I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book?
Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.
I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. Highly highly unlikely, but I hope for it nonetheless. At the very least I'll get to see the "oh fuck what do we do with all these truck drivers" problem get tackled, probably.
I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity...Highly highly unlikely...
Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? Perhaps it is just going to be a moving target, like AI seems to be? Once a chess playing program that could beat the world champion was a pipe dream. The same goes for Go playing programs. Once a pen was a specialized instrument that had to be handcrafted for certain professionals. Now, they are practically free. Once, getting water involved significant personal effort for almost everyone. Now almost everyone one in the industrialized world thinks of it as something practically free.
One of the things which might throw a monkey wrench into the futurist/sci-fi idea of a post scarcity society is the Pareto Principle combined with the perception of relative poverty. Across all of history, productivity has been unevenly distributed. Even people who are wealthy on global/historical scales will feel poor if confronted with wealthier neighbors. Psychologists have concluded that the feelings of relative poverty are very real, and it's this relative poverty which is most strongly correlated with criminality, not absolute poverty.
So why not give it a try? Why not let the libraries lend an unlimited number of digital copies and see what happens?
Some constraints are real, but if scihub is any indication then some of those eternal truths might actually be mostly groupthink, fear and vested interests.
The more usual idea with population control is that one married couple will have multiple children. If they have more than 2.1 on average then the population will expand.
This particular comment seemed to focus on the man impregnating more than one woman, while saying nothing about the total number of children born per capita.
I thought they might have been talking about access to mates as a scarce resource, but to be honest that's just a wild guess as it's not clear to me what they intended.
> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity.
When people talk about "post-scarcity", they are talking about the basic necessities of life becoming so cheap they are basically free. But, even in such a "post-scarcity" world, we will always still have finite resources, and human aspirations will always exceed those finite resources, and so we will always need some mechanism to arbitrate access. Either we use market-based mechanisms (which implies the existence of currencies), or else we turn to socialist-style central planning, in which the government gets to decide who has their aspirations fulfilled and who misses out.
Suppose a billion people all want to live in Venice. Sorry, just can't be done, there isn't enough room, it would totally destroy the city if we tried, we'll have to say "No" to some of them. You might say "we'll just give them a simulated Venice which is indistinguishable from the real thing" – but as long as they know it is not the real thing, they'll want the real thing instead. "Authenticity" is one of those things that humans desire.
Agree with most of your post except: as long as they know it is not the real thing, they'll want the real thing instead.
The way both video gaming and social media have exploded as cultural forces makes me think inauthenticity won't be a problem for the majority at some point. Many people already seem more than happy to judge themselves by their friend counts, Instagram likes, and go on voyages and have experiences online rather than meet up in real life.
I personally think simulated Venice could well be better than the real thing for most, as long as the real world remains relatively expensive, dangerous, and uncomfortable (compared to sitting in your house). There will always be people who prefer real experiences, but I think that group will continue to shrink.
I think so too, in as much as I noted elsewhere I think a large part (not the whole picture, but a large part) of why authenticity is a big deal today is the perception (though not always, true) that what is authentic is better in some tangible way. While it may be wrong sometimes, that idea persists because it often is true.
But at some point the virtual Venice will be better than the real thing: the temperature will never exceed what you find comfortable even if your travel companions have different preferences; there will never be too many tourists; your hotel room is more luxurious than anything you could hope for in real life; somehow you always find what you were looking for even when you read the map wrong. You always get a seat at your favorite restaurant. The buildings are cleaner. The "flaws" are just at the appropriate level to make you feel it's authentic.
More importantly, virtual plain-old Venice will have to compete with virtual Space Venice, where canals float between islands floating in space, or Renaissance Venice, or Black Death Venice for the horror fans, or Vegas-style Venice, or Godzilla-attack Venice, or Lego Venice, or any number of crazy variations.
Places like Venice are also important to us now because it stands out so much. But to people growing up with higher and higher quality virtual environments it will seem more and more boring and bland when compared to modern re-interpretations.
To put it another way: "My" Superman movie was the first Christopher Reeve one. It's the "authentic" one. I measure the new Superman actors against that one. I measure new Zod's against that one. But it was not first Superman movie, and I haven't even seen the older ones. And to many in my sons generation, it's some old movie that's far too slow-moving that most of them have not seen or heard of.
To take another example: The painting Scream, that to some already is "that painting that looks a bit like the Scream mask".
To generations growing up with virtual Venice 2100 with taller, more impressive buildings, more dramatic bridges, and other "upgrades", real Venice may soon enough become "that boring city that looks a bit like virtual Venice 2100 but isn't as nice".
> Either we use market-based mechanisms (which implies the existence of currencies), or else we turn to socialist-style central planning, in which the government gets to decide who has their aspirations fulfilled and who misses out.
There's nothing in socialism that requires central planning. In fact, there are forms of socialism (e.g. market communism) that explicitly include market mechanisms as one solution for allocation of resources.
So I tend to agree with you that currencies won't disappear until we're well past "basic post-scarcity" aka. nobody needs to go hungry or homeless. To get rid of currency entirely we likely need much more fundamental cultural changes and far more extensive abilities to create what we want.
I don't think "authenticity" will survive as a major driver that long past meeting sufficiently good virtual environments, because while it may have a certain charm, with "good enough" virtual environments, reality can be trounced in other factors. E.g. the real Mona Lisa is utterly unimpressive in person: It's tiny. You can't get really up close to it. Many people who have seen it - me included - mention being left thinking "that's it?" A "virtual Louvre" could easily present a "better than real" version of it that I suspect would quickly seduce people away from caring much about that authenticity.
A large part of why authenticity matters today is that we perceive it as better. But if the "authentic" experience consistently becomes drab and dull and trite compared to the copies, the appeal will gradually diminish.
Even so, in the intervening period, we can certainly move product and services between two categories: One where we merely care about tracking consumption to allocate resources to manufacture and distribution efficiently, but otherwise people can consume what they want, and one where we need to mediate and restrict use because we can not yet meet the full, unconstrained demand without sacrificing something else.
I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting that everyone should get everything they want. Everyone should be entitled to a small apartment reasonably near their preferred location, clothes, food, medical care, and a small stipend for necessaries, without having to prove their worthiness through labor. If you want an apartment in Venice, or a New York penthouse, or a Lamborghini? Then you need to get a job.
I feel like this could work really well for artists. Live on UBI, produce as much as you like, and put it on the internet. If people like it, and you want more money to play with, start a Patreon or similar. Everybody wins.
The venice example would actually work pretty somewhat week with a socialist-style central authority: Make sure everyone can live in Venice for a time, then pass on their flat to the next on the list.
> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity.
I would only want to see that if we were already post-scarcity. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot of bloodshed as people figure it out and realize they don't have any way to continue buying the things they require to live.
Post-scarcity is great, but I fear the road that leads to it.
> For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced
(The German Ideology, first chapter, section 5)
Though he was writing about the pre-conditions for socialist revolution, a central tenet of his writings was this idea that redistribution in any form first becomes tenable under advanced capitalism, because never before have we been close to be able to produce so much that we could conceivably reach a stage where redistribution doesn't simply make everyone poor (or feeling poor).
And unfortunately we got to see the consequences of ignoring that warning many places where attempts at forcing through socialist revolutions in places that did not meet the preconditions failed spectacularly.
Globally, we are pretty much post-scarce on anything anyone "requires to live".
The struggle will be to find out how all the rest gets divided when controlling distribution of the right to live is no longer a bargaining position and discovering if we can still provide for everyone without servitude.
There are plenty of poor places with people starving, even though we have enough food to give it to people. But even in the usa, there are people who don't get enough to eat. in Seattle I often see news stories about the food bank.
> There are plenty of poor places with people starving
No, actually there's not. Starvation is mostly linked to conflict zones nowadays. In normal conditions starvation is pretty much a problem from the past. Look at the WHO report on poverty and how things have clearly improved since, let's say the 70s or 80s.
Where I live is not a conflict zone, yet there are people who are starving. The monetary system is not coping with rationing the resources to all in a just manner. People don't have jobs. They don't have the capital to put their ideas to action. Those who have done so, still discover that they need money to market their products and services.
But that's not caused by SCARCITY. Scarcity means there isn't enough food. That's not the problem we have. There is enough food to feed everyone. It's just owned by the wrong people.
Scarcity in economics doesn't mean "not enough" right now, it means that if it were free there wouldn't be enough. If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.
> If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.
I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.
Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are partially there.
It would be a small shift in our mentalities: food is a necessary item to live, we must all contribute equally for it (as a society) and have easy access to it.
If anything I would be more worry about increasing the quantity of food wasted. Paying, even a little, can be necessary to signify that food is not infinite and growing from nothing, and thus, should not be wasted.
> free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.
Definitely, we already heavily subsidize farmers, if the sole source buyer became the federal gov't we could cut out the middle men (Kroger, Walmart, the distribution warehouse chains, food staple speculators) and create a stable food supply for everyone.
Perhaps charge a piecemeal amount beyond a certain quantity, to reduce waste.
> the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization
Well, when you come in and break up the existing communes at gunpoint, you can't be surprised that their output drops to zero, combined with forcing the remaining peasants you haven't killed to form farming collectives.
Locally organized farming communes are quite productive, but you need buy-in from members, which takes time, effort, and proper economic incentives.
And the idea of government-run stores ironically already exists in some of the most conservative parts of the US -- not for food, granted, but in several states (North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Utah) liquor stores are state-run in order to control sales. Amusingly, the lack of a profit motive means that often they have better prices than private liquor stores (generally worse selection though).
One of the biggest drivers of the disaster that was Soviet collectivization was a big fear that Lenin was wrong (he was) in his early claims that peasants would support the Bolsheviks.
Classical Marxism is based in part on a hypothesis that a socialist revolution has a number of preconditions, one being an advanced capitalist economy (Russia of course did not meet that), and a second one being that as a consequence of that, a society with a large working class majority (Russia did not meet that either).
Lenin "worked around" this with a pamphlet published in the early 1890's where he argued that Russia was special: In Russia the large number of landless peasants would come to the support of the socialist revolution and make it possible for a socialist party to take control. Coupled with his idea of a "vanguard party" leading the masses, he believed this would allow Russia to basically "skip capitalism".
The big problem with that, of course, was that it never happened: In the elections for the Constituent Assembly arranged by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks got a minority, with almost all their support in the big cities, while the peasants largely voted for more moderate parties - including the socialist SR/Left SR and Mensheviks. So the Bolsheviks went into their coup (the October "revolution" was a coup against the socialist-led Provisional Government; the Tsar had already been in house-arrest for months) in a situation where they must have known that the odds were most peasants would oppose their regime.
Collectivization then must be seen against a backdrop where the Bolsheviks not only had theoretical reasons to want to minimize the peasantry (trying to "leapfrog" capitalism), but also had very practical reasons to want to try to forcibly mold the peasantry into working class: they were afraid that leaving the peasants be would sow the foundations of further opposition.
Lenin relented a bit after the civil war, with New Economic Policy (which allowed limited market economy), but as soon as he died, Stalin pushed collectivization much harder and further, basically on the basis that while he couldn't eradicate farmers, he certainly could do whatever he could to try to turn farming into an industrial job.
So while they undoubtably also hoped to find ways of increasing productivity, it's worth realizing that a lot of decisions they took also had another purpose of basically trying to find a way of "farming without farmers" that was politically important especially for Stalin, and that made many possible concessions that might have mitigated disastrous outcomes completely politically unpalatable for the Bolsheviks because they especially early on feared for their power base. E.g. even the concession they did make under Lenin (NEP) were unpalatable enough for Stalin to reverse them.
It doesn't excuse what they did in any way, of course, but it goes so way towards explaining why they persisted in at times disastrous policies even after they'd clearly learned about the consequences - maintaining power remained more important for them than getting good outcomes.
Exactly. We could feed, house, and care for everyone, if we wanted to. The main problem is that we're still stuck on the agricultural notion that the moral right to live must be purchased through labor or capital.
How many have you fed, housed and cared for this past month, and is it completely with no strings attached (no capital or labor of any kind expected from them --- only from yourself?)
I'd be happy to pay more taxes to get, at the very least,
better social services for those who can't support themselves. I want to live in a world that cares for those people. If you prefer a selfish motivation, I also want those services to be available for me and my loved ones, should they be needed in the future.
The blocker is that I don't have the time, expertise, bargaining power, or economies of scale to efficiently turn my money into social services. Governments are much better suited to that task, and some do so reasonably effectively. (e.g. universal health care, in countries that provide it.)
I do give to charity, actually. That hardly precludes me from wishing my money, and others', was used more efficiently.
I feel like this isn't going how you were expecting. I was supposed to be exposed as a hollow "progressive" who's free with other people's money but is secretly a grasping hypocrite. You shouldn't assume everyone is selfish just because you are.
To add to your point - and not a detractor from your point, just because you don't have the means to solve a problem doesn't mean your not qualified to point it out.
You may not know how to fix it, but you can probably point out when you've got a compound fracture. If it isn't you with the broken bone, you're probably qualified to suggest that it probably is quite painful.
I've donated a fair sum already this month. I'm no more entitled to opine about the system than you are. It doesn't work like that.
Like you, I don't mind paying taxes. Hell, I look forward to seeing my tax bill. I also acknowledge I can pay more.
Err... I'm not kidding. I don't mind paying my taxes. I kind of like paying back to the system that enabled me to be where I am. On the other hand, I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values.
I grow weary of seeing functional equivalents to, "You're not solving the problem, your opinion is invalid." You don't have to contribute significantly to the solution to notice the problems. I feel that sort of thinking is just an excuse to maintain the status quo.
Re: "that enabled me to be where I am". There is no evidence-based way to determine where you would be in a parallel universe with different rules.
"I don't mind paying taxes." ... "I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values".
It's irrational to say, "I don't mind that money is being coerced from me by people who are squandering it and using it in ways that are not in line with my values."
I don't think that your position is actually conflicting, but perhaps misstated. That is to say, maybe what you don't mind is the concept of taxation as such. Yet you acknowledge that the actual people who, today, are charged with coercing money out of you are not spending it wisely or in line with your values. So of course you must mind. Otherwise why even mention that?
You're willing to pay more to solve a problem. Do it. No realy. Do it. The amount you're willing pay, pay that. It's that simple. Don't read more into it. Do it.
Let's say they would be willing to pay an increased tax of 5% on their income to help homeless people.
You're saying - "instead just give 5,000 dollars to a homeless person, done!"
I think the absurdity of the suggestion is apparent but just in case - there's the obvious issues of
1. Assuming OP is a software engineer with no knowledge of "the homeless plight" or the best economic mechanisms to drag someone out of homelessness, there's no way they could give the money away in a way that actually defeats the problem withouts significant research effort.
2. Donating to charity is a possibility, but is not as effective as "everyone paying 5% extra tax," which leads me to...
3. Rather than paying an extra 5% tax, the OP's most effective course of action would be to lobby the government and his/her local population to make efforts to pass legislation that enables the government to levy a tax on everyone, and then use that money to solve the homelessness problem.
So, just like the OP said, economies of scale, effectiveness.
I am mildly upset that everyone is somewhat attacking someone for wanting the right thing to happen but not just making it happen on their own. How absurd!
I think that this is an unfair criticism of someone who said in their very post, "economies of scale."
One person who wishes for governments to do more for the poor can't be held responsible for the entire homeless population in the nation. That's absurd.
> The struggle will be to find out how all the rest gets divided when controlling distribution of the right to live is no longer a bargaining position and discovering if we can still provide for everyone without servitude.
Have you people not heard of Malthusian traps? Either we limit the world population artificially, or we continue having poor people. It really is one or the other.
The interesting question here is, are the shortages necessary to have high quality media? I would love to have an HN-filtered list of reading on the arguments- both sides. I personally only have an ill-informed, therefore worthless, opinion.
Patents and copyrights are, as discussed in much earlier incarnations, a form of barter (bribery?) by the state to ensure a steady supply of novel ideas. I give you something, you give me something.
We (or at least, policy makers) agreed that this was the cost of high quality media/inventions. And it was sure as hell a lot better than the old guild systems where everyone in a given trade colluded to maintain trade secrets, under threat of ostracism or worse.
A lot of the weirdness people attach to either concept looks ridiculous if you can get past all of the emotionally loaded crap and keep telling yourself they are a quid pro quo arrangement, and not to be conflated with property rights.
I get most of my entertainment nowadays from artists (musical, artistic, etc) that I fund on Patreon, via Paypal, or on Kickstarters.
So... no. Not at all.
The reason we are not seeing 150M budget movies coming out of crowdfunding is that right now the market is too small. Its a fledgling industry to directly patronize your entertainers without the profit seeking middleman in between (or at least in the case of Patreon et al that middle man is minimized). As it grows projects like the Blender Open Movie project or all the software being crowdfunded will become more common and more culturally accepted.
On top of that, there is very little organization in crowdfunding right now. Almost exclusively because of the newness of it all - it is untested, and for anyone who is just making a living off patronage now taking a huge risk partnering with other artists to combine efforts to make more complicated media is a huge gamble.
That being said, there are no logistical barriers to it. It is only a matter of time. But for patronage models to take over media production - which they will inevitably do, on the simple premise that the middle men profiteers in between creators and consumers of media only existed when the logistics of distribution required not just money but influence in the industry to even get your product blessed to be sold in limited theaters or stores and are now redundant - will require a substantial cultural shift for consumers. And those kinds of shifts take generations. I think those under 30 are fairly receptive to the idea, but to make it pervasive may require fresh minds open to the idea that need to grow with constant exposure to the concept early on.
Otherwise its just a "neat thing" rather than the cultural revolution it will need to be to finalize the model - abolishing obsoleted IP concepts alongside the cultural expectation to "put money where your mouth is" on the things you want to see made, rather than for the things that already exist and are being artificially restricted by the government.
However, the profiteering middlemen do add value in that they actively curate and package content in ways that are "consumable" and desirable. They are sourcing the steady drip-feed of content that we passively consume.
Shunning passive feeds, and actively seeking out content that fits your preferences, as you do, requires effort. Any product the consumption of which requires effort is inevitably displaced by service providers who deliver said thing frictionlessly....eliminating the effort.
Agreed that there will always be a slice of the market that actively shuns passively-fed products and ascribes a priceable value to goods that don't fit that friction-eliminating model (e.g., craft beers). But, as long as we remain purely, animalistically, and perhaps irrationally susceptible to simple stimuli-- a large slice of the market will be kow-towed to frictionlessly delivered, externally curated products.
Simply put, some people don't want to go express their preferences for certain products. They just want the market to deliver them something stimulating and to a certain degree they don't care what it is.
But let's move towards your world! On balance it is better, richer, and more full of vibrant, distinctly human creativity.
In our current society, all supply shortages of media are artificial
If you take supply shortages of media as being caused by a long term lack of profitable remuneration/funding for media, then there is nothing artificial about it. It's the funding model which is broken.
I wish there was something like Patreon, but which would take some monthly subscription amount and automatically distribute it to the creators I like, in proportion to the enjoyment they've provided.
> something like Patreon, but which would take some monthly subscription amount and automatically distribute it to the creators I like, in proportion to the enjoyment they've provided.
Like Spotify, radio, broadcadt TV and such? They pay artists based on airtime and they allot airtime based on viewership/listenership,
But currency as a concept isn't useless yet because we aren't post-scarcity yet.
Yes, we are post-informational-scarcity (marginal cost of creating a new copy of existing digital information is zero). But we are not post-material-scarcity.
And that matters because authors need to make money in order to purchase scarce material goods.
I am not defending the various stupidities of the current copyright laws in the US, but the basic concept of "fake" prohibitions on unlimited copying still makes sense.
>Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.
It's only fake from a very narrow view of the world. It's not a technical limitation, to be sure, and I personally despise DRM and the copyright law, but those things are not fake. They exist for reasons, and even though people like you and I disagree with those reasons, it doesn't make them any less real.
Just a reminder for anyone who values the Internet Archive as much as I do: it's easy to set up an automatic monthly donation.
If IA were a SaaS, they could easily charge more than my modest contribution and I would gladly pay it.
If you only know IA from the Wayback Machine, take a look at the other things they offer and you will find something of interest. I was delighted recently to find that they had digitized my BYTE Magazine articles from the '80s!
Of more general interest, IA has the entire Prelinger Archives, including all the wonderful Jam Handy films and A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire:
If you previously saw the original version with the ending that is out of frame sync, this one is cleaned up so you can watch it from beginning to end. Look for the gentleman with the windblown beard when they stop at the Ferry Building.
Hundreds of thousands of books can now be liberated. Let’s bring the 20th century to 21st-century citizens. Everyone, rev your cameras!
If this was 10 years ago, they would be talking about scanners --- this brings me back to the days when P2P filesharing was absolutely blooming, and people would freely scan and share in various forums ("bookz scene") the books they had either bought or borrowed.
The average camera of the time was far less capable than ones today, so digitisations made with one were of lower quality than scans, and in the jargon they were known as "cams" - borrowing the term from the film piracy scene. Nonetheless, everyone mostly appreciated someone "camming" a book, especially if it was particularly rare or difficult to scan.
But over time, cameras improved significantly in quality and their speed was unrivaled, so they gradually replaced scanning --- especially with the friendly competition that tended to happen:
Seeing that we can now again be doing this completely legally and openly to older books, makes me tremendously happy. Nonetheless, I don't think it can completely replace that sense of adventure and thrill of risk involved in participating in a scanparty a decade ago.
As I recall, someone had built a machine that turned the pages and took pictures of the pages. I think they were refining it, as it just snapped both facing pages at once, and were going to market it.
I never did find out what happened to that project. The work was being shared in one of the alt.bin. newsgroups and they had written a few blurbs about their machine.
This predates the popularity of crowdfunding, I don't know if that would have helped. I do seem to recall them mentioning some interest from libraries or archival services but I have no idea what happened.
Maybe someone here knows the rest of the story?
I do have some older manuscripts, including some old mathematics works. I should see if there is a project to digitize them. I'd be happy with digital copies as I don't have a material attachment to the books themselves - I don't think. (I may, I've never really been faced with sending them out to someone.) So, I'd be not too incensed if the process was destructive or if the books weren't returned.
You might be remembering the Ion Audio Saver, which was inexpensive (<200) and included a clear sheet to hold the book at a natural open angle. It ended up canceled; the few shipped prototypes were OK, but the camera was low quality and hand issues with mounting angles.
Quite similar, methinks. The other was much older (in Internet years). If I had to guess at a date, I can say I think it was in the 1998 to 2003 region. I can't be more accurate than a five year span, my memory isn't that good.
It was a rig that was made with a metal frame. You could adjust the height of the camera and it had a light attached to it in the pictures. It turned the pages automatically but would sometimes crumple the pages.
I believe the eventual product was to be able to use any camera that supported remote triggering? There was the little tripod mount screw welded onto what looked like aluminum tube framing. That held the camera and it was adjustable for different book heights and widths.
(I am trying to give as many details as I can, as it may trigger a memory better than my own.)
I recall some discussion on the lighting and they were using fluorescent lights that hit the same spectrum as the Sun. There was some discussion on using different spectrums.
I do also recollect them discussing OCR and that it was difficult to do on the images and not very accurate unless it were a more modern book with a common typeset.
I really wish I'd more info. It was a neat sounding project and the guy built it himself as well as worked on the OCR software - though I'm not sure they ever got the OCR working properly.
> Now it is the chance for libraries and citizens who have been reticent to scan works beyond 1923, to push forward to 1941, and the Internet Archive will host them.
If individuals have private scans of rare books (1923 - 1941), how should these scans be delivered to Internet Archive for hosting?
Does "not being sold" mean out of print? Used, out-of-print books may still be sold. In fact, that's sometimes the only way to find a (possibly very expensive) copy for scanning and preservation.
You can upload them here: https://archive.org/upload/ (account required; free to create) and then send an email to the Internet Archive staff with the item identifier to have it added to Open Library.
If you don't mind shipping them the book(s):
Internet Archive,
Attn: Book Donations,
300 Funston Avenue,
San Francisco, CA 94118
If you have a large donation of books, please call first to make arrangements: (415) 561-6767
"(2) No reproduction, distribution, display, or performance is authorized under this subsection if—
(A) the work is subject to normal commercial exploitation;
(B) a copy or phonorecord of the work can be obtained at a reasonable price"
I'd imagine that "normal commercial exploitation" would generally mean an item that is currently in print, although I could see other theoretical cases this would cover (for example, the work is not technically being printed anymore but there is a huge stock of existing volumes on the market).
I don't think reselling rare volumes would fall under this category - that could be "commercial exploitation", but certainly not "normal".
Despite their age, many of these books are still extremely readable even by young readers. I thumbed through Frog: the horse that couldn’t be tamed and really enjoyed it. The hand-drawn pictures in the book are also very readable and cool in a retro way. Makes me sad about the current quality of our children’s literature.
This may be because there is so much low quality stuff everywhere while only the good and high quality ones survived from the past (Survival of the fittest I guess). So the past looks like it was all good but the present is mostly rubbish.
Does someone know the difference between what archive.org will take and what Gutenberg will take? It seems like they should just coalesce into one data set, right? I imagine archive.org can easily fit the Gutenberg data set; you can reasonably get it yourself via Kiwix.
Archive.org can take and provide works that are still under copyright due to library provisions in the DMCA. Project Gutenberg only provides public domain works, but on a per country basis: https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_FAQ#Copyr... (some works are in the public domain in Australia, but not yet in the US, for example)
There's stuff about archive.org I still don't quite understand. So they use legal hacks to host all the stuff they do? They're legally a library or something?
The Internet Archive is fully compliant with the DMCA's safe harbor provisions; in the event an item is reported by a copyright owner, it will no longer be served to the public (but it will remain in storage until a later date).
Right. The Gutenberg books have typically been proofread by human beings, while the straight IA books are usually raw scans that have been OCRed.
Edit: it should be pointed out that there's a lot of overlap here. As far as I know, all Gutenberg books get uploaded to IA. Conversely, IA scans are often used as the starting point for Gutenberg projects.
But, in general, the advantage of Gutenberg releases is better proofreading, while the advantage of IA is much wider coverage.
I wish this was extended to all stuff under copyright - I think this could do great things in eliminating the abandoned works problem (in my opinion the largest issue of our current copyright regime).
Basically, a lot of opposition--and not by the people you might assume. Disney doesn't care; they're not going to let their copyrights lapse by accident. But a number of organizations that represent individual content creators, such as photographers, are concerned that upon lapse of copyright, large companies will make a minimal effort to contact the copyright holder or estate, call it a day, and then profit from the work.
Although the article's claim that he represented part of Los Angeles in Congress is kind of a stretch (unless they're being snidely metaphorical and it went over my head)
That's the current 44th. When he was in congress, the 44th was more Inland Empire than Los Angeles. "The district encompasses eastern Riverside County, including the sprawling suburb of Moreno Valley, the agricultural fields of the Coachella Valley and such cloistered country club communities as Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage."
Of course, being a former recording and tv star, he had a number of ties to Hollywood.
Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.
I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. Highly highly unlikely, but I hope for it nonetheless. At the very least I'll get to see the "oh fuck what do we do with all these truck drivers" problem get tackled, probably.