

The Ebook Cargo Cult - abc3
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult/

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Each public library pays amount x into a government fund for each person
living in its coverage area. Said government fund then pays for this:

<http://rowling.books/index> (served as a JSON or Marc file)

<http://rowling.books/hp1.txt> (or ePub, mobi or HTML)

It won't happen while publishers keep putting $40 books in the bookshop and
expect to be able to sell them. Nor will it happen while Elsevier still
charges $80 for that article you can only see the abstract of. But between
getting said book as a text file from untold websites or torrents already or
for half a dollar used at Amazon or some local second-hand bookshop, the above
might really be the answer.

And let Goodreads, IMDB and Amazon worry about the metadata and discovery and
the review aspects.

What we have right now flies in the face of Tim Berner-Lee's statement "Cool
URIs don't change". They really don't and they never should. And librarians
are hating it.

We have a gross inefficiency in the system as it stands, and neither Amazon's
Lending Library thing nor paywalls nor keeping on charging for books on a per-
book basis are the answer.

We don't just need a Steam for books, we need the web and some way of nixing
this whole DRM problem. DRM is a symptom of the problem, and that's problem is
getting authors paid. If it's out of my taxes (or some other way that leaves
me paying about $10 a month per household or even some reasonably priced
subscription service, Netflix-esque) and there's adequate metrics for
determining which author should get paid for which publishings of theirs, then
I'm all for it.

We've managed to fund public broadcasting. Maybe it's time to fund public
booksharing.

I just hope that 2020 will be the year of:

<http://rowling.books/hp1.txt>

or

<http://asimov.books/foundation.html>

or

<http://criterion.books/12-mockingbird.epub>

