
Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated - jonah-archive
https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/
======
komali2
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.

~~~
skissane
> 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.

~~~
petercooper
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.

~~~
vidarh
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".

------
Stratoscope
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:

[https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFi...](https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFire)

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.

~~~
KGIII
Another enjoyable site:

[https://textfiles.com/](https://textfiles.com/)

I've donated to support specific projects there. I should probably set up
something regular. Jason does great things.

------
userbinator
_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:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830212)

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.

~~~
KGIII
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.

~~~
polm23
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.

[https://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=F...](https://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdPage=1&cdSort=newest&cdThread=Tx1D5K0J6DEQNAN)

~~~
KGIII
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.

~~~
polm23
I have no idea what you're talking about then, but there's a community of
people who build scanners now. Some of them might remember it.

[https://www.diybookscanner.org/](https://www.diybookscanner.org/)

------
walterbell
_> 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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You can upload them here:
[https://archive.org/upload/](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

~~~
jonah-archive
For the interested, we also have a Python library for uploading/searching/etc:
[http://internetarchive.readthedocs.io](http://internetarchive.readthedocs.io)

------
matt_wulfeck
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.

~~~
gertef
There is high-quality current literature today, and there was low-quality
literature then.

~~~
kronos29296
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.

------
orblivion
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
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...](https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_FAQ#Copyright)
(some works are in the public domain in Australia, but not yet in the US, for
example)

~~~
orblivion
> library provisions in the DMCA

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?

~~~
toomuchtodo
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).

~~~
vog
Wow. This is a really, really clever hack around this flawed copyright system!

~~~
db48x
That's not actually a hack; copyright only concerns distribution of a work,
not ownership or storage of it.

------
c3534l
What are some of the highlights for these newly available works? Anything
good?

------
Aloha
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).

~~~
walterbell
Anyone know what happened to the 2015 Orphan Works proposal by the US
Copyright Office?

[https://www.copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-
works2015.pd...](https://www.copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-
works2015.pdf)

~~~
ghaff
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.

------
shmerl
Copyright really needs a reform, with rolling back the term from the current
insane length to something reasonable.

------
sitkack
> Sonny Bono Memorial Collection

Heh.

~~~
Rebelgecko
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)

~~~
hinkley
Sonny Bono was the Representative for District 44.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_44th_congressio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_44th_congressional_district)

He was referred to in some circles as "The Representative from Disney".

~~~
Gargoyle
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.

~~~
hinkley
I wondered about redistributing. Wonder if the author made the same mistake.

