraries an open
| source ebook and audiobook reader called Palace. Our project is
| on GitHub here https://github.com/thepalaceproject.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I hope some fair deal is worked out. I am wealthy and splurging
| on all the audio books (yeah for Libro.fm) and eBooks (yeah for
| Kobo) that I want, but I still experiment consuming the fine
| content my local library network has. Great books are available
| to easily consume with Libby and interesting movies and video
| content are available with Kanopy.
|
| Libraries can also be a nexus for social events and on site
| education. Very well worth the tax money. In a world of
| dehumanizing digital tech, libraries are a human experience.
| 747-8F wrote:
| This isn't different from the media industry's overall evolution.
|
| Publishers aren't different from Audio media. Authors have mkt
| reach through digital channels, unlike constraints of bookshelf
| logistics.
|
| Why aren't they directly publishing their material? Margins are
| higher, without publisher fees.
| dragandj wrote:
| Many authors do, but how likely it is that the potential reader
| finds their books among the millions of books pushed through
| channels saturated by well-oiled publisher-controlled marketing
| machine?
| beej71 wrote:
| > "They do have a funding problem, but the answer is not to take
| it out of the pockets of authors and destroy the rights of
| creators and pass unconstitutional legislation," said Shelley
| Husband, senior vice president of government affairs at the
| Association of American Publishers
|
| I'm guessing Husband's solution is to raise taxes to pay
| themselves for more expensive books.
|
| The AAP is also suing Internet Archive, incidentally.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The Internet Archive is participating in the legal process to
| get to a conclusion that ebooks are the same as physical books,
| otherwise the concept of libraries is over (except for those
| who can pirate and the data stores that exist across the
| internet, Anna's Archive, Zlib/libgen, etc).
| ghaff wrote:
| The concept of libraries, especially those that aren't large
| research libraries, has already shifted quite a bit. I almost
| never go down to my small town library to take out a book or
| read a magazine. Maybe a DVD now and then that catches my
| eye. Sometimes I discount museum passes. I could go to talks.
| Their e-book service isn't that compelling.
|
| Other people probably have different behaviors. People I know
| with younger children in particular use local libraries for
| children's books quite a lot.
|
| But libraries as a place you checkout books is almost
| certainly already on the decline. For me, the pirate sites
| aren't even competition. I only have limited time. I read a
| lot on the Internet. If there's some new book I want to read,
| I'll probably just buy it for my Kindle. (Obviously many
| people are much more price-sensitive but I wonder how many of
| them are using libraries today.)
| namekyd wrote:
| My wife and I are voracious readers, it would be a very
| expensive habit to have off we were buying everything for
| kindle. We are members of 2 local libraries with listings
| on overdrive/libby and rent the majority of our ebooks
| there.
|
| I suppose it depends on your library's offering and how
| many books you go through
| ghaff wrote:
| To be fair, I don't go through anything like the number
| of books I used to. I have a ton of unread stuff on my
| Kindle--some of which is admittedly large collections of
| classics which I got for $1 or $2 each.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What about people who cannot afford a Kindle, or cannot
| afford to buy e-books?
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a ton of free books, many even out of
| copyright, online. I also fully expect libraries will
| continue to have physical books including recent
| releases. I'm not advocating for libraries de-emphasizing
| this aspect of their mission. But I think it will
| probably naturally happen over time.
| j_maffe wrote:
| The detriment to society due to the lack of proper access
| of the lower class to knowledge is too much to take this
| lightly
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| I read books pretty sparingly, but my wife reads about 150
| books a year. We heavily exercise our local library.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, there's definitely a subset of "super-readers" who
| really benefit from taking out library books. I used to
| be probably in the 50-75 range plus a ton of magazine
| subscriptions. I'm more like 10 or so now. I also bet
| there's a sizable percentage of the population who
| doesn't read one book a year.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Their e-book service isn't that compelling.
|
| My county library system has about 100k ebook titles and
| another 30k audiobooks. I've probably read or listened to
| well over a hundred library books since the last time I
| actually went to the library.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe I should look again. It wasn't that interesting
| last time I looked. But that was quite a while ago. It's
| just a small town library but I assume they use one of
| the regular services.
|
| ADDED: Indeed. They use the rebranded Overdrive (Libby).
| Last time I looked at (maybe) Overdrive ages ago it
| seemed to be highly populated with things like self-help
| books. Looks useful.
| beej71 wrote:
| Even if you disagreed with IA's emergency library thing
| (which I did), they're providing an amazing service to
| humanity orders of magnitude larger than anything AAP will
| ever accomplish. I encourage everyone to support them (which
| I do).
| rabite wrote:
| Librarians should just begin directly teaching people how to use
| Z-Library and Annas-Archive.
| ta988 wrote:
| That would not work long term because those same libraries are
| where those books and papers came from in the first place.
| habosa wrote:
| This sucks but was inevitable. Libraries are such a weird and
| wonderful thing. Even though books are widely sold, there's a
| place where you can go and read them for free instead. And it's
| not some weird loophole, it's a basic unit of our society and an
| assumed part of every community.
|
| Unfortunately this is America. Nothing can beat out profit
| motives forever. The libraries really never stood a chance.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Libraries for the purpose of getting information simply don't
| make sense in the digital age. The internet is far bigger and
| more accessible than any library, and you can find information
| on nearly any topic in exclusively ad-free, public domain sites
| like Wikipedia, the Gutenburg project, and arXiv.
|
| Libraries now exist more as a place for community: somewhere
| quiet anyone can freely hang out, access resources like 3D
| printers (or for the very poor, public fountains/restrooms and
| the internet), and attend workshops. Some libraries like the
| Boston Public Library are still nice and active even today
| (https://www.bpl.org/). But unfortunately as you mentioned,
| people today really don't fund community, and there are a lot
| of degrading and closing libraries.
| zinodaur wrote:
| The internet is better for factoids - for learning something,
| a book is a lot better, if you can get your hands on one.
|
| E.g. for a niche topic there's maybe a 5 page wikipedia
| article, a thousand useless seo fodder blogs, and a bunch of
| academic papers on the topic. At the library, I can get a 300
| page comprehensive text written by an expert whose motive is
| to actually teach me the topic.
| vundercind wrote:
| Same experience here. The Web's excellent for a handful of
| (important!) topics but kiddie-pool shallow for many
| others. You quickly run out of Web resources and have to
| hit interlibrary loan or books stores to keep going.
|
| It's telling that probably the single most-valuable store
| of knowledge on the web is... a book piracy website. And
| even that's missing tons of stuff.
| prepend wrote:
| Is this unique to America? It seems the same problem exists for
| libraries globally, right?
| vzaliva wrote:
| What's worrying about the article is the fact that electronic
| editions of ebooks expire, meaning libraries can't keep them
| indefinitely. It's reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster
| model, where there's only a short window to watch a new movie in
| theaters. So, while libraries might stock new releases, what
| happens to the older ones? Could this trend be pushing readers
| towards newer publications?
| thfuran wrote:
| I've found a fair number of series at my library where they
| only have e-books of, say, #2 and #4, and I've always assumed
| it's because the rest expired and haven't been re-purchased.
| nofollow wrote:
| related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998643
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| Digital media costs library much more money than physical media.
|
| In the US in the state of Wisconsin has a statewide digital
| library last time I was a resident there. That means all
| libraries share the digital library across the state. My
| experience was a incredible variety of content at the cost of
| somewhat longer wait times.
|
| The same cannot be said of Minnesota. When inquiring why
| Minnesota does not have the same system when chatting with our
| local library it came down to publishers were no longer willing
| to have such an agreements. The library would love to have such a
| system in Minnesota but the publishers are against it. I wish
| there was a way we could bridge readers with their authors.
|
| As a side note I don't quite understand the downside even with
| the Wisconsin system. For my understanding it was contracted per
| book for a length of time and also a fee per read.
|
| https://www.wplc.info/wisconsins-digital-library-faq
| briandear wrote:
| How about eliminating libraries and provide vouchers for Kindle
| Unlimited for the poor? Work with Amazon to create some kind of
| Amazon library using Kindle as the platform.
|
| People with money don't need public libraries -- you can buy
| pretty much anything easily. People spend $18 on a McDonalds
| meal, $9.99 for an ebook is nothing. Big city libraries are
| mostly homeless shelters at this point.
|
| I'm not going to a public library to use the World Book
| Encyclopedia like I did 35 years ago. Pretty sure most people
| aren't. I'm not going to check out some music CDs -- I have Apple
| Music. Unless it's some kind of rare collections library for
| academic research, the average library doesn't need to exist.
| It's a vestige like Blockbuster Video.
|
| It would be cool though if people could buy library access for
| university digital libraries. Being able to access journal
| articles is pretty awesome.
| cubecul wrote:
| I am on the commission overseeing a major public library
| system. I strongly disagree with your interpretation of what
| libraries do.
|
| First, the real estate presence of the library is extremely
| important. Children's storytime is one of the strongest drivers
| of foot traffic. Some of the buildings act as designated
| cooling centers during heat waves. They are community centers
| and gathering spaces for local organizations.
|
| Also, just because you can spend $10 on an ebook does not mean
| others would choose to do the same! That's important money to
| many people.
|
| Otherwise, here are some other things I've seen libraries do
| that I think your comment underestimates:
|
| - supplies reading materials to jailed inmates
|
| - helps new residents navigate city services
|
| - manages the city archives
|
| - provides wifi access for the 10%+ of a big city that does not
| have wifi at home
|
| - gives free books to build book collections at home
|
| - loans tools and other "maker" equipment
|
| Not all libraries are funded well enough to do the above, and
| the specific definition of a library in 2024 is very hard to
| nail down - basically converges on a community center.
|
| All I'm saying is that libraries are making concerted efforts
| to break out of the traditional definition ("gatekeeper of
| information") - you should check out your local library to see
| all that they do!
| WalterBright wrote:
| > one hardcover copy of Cook's latest novel costs the library
| $18, it costs $55 to lease a digital copy
|
| I buy the used paperback used for $3.
|
| > a price that can't be haggled with publishers.
|
| Of course they can haggle. They just don't know how to.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The answer may be to change copyright law to allow book owners to
| freely shift mediums (I forget the term for it, but converting a
| paper book to PDF by scanning, or vice versa by printing), and to
| restrict the ability to lease everything - you buy it, you own it
| (a debate older than this issue, and there's term for that too).
|
| Then I could donate my book to the library, they could scan it
| (or buy a scanned copy), and as long as they restricted checkouts
| based on the number of copies, they'd be fine.
|
| The Internet Archive seems to do something similar, though it
| seems to be an issue in the courts. I wonder if libraries could
| donate their books to IA and direct patrons there for electronic
| versions.
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