What we need is a library that focuses only on out of print out difficult to get books. We don't need Harry Potter and likes on it. There are a million legal/illegal ways to get them.
Unfortunately, books aren't abandonware. Legally, sitting on the rights to something is allowed. The odds of such a thing being allowed are low, particularly in this age of reboots, adaptations, etc. One of my favorite book series is basically book abandonware and the rights have always been retained so that things like graphic novels, shitty TV shows, etc. are a possibility.
Allowing out of print, difficult to get books to be lent or shared freely means that you can't reprint them to turn the money machine back on, or try to modernize them. It's the age of books as "IP" instead of books.
Used books appear to me to be largely unaffordable these days due to the internet creating a global market.
If an obscure out of print book costs $500, because (my hypothesis is) it is priced for the single most desperate buyer in the world, then the market for used books no longer has any relationship to my life or needs.
On the other hand, if there are only a dozen people who would buy it at say $5 then it's not in anyone's interest to reprint it. And if someone did reprint it but didn't do the labor intensive part of editing the scan, it would hardly be worth it - so I'm sure even free isn't cheap.
So, I mean, I will do without. Just like I did without Napster back in the day. But people should ask themselves if this is the dystopia we want, and who is serving who. If the Patent and Copyright Clause verbiage in the US Constitution meant what it said, and if markets serve society too.
My thoughts are publishers won't be interested in suing such a library. Courts would be lenient and public support stronger. But once you start sharing bestsellers economics changes for everyone.
Now I absolutely disagree. The primary thing keeping them from suing would have been the optics of the situation: Suing the local library or the small group trying to keep knowledge alive would look bad. That's less of a factor now, and suing the small guys in order to ram through judicial precedent they can wield like a cudgel later would be too tempting.
Not everything though. There are some books I've only ever found through antiquarian shops and private libraries (eg http://londonlibrary.co.uk/ ) which are of historical and cultural value but which will probably never be digitised. Unless I do it, anyway.
There's also a whole world of professional texts in law and other subjects which I've had to access by taking the £200 train down to London to physically sit in the British Library and read (and often, photograph). The more interesting the thing you're doing, the more likely it is that you'll need to venture to an actual library, often one of considerable age.
That's not even to mention the historical archives etc, indexes of which are held centrally but the materials are scattered all over.
I'm amazed at both what I can find and what I can't find at Anna's Archive.
Part of me dies inside when rare books like that become effectively dead due to loss. It sucks when the copyright holders would prefer that to letting the book be free, but what possible incentive could they have for freeing a book?
Well it would be interesting to see who is using the libraries that we have and what are the book they're renting.
The purpose of a library should be to give access to reading materials to everyone, and I think the reality is that the majority of people do want to read Harry Potter.
I think ultimately what we need is more funding for libraries so that they can get more books, which obviously include hard to find books. In any case, most libraries allow you to request books and they can get these from the network of other state/country libraries. And if they don't have a hard to find book, maybe you could consider donating it to them, libraries take very good care of their hard to find books.
They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content?
Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users.
Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book.
Give an incentive based on both the number of requests and the speed of uploading the scan.
Could even allow requesters to set their own rewards. “I’d be willing to pay X to get this book scanned before Tuesday”.
I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation.
For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid.
If we care about research, preservation of materials, having them available for future generations, then really, the sacred holy protection of copyright can take a hike when dealing with those texts.
I frequently have to get on planes and fly off to University special collections and sit in some special room where I can't bring in a camera and have to carefully read through something that can't be digitized because we're somehow not smart enough to see a difference between that and a Dan Brown novel you get at the grocery store.
Pisses me off. Holistically speaking, what the fuck are we doing? This stuff shouldn't be special and precious. We've had photography for over 180 years, this isn't some strange new phenomena here.
I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
Right. This is silly. I’m wondering: If it’s 80 years out of print, is it still protected by copyright at all?
The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Imagine Google had asked copyright lawyers if they could build their search engine. Crawling other peoples websites, keeping an index of their content, and then make people come to Google because “that’s where all the content is“. Would have never gotten off the ground. But now that Google exists, and even the copyright lawyers use it, it’s obvious that this is legal.
Lawyers and politicians are followers, not leaders. And much of technology is about circumventing their yesterday-values.
What did Peter Thiel say about the Internet? The world of atoms was over-regulated. So businesses fled into the world of bits. It’s a cat and mouse game. Whatever you do, better make sure you’re the cat.
> The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them.
Absolutely. Break them and support the people who facilitate the disobedience. Fuck the copyright lobby, fuck publishers, and fuck anyone who gets in the way of me reading what I want in whatever form I want.
The people who are preventing you from reading what you want in the form you want it are not protecting some sacred system of authorship reward. They have no ethos. They are simply protecting the interest of their masters, for pay.
Yeah, copyright laws on infinitely reproducible material (whose original author is likely already dead) is one of those laws I don’t intend on upkeeping and will torrent/download any such book if available without any moral objections.
We absolutely do. I'm for much shorter terms, e.g. 14 years, the original term in the US.
But I would be willing to correct for changes in life expectancy since 1790. I haven't run the math, but I suspect it would be 20-25 years, discounting infant mortality. This is a far more sensible figure than "authors death + any ridiculous number". (I do sell books I wrote with my copyright, so I'm not completely unaware of the needs of authors.)
That said, I do want the same copyright protections for the wimpy kid and Dan Brown, because the alternative--differentiating copyrightable material or charging to make it--is am undesirable alternative to shorter terms.
> I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
I've no objection to invective against them, but the people making the rules are quite content for us all to be distracted from the task of working out what change would look like and then agitating for it.
Sure. But they already run a piracy site, don’t they?
The cost and delay of shipping are what drives many people to piracy in the first place, I would argue. If I can have a book for $5 in two days as a used physical copy from Amazon, for $20 now as ebook from the publisher, or for free right now from a piracy site, the choice is obvious.
Also it's illegal in at least one major national jurisdiction to fuck with people's mail (US). Which means that ironically if you're going to break the law, using the mail isn't a terrible idea.
> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book.
Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner.
Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.
You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.
I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.
Voice Dream Scanner on iOS recognizes pages and text and performs OCR. You just go snap snap snap.
For text that is sufficient. If you want to capture the layout also, or graphics, things get much more complicated. Even just getting headings requires post processing. So yeah, proper ebook vs just extracting the text are two different problems.
Graphics or any kind of symbols. I tried this with an out of print edition of an economics textbook from the 70s: the scans were fine but I never found any OCR that could even semi-faithfully reproduce the equations, nor anything in a table.
It occurs to me that a place where scans and first-pass OCRs of this stuff are shared with the intention of version controlling the resultant epub would be handy, such that small PRs could be applied cumulatively and the result be versioned (and therefore referenced). That's considerable work and legal risk, though.
There's also the various https://diybookscanner.org variants. Not the quickest imaginable system, but it's much better than going <i>snap snap snap</i> with a cellphone.
Digital has lots of advantages. You can have it with you at all times on your phone. You can use text to speech. You can export your highlights. Soon, people are going to want to ask ChatGPT about content from books they read, as well as highlights and comments they added.
A physical copy is the worst format that I would personally consider buying. I only do that when I cannot get a digital version. And the first thing I do once I get it is that I cut off the spine and run it through my scanner.
(Then, I spend hours researching the internet for a good e-ink reader :-D)
YMMV but I dislike referencing through digital formats like pdf. With a hardcopy I can bookmark various pages and very easily thumb through / reference it. Searching for exact text is slow though, so I try to acquire both types if I get a hardcopy.
For my e-ink tablet/reader, I use an onyx boox and a kobo.
> They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives.
Who are "they" that you are giving orders? What difficulties have you found with scanning books that "they" could solve for you? Since you write "just" it must be quite easy? What incentives have you provided for people to scan books?
London has a number of red telephone kiosks turned into libraries. I belive they are administered by local groups which move the stock around once in a while but I would suspect it's difficult to manage this online since there is no check-in/check-out process.
It sounds like the Street Library project here in Australia. Every little suburb and village now has multiple little enclosures that basically encourage to people to put in a book they have finished reading and take if they want. All grass roots driven and seems to work well with very little abuse.https://streetlibrary.org.au/
My wife has constructed, and contributed to, a few of these. I see them around town, even in residential areas; and, as you say, there is almost no vandalism or abuse.
LittleFreeLibrary.org applied for trademark control of “wooden boxes with a storage area for books”. Additionally, LittleFreeLibrary.org now stakes claim to word variations beyond their trademarked name “Little Free Library”, such as “little library” and “little libraries”.
From a beautiful idea in 2009 to these terrible ideas now. :-(
Z-Library envisions a book 'sharing' market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe.
Has this ever worked out? By "this" I mean some online entity that's only or mostly involved in less than legal activities saying they're going to launch some massive real-world project? I feel like it's less a way to accomplish something in the real world or even to generate press attention, but actually just self-fueling hype. The non-legal project is manned by mostly unpaid activists, who are motivated by a shared philosophy, which must be driven by willpower. That will to continue on is bolstered by hype, and these announcements are a way to self-generate hype.
> According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested.
Like the old e-tree where they would send someone a CD, they’d make a copy and send it on to the next person.
Never actually used it because by the time I got into the jam bands I already had good enough internets to just download stuff but it was still operational circa 1999 — guessing for folks without broadband.
I wonder if the benefits of having physical copies of books will outweigh the expense, difficulty, and risk/exposure of running a miniature version of Amazons logistics network.
On the connected question of why human societies accelerated their development over time (recently posted on HN) a couple of comments are pertinent (see [0] and [1]).
If one values the continued acceleration of human development (in all its expanding pluralities) then there is a strong case for something like Z-lib to exist for a lot of factual or science-generated information being available for everyone. For such texts, I would guess that what the library contains could lag behind the commercial publication front by 5-10 years without appreciable profit loss to the publishing companies, nor significant losses to the estates of individuals who created them. And taking away some of their back catalogue might actually reduce publishers' running costs... (Ask: Can anyone else on HN put hard numbers to this?)
The debate seems similar to the one regarding taxation vs. inflation rate rises. Governments are currently choosing to raise inflation rates because that doesn't impede trade flows as much as some potential friction coming from moving money through a government bureaucracy for some cause. The particular cause matters, but the choice is about efficiency in essence. The same with Z-lib, as I see it. A Z-lib type free digital library could raise global efficiency in all sorts of areas, but the argument will only pass if various forms of extortive-because-looking-very-obsolete-now old capitalist inefficiences can be demonstrated to be such. Lots of publishing companies are probably holding on to old titles that for them are already digital landfill in their archives. Maybe they just need to see that clearly.
The other catch is that the "for everyone" phrase implies a representative global stakeholder is needed for it to "get legal". UN.org/z-lib anyone?
The copyright police will fall on this like a ton of bricks. Publishers already hate libraries (yes they do), the last thing they want is more of them.
This has been a thing for decades, nobody cares. It doesn't scale to a size that warrants their attention.
Not that there's much the publishing industry could do about it if they wanted to. Apart from leaning stronger into ebooks, where people can't do this. But as it stands that'd mean giving Amazon even more power and money.
It reminds me of AOI series[1] where they were stopped by the planet-scale war/rebellion. The book series is so-so, but a good cautionary tale and few interesting ideas. I am afraid those devils that calling themselves publishers won't stop before crossing any line just to keep their reign.
Hate is the wrong word. Publishers and libraries have a complicated, sometimes antagonistic relationship. It's also important to understand that 'publishers' are not homogenous. Outside of the big 4/5, many publishers love and go out of their way to support libraries.
The issue is that the relationship is asymmetric. Even though publishers make good money from libraries, libraries need publishers more than publishers need them right now. IMO, libraries need to continue to move beyond being only thought of as places to read the latest NYT best seller list for free.
I don't understand why they should hate libraries. Libraries get people hooked on books, then they start buying them. At least that's what happened to me.
Libraries typically have a limited length you can keep the books before you must return them. If you really like the book then you will want to buy it.
The don't. Libraries are a huge money source for publishers. Libraries and publisher's do disagree about the payment model for ebooks but it doesn't mean they hate them. Far from.
But everybody knows what a library is and grassroots booksharing (aka drop off your old paperbacks in an agreed upon public place) is already a thing, so maybe not a dystopia?
Also, buying books second hand is incredibly easy and cheap. And buying a license for an ebook is incredibly convenient and also tends to be rather cheap.
Why do you think ebook licensing is cheap? The big 5 all have "metered" licensing, where licenses expire and require repurchase after either a certain period of time or a certain number of checkouts. These are usually set up so that every ebook will have to be repurchased every 1-2 years. Furthermore, ebook prices are usually between 1x-3x the physical list price depending on publisher, date of publication, and popularity.
Interesting. It's more like 0.5x to 1x of the paperback in my experience, buying mostly English books on Amazon Germany. Sometimes considerably less, especially for older books, eg I just bought a fantasy trilogy from the 80s for like 2 bucks. And, like I said, real convenient.
Also I'm talking about "buying" an ebook as a consumer, the licensing model for libraries might be terrible for all I know. It's certainly still pretty terrible for most library members. I imagine digital lending is terrifying for the publishers.
Some physical books cost 3 bucks, new, others are 30, some textbooks 150 USD. Distribution costs have little to do with it. Not that I'm defending predatory textbook pricing, I totally support copying those 150 USD textbooks, whether it's digital or, old school, photocopier copies.
I wish they would have done a bit more research and explanation here. Book lending it not new, but the focus on best sellers is rather recent. Libraries spend a majority of their ebook budget on best sellers which is unfortunate.
>I think if people feel the need to explain the concept of a library and this is some shadowy samizdat notion now we might as well give up all pretense like we aren't in a dystopia.
The author is being sarcastic. He knows very well that everyone knows what a (book) library is. How can you not tell that by "a few hundred years old already"?
A "library" simply refers to a collection of materials.[1]
For example in the tech world, the second "L" in DLL stands for Dynamic Link Library, a modular collection of code.[2]
There is no implication of lending in the word or concept of a "library" by itself. An explicit example of this are private libraries, libraries held and used by individuals.
A public library is a library owned by and operated for the public, aka the people, and as a library of the people the people can take (and must return) books from the public library. This is where the common concept of "borrowing books from the library" comes from.
Private membership libraries predated public libraries in most places bt by well over two centuries and often loaned. It was actually more common for people to share a library and borrow from than to accrue their own, as the cost of books was considerable.
