Always saddens me when people who take the >2000 year old concept of a library into the digital age have to do so in the shadows, oftentimes under threat of persecution.
Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they please?
Google Books was 90% there, I wish it would have been allowed to succeed.
Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it.
Libraries purchase books, increasing payment to authors
Libraries have a limited quantity of books and check them out for a limited time, making them inconvenient compared to purchasing a book. For very popular books this means there's a high incentive for people to buy rather than wait to be able to check them out.
Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books. This means that for very niche and valuable books the market allows books to be sold at the higher prices necessary to sustain incentives.
Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.)
Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press.
And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business.
You’re thinking about books, but the content that everyone was trying to claim copyright over at the time was news, in newspapers (broadsheets.)
It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original!
I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.)
Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.
Copyright wasn't the cause of the dropping price of books, copyright was a RESPONSE to the dropping price of books. I don't buy the causality you're drawing here at all.
I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
I'd expect it to decrease the number and quality of books since it limits the number of things authors can write about and people can't write improved versions of other's people's books either.
Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
Yes, I'd agreed with that. The present day example is China which has only paid lip service to international copyright law and patents but which in practice has essentially ignored them. No other country is booming ahead like it is - it proves your point.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
They're booming because they're benefiting from our work. Copy + paste only works for some time until you start needing to create your own original things. But without copyright what's the point? Someone else will quickly take your investment of time and effort, and make profit that you can't (because you need to price what you developed higher than the competition, who is using your work, to recoup that investment).
Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused.
"Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused."
I'd agree—and I'm not contradicting my earlier comment by saying that. It's that what passes as breach of copyright and patent law is so finely ground that neither corporate or national interests are properly served.
So much time is wasted on protecting stuff that either isn't really a breach (so close to prior art) or on developments that are so trivial that they effectively amount to very little, that is the overall net result/outcomre is negative (even the winners only achieve a Pyrrhic victory).
The only people who truly benefit from this over-grinding of the law are those in countries whose laws allow more flexibility. The over-fine grinding of law also acts as a disincentive as it's intimidatory, people aren't going to invest in developing products if they have to spend most of the profits from them on litigation brought on by competitors whose principal aim is to just thwart competition.
As long as you stay ahead of competition or make simply better products it will work. Someone might steal your design, but they still have to manufacture it and parts like pcb, case and so on. This will take certain amount of time and in this time you should come up with new better model that offers more to customers.
That's fine if there's a level playing field. If a manufacturer can steal your design in China and get away with it and you can't do the same in the US then you're stuffed. And that's what's happened.
This is a very interesting take on the history of copyright I had not come across before. It is interesting because the historic facts don't match the pro-copyright narrative.
It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
Sure but I think we went too far. Current copyright protections are aimed squarely at keeping corporate profits, with insanely long protection periods that in most cases end up profiting the company insanely more than the author.
Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
Knowledge (and art) creation itself requires access. Which was what Aaron Swartz was hoping to achieve in compiling JSTOR's archive. He was effectively politically assassinated for this.
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
that was resources/materials problem not content problem. To make a book back then involved paying a scribe to handwrite on a parchment which is made of sheeps skins. it usually took about 425 sheep skin to make one bible for example. Yet libraries still existed. Copyright by contrast has never been about incentivizing literary creation but the opposite. It was in fact was put in effect as a censorship mechanism where the printers where given exclusive right to copy a written works in exchange for not printing book that parliament objected to. Under the Statute of Ann, the first copyright law, an author did not have right to his work the printer did.
You are comparing two different periods with completely different environments. You would take todays world any day for virtually anything of the human condition nowadays, thats not an argument to justify copyright at all.
That's roughly true worldwide -leader would pay for books to be written. But someone still had to pay, and copies tended to be limited. And if course then there were the book burnings to eradicated knowledge dangerous to the current leader.
Yes, and long before the digital mode of distribution.
I think there's a somewhat irrational fear from publishers that anyone with a personal computer can create 1 million copies of a book almost instantly (ok, maybe a few hours, depending on disk speed), and distribute them almost as quickly.
I imagine there were similar fears of the printing press from book scribes back in the 16th century.
The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
> The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
It's not. They want you to pay them for the book instead of just getting it for free.
That isn't the fear. The fear is that you as an author will not be paid for your work of creating and publishing the material because whoever wants a copy of the book will go pirate it instead of paying you.
Luckily, for now, piracy doesn't seem to be making that huge a dent in author income as far as I know. Many people find it easier to buy their book with one click on Amazon or one of the other storefronts, or read through a bunch of books with a single Kindle Unlimited subscription.
I'm not sure how long that will last. Some authors are updating their business model to include subscription services like Patreon, where they sell more direct interaction, character naming rights, early access, and additionally gated materials to dedicated readers. This is probably good to secure their income stream in the long term.
> A million copies of a 10MB PDF is 10 terabytes. A gigabit internet connection could serve that in 22 hours. Pretty straightforward to do that.
Yes, just so. The parent seemed to be arguing that it was too much to claim that it would take a few hours. I'd definitely call 22 hours at least a few!
That was at 10 MB per book, but that seems pretty high. Looking at the most popular books at Project Gutenberg suggests that 0.5 to 1.5 MB is where most fall.
If you go the sponsored route and use a CDN, then at 10 TBit/second it would only take 18 hours to serve it 8 billion times (approx once for every human). But there's still bittorrent and if the file's popular, that gigabit upload won't be the limiting factor.
> Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
There was even a period (ancient greece to middle-ages) where the very notion of "author" did not make much sense as books would get copied and augmented many times over by new copyists/contributors.
Kind of a sad that we lost this practice along the way, where a book was a living, evolving thing.
A chief difference is that with a wiki there's a canonical current version which everyone is working from. With written manuscripts there's ... just a bunch of different (usually handwritten) variations and modifications of a manuscript.
(Modifications wouldn't have been made to a single print copy, usually, though there are such practices as marginalia.)
What you'd see especially are commentaries on works. E.g., Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle, or the many commentaries which accompany Sun Tzu's text (itself likely a compilation) in Art of War.
That said, good observation. I've been suggesting for some years that the wiki is itself a distinct form of literature, though itself with some precursors, such as loose-leaf bindings which enabled the notion of a loose-leaf service in which a book could be continuously updated over time, dating to the late 19th century:
A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
I have an innate desire to write a book. But I haven’t because the effort would be significant and I have other things to do, including work. I am glad that the many professional authors whose work I’ve enjoyed had financial reward providing them both the motive and means to write for me.
You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions.
Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
Survey of Chemical Notation Systems - A Report of the Committee on Modern Methods of Handling Chemical Information. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, 1964.
It's an excellent snapshot of the world of chemical information on the cusp of computerization.
I'd much rather have doctors that weren't motivated by profit. There would be many more that actually give a shit about people rather than paying off med school or their Porsche loan.
Academic publishing says this too, and for them at least it turns out not to be true, because they insist that typesetting be done before they see it. The value-add from the publishing industry in general is payment advances and marketing. Same as the music industry. They're both a whole lot more and a whole lot less than somebody drafting in word.
They absolutely do and would do more often without copyright laws holding them back. Every person who finds a book they want to share with others would be free to make improvements as they saw fit, and that would certainty include edits and correcting errors.
Even today we have rouge editors who take copyrighted works, then illegally edit and distribute them along with their changes because they feel it improves the works in question. Examples include fan edits of films to improve the narrative and streamline edits of mythbusters to remove obnoxious repetitive cruft.
Other examples of free editors can be found in Wikipeida articles, fanfic projects, fan translation projects, and video game walkthroughs. Even mods/patches for video games can be a form of "free editing".
There are very few forms of media where I haven't seen people providing some form of editing services for free. (I can't say I've seen it for oil paintings yet I guess)
I think Wikipedia is a massive, living counterexample to this. It has tons of problems, but the lack of people willing to do the work for free is not one of them.
After 3 days it suddenly struck me how hilarious this is. How does one fact check if substantial amounts are gone or impossible to find?
You get the modern internet, great editing, wonderful font set, the best marketing money can buy under the sun, no references. Sort of factual, we think... uhh... trust us!
> But a very small number of people want to edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing for no pay.
But not all books need all of those services. The editing, copy editing, and fact checking can be left to the responsibility of a motivated producer to provide, or to a motivated consumer to demand. (Of course, a producer might decide to skip those, and serve non-discerning consumers who don't worry about factuality. But … well, that's where we are, anyway, and always have been. There was yellow journalism well before social media.) Typesetting can be handled automatically for bulks that never leave the computer, which is probably many of them. I'm quite OK if books aren't marketed to me; I think I've hardly ever intentionally consumed a book based on an ad anyway.
As to funding, the whole point of the claim to which you were responded was that there are plenty of people are willing to write for free, so that there is no need for separate funding. This means that we'll get literature that reflects the skills and interests of the people who are interested enough in writing to do it for free, and who can support themselves while they do so. Well, OK; it's not a representative sample, but neither is the literature we have now, nor has it ever been historically. (Of course, too, some writing is inherently costly: travel writing, for example, is costly even if you are willing to do the writing itself for free. But not all writing needs all of these services.)
Heh. It looks like I set out inadvertently to demonstrate the importance of copy-editing. "bulks that never leave the computer" should have been "books …"; and "to which you were responded" should have been "… responding".
I'm curious (but not complaining!) about the downvote—whether it indicates disagreement with my claim that some of these services are not needed for some books, or something else. If the latter, then I'd like to know what, to understand better the nature of the argument. If the former, I would be very interested to hear that case! (That is, the case that all books need all of the services "edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing".)
As an academic, where publishers are particularly parasitic, and where academics do, indeed, provide all of these services for free (and worse, since we still wind up paying, directly or indirectly, the publishers' exorbitant fees), I share the sentiment of my sibling commenter pessimizer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975366).
> A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book.
But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
Writing gets better the more you do it. And many writing styles people have initially complained about turned out to be wildly successful. See Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
> If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still be work for professional programmers: I want software that does X. There is no free software that does X. What are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write it for me.
If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you release that software to the public, then I got the software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me. Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
It is never good to explain something in terms of what it is not and it is better to travel towards some place new than to travel away from something. If you build your philosophy or movement on [say] anti-capitalism success can be glorious as always but in the long run you will need real life examples of capitalism for any of your arguments to make sense.
One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around.
If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place...
What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that?
The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest.
The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible.
They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms.
The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition.
We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds.
The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes.
Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate.
It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction.
If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains.
Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else!
We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable!
yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable.
Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license.
Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars!
Piracy? Surely you mean heresy?
In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk.
How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years.
haha, I just type faster than I can think. I would normally rewrite things a few times but I felt it captured my thoughts well enough. And since they are to deep or to all over the place (however you want to see it) for this forum why bother refining it? Ill remember not to write/post/share my perspective more often as to not disturb the group think.
And a lot of worst of modern day Linux & Open Source is those big tech corporations pushing their own agendas... Linux might even be better off being a hobby again.
Which is great for this conversation, because it proves that it isn't absolutely necessary for software copyright to exist in order for people to get paid to write it.
Yes, but very few people can afford to write full-time without getting paid for it. The money isn't the deciding factor between writing vs not writing. It's the deciding factor between writing 40 hours a week vs 5 hours a week after doing their day job.
Many other good writers are restricted from producing a lot more because of it too.
For all we know Steven King could have authored the best Harry Potter novel of all time, but we'll never know that because even if he wanted to, laws would have prevented him from writing one. King actually might have enough money to make that happen anyway, but billions of other humans, each of which might also write the best Harry Potter novel would never be able to afford to under current laws.
It's easy to look at the good works that get created despite our copyright system and think that it's working out pretty well without giving consideration to what we're being denied because of it.
I don't think one has to go this far. It's already a hard job being an author, and if you make it less well-paid for the median author, we'd get less art, and less knowledge shared. However I think one could easily make a case for making it less well-paid for the big winners head of the power-law curve (the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc) which extract huge paychecks from the copyright monopoly.
I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
I would be shocked if the median pay for an author was more than $2/hour. I'd actually be shocked if it was that much. Not sure what effect lowering it to $1.50/h would be.
That seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Sure, there might be a lot of people who want to _write_ a book and may do it for free or very little, but the people editing books still need to eat.
Writing a book takes a long time and will take even longer or never get finished at all if you also need to work at McDonald's to make rent and keep the electricity on.
When it comes to populations it's about statistics, not about what is possible at all. If we want many great works, we need to make it possible for more people to succeed with that not make it harder. Same fallacy as saying that discrimination or poverty don't impact success, since some people have pulled it off despite those.
Sorry but this is such an american trope, that people need to write themselves off to prove something to somebody or themselves (not sure what exactly, there are other ways to gain respect but maybe some folks struggle to find other, more effective means of deeper introspection).
Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great).
That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts.
I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word.
To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
What you are describing is a wonderful result that happens to fail due to our economic system which requires everyone to constantly seek profitable activities to survive. If seeking profitable activity was optional, authors could write books as their passion drives them, and then share them with everyone for free on a global library. Most creators create because they want to do so, and the profit is incidental as they require some profit to survive.
But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.
Ok, go ahead and consider alternate economic systems.
But until we have that new system, would it be alright to continue to respect the wishes of authors who have created creative works under the current economic system? Consent is important. We can’t opt them into our hypothetical passion-driven economic system where is everything is free against their will.
Individual authors might opt in, and it’s fair game to pirate their work. But let’s not decide on behalf of other people.
The decision is not entirely on the author. Jurisdictions have to decide how much they are willing to spend and how far they are willing to go to enforce copyright, potentially forever.
Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
> Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
Alternately, technological advances are going to make it much easier to control everything a person has access to, constantly monitor everything they access, and identify/punish those who access unauthorized material.
I currently mirror many terabytes of content onto external hard drives. I have loaned copies out to many people, who have made their own copies. I will continue to loan to anyone who asks.
What technological advances do you imagine preventing me and others from doing this?
Storage will continue to decrease in cost. It will only get easier to duplicate these libraries. What happens when they fit on a phone or a thumb drive?
> What technological advances do you imagine preventing me and others from doing this?
DRM "Trusted Computing" and spying at the OS level mostly. Your friend will plug in the external hard drive. Their OS will immediately scan the contents, upload filenames/hashes to a server to compare them against anything they consider illegal or unacceptable. Any attempt to play media will require your computer to connect to the internet to verify that you have a valid license for it. Your friend's OS will be 100% cloud based (Windows360 SE) making every device basically a dumb terminal and anything they do on their computer could be watched and analyzed in real time for signs of illegal activity (and market research). Your files may not even be accessible at all for your friends since the OS could stamp each file with an ID and remote attestation could prevent any unauthorized computer/user account from viewing the files. You can't authorize all your friends computers without de-authorizing your own. Limited number of authorizations per year. Any attempts to access unauthorized content could be logged and reported to authorities.
Very soon you won't be able to buy a computer with a modern processor from either Intel or AMD that doesn't include code written by Microsoft designed to prevent your computer from booting at all unless it's got Windows installed. Currently they allow you to toggle a switch in software that will let you bypass that restriction, but no promises that it'll stay that way (https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-pluton-secure-processo...) and (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59931.html)
DRM is in every browser, and even in the HTML5 spec.
Every computer/monitor that supports HDMI already has DRM included in it designed to prevent you from making unauthorized copies of high quality video content. Like all DRM it's illegal to bypass that.
Starting with Windows 10 (although a windows update later added it to 7 and 8) Microsoft collects your filenames. Apple already wanted to scan their customer's personal files for illegal content.
We're much much closer to that reality than I'd like. There's already very little hope of getting away from DRM.
I believe that the default path on Windows will impede copying of some content.
I remain entirely unconvinced that I will somehow be stopped from putting together unencumbered Linux machines. I am unconvinced that anyone can prevent me from enjoying and sharing the terabytes of content I already have. I am unconvinced that HDCP strippers will stop working for existing content. I am unconvinced that people around the world will be entirely prevented from copying new content.
I really hope you're right. If they start adding more user-hostile stuff in CPUs and firmware it may not matter what we're using for an OS. Intel and AMD are basically the entire market and having just two companies with that much control over our computing freedom is a problem.
HDCP strippers will probably keep working, but committing crimes like circumventing DRM only gets riskier as our computers log and report back connected devices, what we're doing on them, and companies can buy up our purchase histories.
I do admire your optimism, but I've seen our freedom increasingly restricted over the course my own lifetime too. For example, the idea that Microsoft was overstepping their boundaries and taking inappropriate liberties with our computers has been around since Windows 95, but there was a time when I never thought we'd see a day where MS was openly snooping on user's personal files or plastering ads all over their OS yet here we are.
Don't underestimate surveillance capitalism and the desire companies and governments have to restrict what we're able to do with our own devices.
I am not just optimistic. I am actively working to ensure that I have general purpose computing available. The world is more than Intel and AMD. Tech at the level of Raspberry Pi is not going to go away. What Windows users do is irrelevant.
> But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.
I honestly cannot think of a more trivial reason to tinker with the system of incentives that undergirds the global economy.
Anyway, the free worldwide digital library already exists at library dot lol.
That we could make an authorized free library for everyone in the world is just one benefit. If we also eliminate patents and all intellectual property restrictions we’d see a much higher rate of innovation. Contrary to the fairy tales we’re told by those who benefit from holding patents, I’m convinced that intellectual property restrictions dramatically slow down the rate of innovation.
But there is a big difference between an illegal pirate library and an authorized global library. The latter would be much better for everyone.
And you might be surprised to realize that providing a basic standard of living for every person does not require dismantling the larger capitalist system. Corporations buying raw materials could still pay in currency. I’m just describing a world where food and shelter and clothing and individual transportation and medical care are provided to everyone. This doesn’t even require dismantling the broader capitalist system.
> If we also eliminate patents and all intellectual property restrictions we’d see a much higher rate of innovation. Contrary to the fairy tales we’re told by those who benefit from holding patents, I’m convinced that intellectual property restrictions dramatically slow down the rate of innovation.
This claim is contrary to common sense. If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel? The moment I share it, every publisher on the planet can print it for free, without paying me a penny. If I invent a widget, Walmart can use their established supply chains to build my widget for cheaper and distribute it wider than I ever could. Why would I put in all the work required to invent my widget only for some soulless corporation to profit from my labor?
> The latter would be much better for everyone.
So we remake the global economic system... to remove the odium that accompanies pirating IP?
> And you might be surprised to realize that providing a basic standard of living for every person does not require dismantling the larger capitalist system.
Obviously--every single nation with a high standard of living has achieved it via free markets.
> If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel?
Why did you write this comment? Anyone can copy it for free without paying you a penny! Even if authors had zero chance of making money on books they would continue to write them because they have something to say and writing is what they love. Fewer people might become full time authors, but books would continue to be made. There would always be artists who would continue to paint and musicians who would continue to write songs even if they could never make a single cent on their work too.
Not everyone gets fulfillment only when they are paid money. Many artists are perfectly happy just knowing people enjoy their works and want to share them with others. Some artists even encourage the free sharing of their works.
Common sense is often wrong. This is how we form new ideas. We look at existing common sense and discover the flaws, and that's part of how the world changes.
> If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel?
Because no one else has written it and you have a story to tell. Are you a novelist? I feel like most novelists write primarily because they want to write, often despite it being unlikely to net much profit. This is like looking at open source software and saying "if someone could copy my code I would never write any code". Well, this may be true for you, but it is quite apparently not true for everyone. As someone who puts every engineering artifact of mine on github with a copyleft license, the idea that people will only do things if they can exercise IP restrictions is just comical to me.
> If I invent a widget, Walmart can use their established supply chains to build my widget for cheaper and distribute it wider than I ever could.
Walmart may or may not want to produce the thing. You may notice that there is a lot of open source hardware out there and walmart isn't producing it all, so obviously there are more criteria out there than "free designs exist". If it happens that they are well positioned to produce the item then it's probably good for everyone for them to produce it.
Think for example of the people in poorer countries who, through their government's agreement with the WTO to trade normalization laws, they are required to follow US patent laws. So if there is a piece of medical equipment like an MRI machine that is patented and costs one million dollars, those people will simply have to die of their illness because no one in their country could afford the patented machine. But if IP restrictions did not exist, then someone well suited to produce those machines could produce them for cheaper, to the medical benefit of people all over the world.
> Why would I put in all the work required to invent my widget only for some soulless corporation to profit from my labor?
Because the widget does not exist and you want it to. That's why I and so many other people contribute to open source.
> So we remake the global economic system... to remove the odium that accompanies pirating IP?
No, we remove the intellectual property restrictions generally spread across the globe over the last 30 years to end this government blockade on innovation that comes with an individual being able to claim rights over one idea. I assume you are not familiar with the story of 3D printers and how rapidly they spread only after the patents expired. 3D printers were patented in 1989, though two companies came up with the idea and were not able to resolve things until the early 1990's, when they agreed on terms and began selling the first machines for $50,000 in 1995. By 2008 the price had dropped to $25,000. In this time they sold 16,000 machines. Then the patents expired. Creators in Europe worked to make the first open source 3D printer which they got working just as the patents expired. This clearly demonstrates the folly of your assertion that engineers would not work without intellectual property restrictions, as these creative engineers did just that. There is something that animates us that is deeper than profit that does not require government manipulation of markets to facilitate. Over the next three years engineers all over the world worked on new designs, and by 2011 you could get a decent 3D printer for $2k. By 2018, there were hundreds of manufacturers all over the world, you could get a machine for $250, and a single company, Prusa, was shipping 6,000 printers a month. Their machine was all open source and their machines are still all open source to this day.
So printers went from $50k to $25k in the first 13 years under patent, and then $25,000 to $250 in the following ten years after patent. They went from shipping 16000 printers in 13 years to global volumes of 10k per month. So tell me, did more innovation occur before or after the patents expired? And given that two companies independently invented them and had to work out agreements before they could sell, I think it is fair to say that they could have taken off before 2008 if it had not been for the patents.
Remember, the sole purpose of a patent is to block would-be innovators from improving upon a patented design. This is like molasses for innovation. Patents do allow for securing large investments, but without patents we would see more frequent smaller investments to help innovators maintain first mover advantage and keep the market moving. The whole point is that free markets work fine without the massive market intervention that is government-secured monopoly on information.
Imagine if poorer nations could copy the designs for MRI machines? Then suitable machines would still be produced. You have to really study how open source 3D printers have developed to understand that the rules of innovation do not follow the old business school fairy tale that all innovation comes from big investors looking to create new IP. That just isn't the only way things work. And when you learn how all this other innovation occurs, you start to see how much of that is being squashed by IP restrictions.
> every single nation with a high standard of living has achieved it via free markets.
We could achieve a higher standard of living with freer markets not moderated by government decree that allows an individual to claim monopoly on information for 20 years or longer. It's funny that you mention free markets because the Mises Institute has multiple lectures about the way Intellectual Property harms capitalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWShFz4d2RY
The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to the premise of libraries.
That first lowercase "library" formed a garden path that reminds me: How (nearly) nominatively deterministic of Elbakyan! In a way your comment makes sense there too, when considering Sci-Hub's purported use of donated credentials.
Hope the next Alexandria library is named Elbakyan library. She surely deserves. And this time I hope it doesn't catch fire. Fortunately bits are not as flammable as paper. But on the other side they are higher maintenance to last thousands of years.
> Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it.
Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing books for the interested to read them. Any function they provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the mission of most libraries is to support the publishing industry. The history of libraries has been to defend themselves from the publishing industry, which historically has always fought to have them shut down.
I think the industry is ignoring ideas like micropayments, donations, short-term rentals, and similar.
The average reader wants a centralized repository of knowledge with a smart search engine. They may not always want to buy the whole book. But hundreds may want to read something relevant and even pay for it. The publishers should notice all this and collaborate with one another to provide what people want.
Instead, they lock up their books in silos, expect separate registrations and logins, demand annual subscriptions upfront, or require university accounts to access. It seems short-sighted to me. Spreading knowledge doesn't appear to be part of their balancing act at all half the time.
This is far outside the Overton window, but I think it will be what wins out in the end. All information deserves to be free.
The society that used it will grow with the value of the information. That value can then be captured through increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual process.
Since all information released in this process is free-to-use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.
That's an implementation detail. Do we first agree that the system proposed would lead to a better society? Would lead to the pie growing by a lot? Would stop heaps of wasteful processes?
Since people already give away information for free - see open source software, wikipedia, all sorts of other sources, you wouldn't need to be even close to accurate to start with. Can we agree that Wikipedia provides at least $1b/year in value? Great, give them $100m/year and we'll work from there. Linux? Let's go with another $100m. Firefox? Stable Diffusion? That guy in Nebraska[0]?
I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation, but a way is through a very small subset of people, when trying to download a book or use other information, they get entered into an auction shared by some others who also want to use that information. Anyone who bids more than the median gets to use the information and pays the median, anyone who bids less than the median doesn't - but gets the median value in return.
> Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books
Libraries as in the Library of Congress or the British Library are offered a copy of every book that is published in those countries. And you can go there and read them.
If you’re lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and have the right passport. But if you weren’t, if you have a citizenship that does not come with the right to knowledge, then Library Genesis is there for you.
Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss.
Lecture offers are secondary income streams for nonfiction authors (actually very similar to what live performances are for music).
Also, it would perfectly possible for publishing houses to find secondary income streams if they desired, but it is easier to complain about illegal copies than to find new income sources:
Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
> Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
Coz they'd prefer to control the supply and get all the profits while giving actual writers a pittance and having in their contracts that anything they write belongs to corporation that paid them. Similar deal with code really...
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
Funny, I was just thinking of this.
In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience.
Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
I'd argue with some forms of writing / publishing books are the secondary income stream.
There seems to be a growing audience for online serial fiction as well as technical books that are written by the chapter, where some readers pay for early access to chapters that have yet to be released.
The outputs of these are quite long, so at some point a block of chapters gets bundled into a "book" as well as an audiobook on occasion and then sold on amazon.
Some authors then hide / remove the earlier chapters (this is not universal), or add extra bits in the book and then publish this for people who are hearing that "This story is really good, get the book to find out what happens".
Not sure what the actual economics looks like at the macro level, but it seems some authors are doing it as their full-time gig.
I spend way more on music than I used to before Spotify. Before then I might buy a few albums a year and pirate most of my collection, now I consistently give the music industry a repeatable income each month. And I hate those guys.
I’m surprised this doesn’t yet exist, to be honest.
I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
O’Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues, not current best-sellers.
Check your local library. Mine has a surprisingly robust eBook collection via Libby that's easy - and integrated with Amazon for delivery to my Kindle.
I'm actually sad to see libraries embrace DRM encumbered services that track what people are reading or use your personal information for marketing. Librarians at one time fought very hard to keep user's reading lists private, and while they lost that battle in the US and the state collects our reading lists, it seems backwards for them to hand that same data over to 3rd parties to use it for profit.
Well, Spotify and Netflix have large gaps in their catalogs, so I would expect the same to be true for a similar book service. In fact, more than half of the time I look up a book on LibGen, I come up empty.
Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do it.
If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over destroying long term incentive structures that led us here with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned exceptions).
Purchase books. Please.
Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things other than books.
I agree that funding for otherwise unknown authors is necessary for high quality books, and I agree that more sales mean more money around to fund "risky" authors.
But I'd rather see funding work a bit like science, where you ask a non-profit for funding based on a project proposal that's judged more on its merits than on its sales potential. No author would need an "X Twitter followers" pre-requisite anymore.
And then there's the counterpart, namely, reach: when I studied Japanese in South America the only textbook available in Spanish were photocopies sold (illegally, of course) by the University of the only original they had - with such a small market and highly devaluated currency, no bookstore imported the book anymore. Had it not been for piracy, none of us could have studied. And it would have been poor consolation to know that our sacrifice in not pirating a book would have led to better books somewhere else that we also wouldn't be able to afford.
Are project proposals not sales pitches? Isn't this what everyone in academia complains about? Having to "sexy" up science so they can sell it to people (get other people to pay for it)?
> Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free.
I would argue this is more or less already the case.
Modern pirates are economically disenfranchised people (usually sustinance fishermen) that have had their livelihoods stolen by international conglomerates.
Even with the the murders, etc, they are multiple steps up the ethical food chain from slaver fishing ships, which are apparently totally legit businesses (TM) in the global economy.
I really don't see the problem with the term "piracy". I guess if you are a vegan and also 100% boycott Asia you might be able to cast a stone against 21st century pirates.
> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.
I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.
This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.
So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.
There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).
You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.
Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of concepts.
Because the main source of ire of book authors is that they lose some part of the revenue from book sales due to copyright infringement, which many call piracy.
Now, piracy is an incorrect and am emotionally charged term to describe this phenomenon. I believe that a productive discussion on any matter requires clarity of chosen terms. Piracy is not one such term when talking about something not related to sea and ships.
Given that any book can now be preserved and reproduced indefinitely, and given that there's only so much reading one man can do in his life, shouldn't there be a point when we have enough books and don't need any new ones? We might have reached that point already.
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
They certainly don't have to operate that way. You could have nearly the same incentive structure (minus the cost of actually commuting to a library) if they purchased their goods and only offered time-limited checkouts up to the number of copies they've purchased.
most books are written with no expectation of financial reward. the book that pays the writer well is by far the exception and if books were made free by law tomorrow books would still be written. we’d lose some fiction authors sure, but even those would keep being written. in general the importance of money to the creative process is greatly exaggerated. barely anyone gets rich from art or knowledge production but it keeps happening because beauty and knowledge are ends in themselves, things we seek out for no other reason than to behold them. money is just what we need to eat and have shelter.
> keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it
Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out of financial motivation.
It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks for the craft of writing.
That's pretty clear. I start from "work should be financially incentivized" as evidenced by, well, the world around us. Then you argue that writing is very special (maybe a form of art, and many artists are hobbyists). To which I reply that while writing could be considered a form of art, the kind of books I read (and sometimes write) require hundreds of hours of work (that could be very satisfying, for sure). The enormous time investment means that you either get money for it in some way or you don't do as much of it as you'd want to, because you need to get a paying job to survive.
Exactly. The idea that people who have an ardent need for financial support to survive would choose an activity that is statistically unlikely to provide sufficient financial remuneration seems odd, don't you think?
The separation here is nothing to do with "art". It's to do with a person's ability to choose an occupation based on desire/interest or pure financial need. Writing is in the former category not because it's "art", but simply because one needs to be comfortable to have the luxury of taking such risk.
To put it another way: people choose the vocation of writing despite financial motivation to pursue alternative more lucrative undertakings.
> if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability
This is less about want and more about means (people wanting to write books but not having the freedom to invest their time in it if they don't have pre-existing financial stability).
But... this is currently the case. 50% of books published by the "big 5" publishing houses sell less than 12 copies (source: recent Penguin Random House antitrust case). The chances of any writer making any money on a book they write is close to zero even if they get a publishing deal with a major publisher.
The current system of copyright doesn't protect writers (nor motivate them to write); it only protects monopoly.
I think a big part of the argument for Universal Basic Income etc is that you can make a meager living doing just that. You could make an argument that UBI and free information would go well hand in hand.
>"Libraries are [a] part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it."
Author here. One of my books was pirated and wide spread some time ago within the community I'm in. My income dropped almost immediately, I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month. Not motivated to write another book.
The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost. Now we have zero distribution cost!
The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.
You aren't losing sales. You are missing them. They aren't being taken away from you, they are passing you by. The result may be the same for you personally, but it's still a critical difference.
You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist. I do know, however, that pretending the old system can still work in the digital age isn't fixing anything for anyone.
You just kind of handwave the whole problem away. Why aren't authors paid for the work they do? You can that like it isn't true and that it cannot be true.
>You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist.
So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken and needs to be entirely re-created BUT you also don't know how or what it should even look like. But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.
> You just kind of handwave the whole problem away.
No, that's what copyright does. It demands we all play the game, then it's totally unprepared for that not working out. Someone used a computer and an internet connection to share data without paying me money? shocked Pikachu face
I'm at least admitting there's a problem. Just because I don't have a solution does not mean I don't understand the problem. Not all problems are that easily solved.
If I did have a solution, I would be implementing it. After all, a solution to that problem would be one of the most valuable contributions to society I can think of. At least one of the most highly valued.
> So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken
I didn't decide. I was speaking descriptively, not prescriptively; something the copyright industry seems rather unfamiliar with.
> But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.
It's not a matter of being OK with it or not. We can't compel every person to follow the rules. We've been trying that method for 30 years, and it's been blowing up in our faces the entire time.
The reality is that copyright is a false promise. We can't force people to add a monetary transaction to the distribution of information, when information can be distributed anonymously at next to zero cost.
You're so worried about the ethical implications of piracy, but what about the ethical implications of the false promise that is copyright?
We are telling authors every day that they can make money selling books, but that is only true occasionally, by chance. We have no way to guarantee that will happen. We can't attribute every successful book sale to copyright enforcement, because we know copyright enforcement is broadly failing.
It's time to stop treating this like a game of good vs evil, and recognize the failure of the game itself. Even if that means recognizing that we already lost.
You talk about wanting to find a solution, so I'd like to share where I think one might be found. Not that I've found it, I just think I know where to look.
The problem with books is that we live in a partially post-scarcity society. Star Trek envisioned post-scarcity everything, but we live in a partially post-scarcity society: Food, pure metals, clean water etc. are all still scarce, but anything that can be digitized is not. Books can be digitized, so they are subject to post-scarcity economics, but most of the author's needs are subject to scarcity economics.
What bridges the these two economies, and where I believe the answer can be found, is in attention. Attention is scarce, but it is also necessary to consume anything in the post-scarcity economy. It exists in both worlds somehow, and I therefore believe it's closely related to the problem of how an author can get paid.
Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.
What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?
Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.
> Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.
I'm not telling authors to find a new framework. Such a thing doesn't exist. I'm not even sure it could exist.
And that sucks, because authors need a new framework.
> What do you expect them to do?
I don't. I have zero expectations.
> Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.
I'm not here shaming anyone. I'm just being honest. This system is broken. We're all looking at the same shattered pieces. It's wild that I'm the only one here who isn't pretending everything is OK.
> Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Post-digital, a legally purchased book can be shared with no friends, none at a time.
> Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Sure, but books also had a much higher value due to a relative lack of competitors. Books now have to compete with a plethora of free media available on YouTube, forums, blogs, etc.
Some of them may be of lower quality, but it's hard to beat free. Lots of us have taught ourselves skills via free resources that we probably would have had to pay for at one point.
It's much harder to charge for knowledge than it once was.
Well, post digital era we still buy/rent games, video and music.
I don't see why something similar couldn't be done, pay monthly and you can read whatever your want, and what you read depends on where the money from your subscription goes. And as distribution costs are lower, higher % of it should go to the writers. Hell, amazon could just do that, except of course they wouldn't give a fair cut...
At zero cost to try new authors it could possibly be a good way for more niche stuff, you can just page thru any book that you want with no cost but time
> What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?
There is actually one guy doing it on patreon but he already have YT audience for music gear reviews (book is about electronic music ideas and tips). So it is possible, just kinda hard as you already need to have publicity.
It's only a problem is he's unmotivated and he wants to write. If he just decides not to write then, it's pretty simple for him to move not. Not so for the readers who pirated his first book, found it expanded their minds and now are hungry for more by the same author.
That might be frustrating for his would-be readers, but in the same way that it’s frustrating to me that there aren’t many great small flagship smartphones. It’s a bummer, but I’m not going to genuinely complain that I’m being wronged because there aren’t enough people out there willing to buy a small phone.
I am happy to complain that we as a society have limited ways to reward people who share knowledge that we all benefit from. The answer, if you ask me, is to levy a tax and let citizens decide where the money goes via quadratic voting.
royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres of fantasy that are available for free.
The business model is, the author builds up a substantial number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons can read.
Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.
The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or editing or prose they just want the story.
I expect this will become a fairly standard model in multiple genres going forward.
I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the models that have gone before.
Definitely a fan of this model. Anecdotal, but I recently subscribed to AMC+ because the pirate streaming site I was using didn't have the latest episode of a show I wanted to watch. I could have waited a literal day, or gone to a torrent tracker, but paying the $9 was just easier and shows support for the show.
I agree that this is a huge problem to be solved, but I don’t think it excuses piracy in any way.
On another note, one emerging new framework is patreon. Instead of paying for printing/distribution, you’re paying the author directly to continue writing.
Over 3/4 of the media I pay for is creative commons, redistributable, non-commercial, no-modifications, attribution licensed. (The other 1/4 is streaming video, music, etc, which is not CC licensed.)
I am 1%-5% of some of the CC artists' income. I'm probably < 0.000001% of the income for the corporate media sources I pay.
> The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.
Many people have their lives depending on that business model. They just cannot realize that such system is dying, if not already dead. It's a false hope dictated by self-preservation.
The same could be said about software. Broken from birth I guess. Music too. Movies?
The main difference with books is how easy they are to distribute. The other forms take up more space and are not as trivial to leave at an end point to be picked up. Music and movies also have big interested who might sue you. Software was easier to copy - you would rather have my .exe than my .zip of hacked up SaaS code that won't work next year.
To answer what the next framework would be like. I think it would be crappier than just selling the book, and support fewer people. It would be bad for the reader too. Often the act of paying for a book makes it more valuable - the emotional investment in it means you will finish it and make use of it.
> The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost.
This isn't true through. The price in funding creation of the book (there is value on having the author focus exclusively on writing the book rather than finding time while doing a full time job), editing, marketing, etc.
It's like saying the price of a phone is simply a tally of the cost of each individual component, where you have to factor in engineering, R&D, etc.
The price of a phone is paid when you buy the phone. That's when and where the transaction happens.
If that transaction doesn't happen, then none of the other things you mentioned get funded.
You can't get the phone without a transaction happening. It's a physical object, so moving it has a distribution cost.
You can get the contents of a book without doing a transaction. You can share the contents of a book just as freely as I'm sharing this comment.
Because there isn't a transaction happening, there is no source of income. There is no time or place to ask readers for money. Money isn't even involved in the first place; neither are goods or services - apart from a trivial amount of bandwidth.
Treating arts like they are singular objects to be made only once (or services to be performed once) doesn't work anymore. Now they are instances. They can be recreated or performed for free. By anyone. Anywhere. At any time. Without anyone else watching.
You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction. You can never stop the signal.
>You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction.
IMO, you shouldn't hijack someone else's work to make it free. If the person creating it wants it to be distributed freely, they have the option to make it so.
> You can't get the phone without a transaction happening.
This is also the case (not always) for a book, because the creation has a cost. Again, the author can choose to make it free, but they should also be free to charge a fee for it. It's pretty arrogant to take that choice away from them.
I'm not taking anything out hijacking anyone. I'm not here to talk about whether piracy is or isn't moral. Believe it or not, that's totally irrelevant.
The cold hard truth is that an author can't choose to make their book free, because they can't choose to make it - the book itself - cost.
Books aren't individual objects anymore. They cost nothing to reproduce. They cost nothing to redistribute. Any value we assign to a book can be infinitely diluted by anyone at any time, because it's free and instantaneous for them to make new copies and share them.
It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.
It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.
This point of view ignores the fact that books have a cost to create, unless you think they just wave their hands and the content comes out fully formed.
> It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.
> It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.
I have made no comments about either of these subjects, so I don't see how it is relevant.
When secrets are written down on paper, then it's hard for people to share them without buying more paper from you. Sure, people can copy the paper and publish it for free, but convincing them not to is still a scalable solution. Printing takes work. At least, it did when copyright was invented.
When secrets are published on the internet, anyone can publish them again for free. Worldwide. Instantly. Literal billions of copies if they feel like it. There's no holding that back. It's not remotely scalable.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
My answer to this is that authors (and other creatives) should have a right to recoup the costs (including time) of their efforts, but currently the time period for doing so is ridiculously (too) long.
In the US, the original copyright term was 14 years, and if the author was alive after the end of that there was another (optional?) 14 year extension:
Those are good arguments against the length of the copyright, but not copyright itself. I assume the author got their book pirated in short time (shorter than 14 years) after release.
I don't think most piracy is early Mickey Mouse cartoons; if the argument for piracy based on copyright length was sincere, I'd expect to see almost exclusively older works pirated, but that's not what's most popular on the torrents.
Oh for sure the setting has evolved plenty from the early days, but that inherent conflict of resource guarding vs access is what drives a lot piracy.
Other angles on the same continuum:
- You cannot pay a reasonable amount to a single provider and expect to watch the television shows your friends talk about.
- You cannot go back and re-watch your favorite television show on a streaming service where you originally watched it, as their catalog dropped it last year.
The flipside: why should people everywhere in the world be asked to give up a large portion of their discretionary income to get access to educational materials that can be reproduced at zero marginal cost? What is the loss to society as a whole when we make pointless time sinks like Netflix and social media free but college textbooks unaffordable to many?
The internet allows us to give everybody on the planet access to world-class educational materials at practically no cost. This is so obviously a good thing for society as a whole that we should strive to see this future materialize. Yes, some authors will lose income, but society as a whole gains greatly when we fight artificial scarcity.
For what it's worth, I think authors should get compensated by some other means, especially when they write great books. But artificial scarcity isn't the answer, it never is.
(The current model is also unfair to authors because book sales follow a power-law curve where a handful of authors take practically all the winnings)
I can see the production cost of a fantasy genre book being high with every new book but textbooks not that much. Maximum you're asking some TAs to review your book and paying them with a thank you note on the first few pages of the book.
And to put more perspective into this conversation right now Disney+ subscription costs $79 per year, O'Reilly subscription is $499.
I don’t understand why people seem to think that having a monetary incentive to do something taints it somehow. Rewarding good behavior is half of justice. If someone writes books that many people really like, they’re doing a good deed and in my view should be rewarded.
Another thing you might find in your dreams is a world where people can live a comfortable life without working. I’d like that world, and I’m sure a lot of good art, music, blog posts, etc. would come from it. But I don’t see why you’d actively want people who produce those things to not be rewarded for it.
If you agree that allowing more people to have access to certain information is a net good, and that a adding financial barrier to access reduces the amount of people that can access it, then you agree that making information contingent on payment is strictly negative.
The problem is that under our current "make money or die" societal model, if you optimized for net good you'd end up starving on the streets.
Good art tends to sell for little to the artist, only becoming valuable once some rich person decides they want to sell it as expensive. The good artist does it as "the starving artist"
Similarly, it's big corporations like Spotify that benefit from music copyrights. Musicians make their money by selling your tickets
I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.
> It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact people do not buy books, period.
The fact you're saying "period" means you're not ready to listen, but like to stick to your point of view. This will only affect your ability to see the truth.
> I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.
Unless the billing system tells you explicitly "you see the lack of people here compared to last month/year/some other time period? well, we actually possess the technology to find out who these potential people would have been, so we reached out to them and asked if they were going to buy your book. they all said 'yes, but not anymore, since I can now pirate it' and that's why your book stopped selling as well as before", how can you be sure you were going to make that money?
You misunderstood them. "Period" does not refer to the entire argument, as in "no one can change my mind", but to the sentence "people do not buy books", as opposed to "people do no bus books because they [...]"
Not necessarily. Wouldn’t most book sales (especially in small niche interest groups, which is what this sounds like) be expected to come very quickly after the release date and then drop off very quickly?
Yes, there might be other variables affecting it too, but a blanket statement of "Piracy doesn't reduce sales" when it's primarily studied in the higher volume form of video game sales which are often pirated immediately after release and thus the effect is not clearly visible is not a good argument either.
I feel blanket statements are generally not a good fit for serious discussions. We have to keep asking the questions that will guide us closer to better data.
I can't imagine the only good studies being on games. I'm sure similar studies for other forms of entertainment/art exist too. Games are also harder to pirate, and has its own problems that are virtually non-existent for books.
And if we were to go down that route, we can further divide the affected people into publishers, authors, book stores etc. and only then can we figure out how the moral compass of each of us is really adjusted :)
Big movie studios/publishers making billions of dollars? Hard to feel sorry for them.
Indie authors/studios? I definitely have a soft spot for them.
The porn industry became easily pirated. They pivoted to live shows and pay per minute (micro-currency tokenized payments), which can't be pirated and is easy to pay for (buy blocks of tokens).
Now, the recorded shows are effectively advertising for the live shows.
This was the case for a while, but OnlyFans kinda debunks that, no? It has been the biggest source of income for modern creators, and they generally don't do live streams (outside of like Twitch). Piracy is a very common problem for them.
It is still the most profitable and popular form of distribution though. You do have to fight the DMCA battles, but when it's your income you're gonna do that. That doesn't prove your point.
Disclosure: I am anti-copyright and am dating someone whose primary income is OF. I'm hyperactive in pirate communities but still fight for my partner's content.
Information deserves to be free, but creators should still be paid for their work. Adult content barely f*king qualifies as "information".
You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free?
Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?
> I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.
Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't write books for living, do something else. That how the rest of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into something that flops.
I generally agree with this particular point, but not with the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's problem and he should just suck it up.
It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works.
A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)
> It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution.
That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to limit the distribution of information throughout society, supposedly to make content creation more financially rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to increase the distribution of information throughout society, and supposedly makes content creation less financially rewarding.
The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve it. They’re both just choices about whether the distribution of information throughout society or the financial rewards for content creation are more important.
Of course the author is losing something, someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free. It's not your responsibility to put food onto someone's table, but it is your responsibility not to steal it. Immoral acts do not become moral because they are easy to commit.
It’s amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and software. Indie software only escaped because the sass model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its only saving grace is that it’s also a performance medium.
If piracy makes it so that it doesn’t make much sense to produce novels, it’s the world that’s poorer. Justifying that because it happens or because it’s easy is nothing more than the naturalistic fallacy.
Copyright infringement is not theft. You can't "steal" "intellectual property" because there's no such thing, it's a misnomer.
If you learn that a trillion aliens from andromeda were reading your book right now are you horribly upset and graciously harmed by this blatant copyright infringement? What if they instead land and take all the worlds water? Note the difference between the two scenarios?
That's not a metaphor. Copyright infringement/ ip violation is not theft. When an item is stolen, you lose it. When your copyright is infringed, you may not even know it happens.
A lot of defenders of copyright often liken ip violation to theft. I remember a famous campaign where I'm from saying "piracy is theft". This is misinformation and fallacy. Copyright infringement is not theft, and there is no reason it should be treated as such
1. Taking food off someone's table was a metaphor.
2. If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.
3. If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
The most legitimate argument for large scale copyright theft is eminent domain style seizure on the grounds that it benefits society. I would even endorse a weak version of that argument in narrow, well defined instances. And do. Copyright should expire, and it should definitely be harder to extend. And it should be possible to seize copyright from estates where the creator is no longer living, in certain circumstances, or at least expand fair usage in some graded manner.
That's not what's being argued about though, what people in this thread, and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
> If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.
The argument is not about tangibility. If you steal someone's virtual money, they still cease to have it.
> If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position
On the contrary, I'd argue that allowing people to literally own numbers is absurd.
Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.
So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.
> Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free.
Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.
Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.
I'm being pretty good faith about this, I just don't appreciate people who can't read.
The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.
Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.
Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.
The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.
Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.
In your line of argumentation, if we enforced the ban on copying books, songs, movies perfectly, we would get much more of them.
Is this what we want though?
We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.
This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.
Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.
If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants. Even the most talented will have to find other things to do with their time in order to support themselves.
Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.
> If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants.
Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?
> But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive
I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.
This is the "it's easy to steal so it's okay" argument, which I addressed up thread in a sibling comment about the dynamics of IP on the internet.
Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.
No, it's the "internet is the platform for sharing" argument. Copying, sharing work of others is not, in essence, stealing that work. It is sharing that work, maybe illegaly, but then it is illegal sharing, not stealing.
2. No, that’s not the argument I’m making. If someone steals the money on your bank account, you still lose a quantifiable amount of that money. Your private property is being taken. If someone infringes on your copyright, they have infringed on your right to exclusivity to the content, but they have not stolen any of your property.
Note that here, I’m not making a judgment of value. Copyright infringement is a crime under the law of most countries, and it is definitely bad in some systems of values.
But it’s just not stealing. Something can be a crime without being thievery.
As a comparison (not metaphor), say somebody organizes a barbecue in your lawn while you’re absent, without your authorization. They bring their own stuff, they don’t damage anything, and when you come back you don’t even realize they were here.
Did they commit a crime? Yes, they infringed on your property
Did you lose money? Maybe. It may be so that they would have paid you money to use your lawn if they had no choice. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had that barbecue at all.
Did they steal something of yours? No. Their crime is trespassing, not thievery.
3. That’s closer, but distorted.
First, I never argued that copyright should be abolished. You are arguing on a weaker version of something I did not even mention. The only thing I was commenting on was that your argument for it was based on calling ip violation thievery, which it is not. Most modern systems of values consider thievery wrong, thus you create an emotional response to copyright by likening the two. But that is not a correct argument because copyright infringement is not thievery.
> and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
Those products didn’t exist before they made illicit copies themselves. If I make a fake Louis Vuitton bag for myself and wear it, I did not steal it. I certainly infringed on the designer’s IP, but my crime is counterfeiting, not thievery.
> that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
Now that’s the interesting part. Now that we have admitted that copyright infringement is not thievery, ie not innately morally wrong in at least some systems of values (and I’m pretty sure it is actually a very recent notion), we can ask ourselves the right question: does it have a positive impact on society? The answer to that is mixed:
- It creates incentives for artists and people who transmit knowledge
- But it also creates inequality in access to culture / knowledge
- And it creates counter-incentives for people to access culture and knowledge. Thus making individuals less learned and knowledgable
No doubt that the first effect largely compensates the 3rd, and that globally it has a good effect on society. Remains that it is not optimal at all.
But can we create a better system of incentives? That’s the real question. My take on that is "probably.".
"Steal" has many meanings and only some of them involve the loss of the thing stolen.
The Oxford American Dictionary provides several examples (I'm using "___" to indicate indentation in the following) that illustrate the range of what can be stolen:
1 [with object] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | (as adjective stolen) : stolen goods | [no object] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers.
• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.
• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.
• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.
• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.
2 [no object, with adverbial of direction] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.
• [with object and adverbial of direction] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.
noun [in singular]
1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.
2 mainly North American an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.
• an idea taken from another work: the chorus is a steal from The Smiths' “London”.
• Baseball an act of stealing a base.
• Basketball & Hockey an act of taking possession of the ball or puck from an opponent: point guard Kaleb Joseph finished with eight points, four steals, and seven assists.
PHRASES
steal someone blind
___informal see blind.
steal a march on
___gain an advantage over (someone) by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are
stealing a march on their competitors.
steal someone's heart
___win someone's love.
steal the show
___attract the most attention and praise.
steal someone's thunder
___win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress.
[from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its short run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’.]
"Taking food off the table" was a metaphor. Your statement makes even less sense if you weren't referencing that. You're saying, in effect, that zero marginal cost items are not property. That's a radical position that I would be surprised if you actually endorse after you think about it.
The parallel between SaaS and live music is pretty interesting. Seeing a play in a theater (as the un-pirate-able version of a movie) also fits in this category. Service instead of product, essentially.
I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though. The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie and post-book medium alike.
Exactly. The form of the novel is tied to text and text is fundamentally east to distribute because it is information. The problem is structurally tough.
Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth. Just because someone works hard doesn't mean it's a profitable endeavor. I worked hard at startups that failed, it doesn't mean the startup has to be worth anything.
The book market shows people DO buy books, just like OP said. Clearly their book was worth something. Just because people will take it for free instead doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid for it.
Did the startups fail because people were stealing intellectual property? (For example, by illegally obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to create offerings that customers valued above the cost to produce them?
Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.
I used startups as an example, what I'm really criticizing is the notion that simply working hard means something is valuable, which it's not. I could have just as easily used the example of rolling a boulder uphill. Don't extrapolate the a analogy onto the original book argument, they are not connected when I wrote it.
I think that gets the causality the wrong way around. I've heard plenty of people express similar sentiments without (so far as I can tell) being Marxists.
More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism because it's a thing many people find intuitively plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
> "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all day, pay me.
"Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that."
But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore I am entitled to payment.
Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your labor hasn't created value unless you've actually produced something other people subjectively believe to be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It might fool children but for an adult to believe it requires brainwashing.
The miscommunication in that case is that the person doing the boulder-rolling/book-writing/startup-programming genuinely thought they were providing value to society. Your example picks a ridiculous non-valuable labor. To understand their point of view, imagine something that you would consider valuable, but which goes generally unrewarded. To get you started: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, volunteering for a fire department, cleaning an oil spill, rescuing animals, planting trees to reduce man-made erosion, ...
Choosing to write a book that nobody wants to buy is no different from choosing to roll a boulder up a hill. You better be in it for fun because you're not doing anything of value to anybody else.
If you want to volunteer for homeless shelters or something, then you can sleep sound with the knowledge that what you're doing is worth a great deal to people who can't afford to compensate you for it. But writing books nobody wants to buy is not that sort of selfless act of charity.
Read my parent comment. Labor does not equal value by how most people define it. If I can labor for a task that people don't find valuable, like rolling a rock uphill, that means people intuitively feel some sort of subjective theory of value that's not connected simply to how hard someone worked. Hence, LTV does not make sense and we must find a different theory of value. Now, you can disagree that capitalism is not such a theory, but you ought to be able to agree that LTV ain't it, chief.
You haven't said anything about land, only about labor, so your sentence does not follow. You’ve made a case for why labor inputs might not be directly related to market price, but that says exactly zero about land?
Why are you talking about land? This thread is about the labor theory of value, LTV. Are you talking about the land value tax, LVT? Those are two very different things.
You are completely missing the point of this thread. Even if we morally agree with all your points, the claim is that less books will get written and that that's bad for all of us.
To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.
Let's get real. Even in the era of Internet and easy copying, zillions of books are being made and sold for money, profitably. The number of books being printed has no end. This situation is harmful to society, because good quality books are hard to discover and check (in a bookstore, on a piracy site) because they are drowned in the pile of rubbish that is wasting our time.
Making books less profitable would suppress the production and make the quality stand out. A net positive for humanity.
> Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?
If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it, we have a law that protects those that do not.
> Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information.
He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid for his work.
The law protects against somebody else making money. It is not very effective in making readers pay the author.
> You deny his right to get paid for his work.
I think he (and me) is saying there is no such right in general. There is only "copyright" - the right to distribute the copies, or sell the license. But there is no right to get paid.
Not at all. The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. The buyer is responsible for paying the author. If the author can't hack it and get buyers(often the buyer in this sense is the distributor), then the author should find a different occupation.
> The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work.
What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.
Oh, the moral card. Morals are highly context-dependent and vary across the population and social classes. There is no consensus on the idea "reading books without paying for them is immoral". It may be - if the person reads all books by some author, can afford to pay, but never does, then it does smell like bad behaviour. But not everybody behaves like this.
Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year.
I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.
> you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality
Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate than others. The reality you're describing is one in which pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others' authors will find something else to do; they can make podcasts or whatever.
World 1: zero copyright infringement. Everyone pays. No one pirates.
More people write books. (as will be more money in it)
World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich.
More crappy books.
More high quality books.
World 1.2 Can make you rich.
Many people will write purely for financial reasons.
Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it.
More books written by companies.
More crappy books.
More high quality books.
World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free.
The fewest books produced.
Hobbyists or retired people only.
People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people.
World 3: Somewhere in between (our world)
In-between.
Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.
I would try by saying every author is a compiler (as in, a collector of sources). They use someone else's ideas, either as building blocks or as a subject. The rules for when and how the people down the chain should be compensated are arbitrary. For a long time it wasn't a problem anyone cared about in societies (the pre-copyright era), then we got sort of a "verbatim" standard, but we're seeing more and more how silly it always was with better tools of automatic rephrasing.
Publishing books in the current model is like planting flowers in a public space, with seeds you've just taken from a bunch of other people's houses, and then requiring people who walk there or look at the flowers to pay you. I mean, we should be encouraging caring about the commons in some way. But the creators or copyright holders for cultural creations don't inherently have the power to dictate the schemes they like.
It isn't that there is no original work in using the existing sources. Just more stuff is, by necessity, re-used that created (otherwise people wouldn't understand you), and the exact boundary is arbitrary.
Given the choice, many people would rather get something for free rather than pay for it. Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work, they come up with elaborate rationalizations.
There's a sort of virtue in embracing the intellectual honesty of saying that you took that work because you wanted it and had the means. Call it the Genghis Kahn justification.
Even if the work is completely derivative, someone still put significant effort into compiling and organizing it. And their immorality of taking the work of others doesn't obviously justify the immorality of taking theirs.
The point is, it wasn't immoral of them to "take the work of others" to begin with. This is how culture works: mythology, classic stories like the Arthurian cycle, fables, lots of classic literature etc. came to be by just taking the stories and characters people liked and doing whatever the next artist wanted. (Today's equivalents are all owned by Disney, for example.) This is also how science and philosophy functioned for ages.
The worldview holding the modern copyright system to be the moral reality is the elaborate rationalization, ingrained into people by the interested parties. You can research the history of copyright law if you want.
This is a separate issue from caring about compensating and nurturing the artists, which is often what people who are mindful about this stuff do. Just not necessarily inside the "traditional" framework.
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
But there isn't anything immoral about benefiting without paying. At least under consequentialist utilitarianism, one of the main doctrines in ethics.
And why would there be? Someone benefits but no one else loses. If someone has planted a try by the road and I relax in the shade for a few minutes, have I done anything wrong? If I admire a fine bit of architecture have I done something wrong? If I pause to watch the kids playing in the playground have I done something wrong?
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
You've got it backwards. The onus is on you to provide a convincing argument that sharing documents without paying directly the authors is immoral.
If the document is useful and popular, then I see no immorality in sharing it without paying the author. For paper books, the readers do not pay the authors directly either, they pay the distributor the agreed price. In other cases, this agreed price is the marginal cost of file download.
I think this is the wrong question to ask. To me, the answer is rather obvious: because knowledge and culture costs nothing to spread and benefits everyone.
The actual issue is about getting paid for work. I would ask another question to address that instead:
why does getting paid for author's work require limiting access to it?
I'm fine if you want to share my book with your friend or with a group of friends. However, library !== the entire world.
Moreover, libraries buy book(s) so they can share more copies if there is a demand.
Without authors getting paid for their work there won't be any books at all, except books from those authors who are willing to write them for free of charge. But I assume you don't like online libraries with free books online for some reason.
In many places in the US, anyone can get a card to a library.
So, if everyone had that knowledge, it actually would mean the entire world.
In the county I have my card with, they give a card number over the internet without any kind of address validation, so anyone willing to lie about their address can get a card there. I'm sure that's true for countless counties.
> Without authors getting paid for their work there won't be any books at all, except books from those authors who are willing to write them for free of charge.
You mean except for authors who are willing to write them without charging each reader for a copy.
On an annually recurring license. So the taxpayer doesn't just buy hundreds of books no one asked for and will never read, he buys them ten times over.
In what country do libraries work like that? Not in America. In America, libraries do not pay annual licensing fees for books. A book is purchased or otherwise acquired, and then lent out as many times as the library pleases. When the book wears out, the library may rebind it and continue lending it.
This is covered by first sale doctrine. After the library owns that book it is theirs and neither the author nor the publisher is entitled to anything when the book is lent.
It's not a huge amount... minimum $50/book/year, maximum $4,500/book per year, but I suppose it's significant if you have, say, 20 books, each bringing in the maximum.
Damn, I'm glad the American library system isn't held to such asinine rules. I can buy a second hand book from a shop that pays nothing to publishers, donate it to a library for free, and the library is now allowed to lend that book as many times as they please, never having paid anybody a single cent for that right.
You propose to peel back the first sale doctrine, stripping rights from consumers and give even more privileges to corporate publishers? Terrible idea.
That's not what I'm saying, please don't reply like this it's very tiring and against the guidelines. I'm saying it doesn't make sense that the authors and the publishers don't get any money after the book was bought once and then it can be borrowed an infinite number of times. The libraries should pay some sort of fee to compensate them. It doesn't reduce your consumer rights, you can still borrow the book from the library. You can still donate it to the library. You can still lend your book to your friends and family without paying for anything. That's how it works over here in the EU (I don't know how every library system works in each EU country), not exactly a place with less consumer rights than the US.
> I'm saying it doesn't make sense that the authors and the publishers don't get any money after the book was bought once and then it can be borrowed an infinite number of times.
Why not? That's how everything else works, at least in the US. e.g. my local hardware store will rent to you a variety of tools (which they also sell) or even trucks. They don't need to compensate the manufacturer for each rental; they just buy it like anyone else would. Even Netflix got their start buying DVDs and mailing them to customers to rent. As far as I know they have no requirement to pay ongoing fees or establish a licensing deal to do that (and apparently they have better selection for dvd rentals because of that).
In both this and a traditional library, one person buys the book and then a bunch of people read it for free. What are you saying is the difference between those scenarios?
They’re limited to a certain number of loans before the library has to buy another license, or a per-checkout fee. Physical books have about a 50 to 100 checkout lifetime and ebook licensing is similar.
There are quite a few different purchasing and lending models libraries use today. Outside of the big 4/5 publishers, many publishers will sell ebooks to libraries using a sim use model (pay 1 subscription fee and checkout as many times as possible over the period), and some will even let the library buy in that model perpetually.
NPR did a good and brief piece on digital lending economics which also talks about how those economics are different from physical lending. Libraries license materials, and the license for a physical book will typically last as long as that book can be circulated(basically until it falls apart).
I've started going to the library more often(and using Libby for e-reading), they might not have the exact book I want, but there is always something I am interested in there.
> Libraries license materials, and the license for a physical book will typically last as long as that book can be circulated(basically until it falls apart).
Libraries buy books, which are then covered by first sale doctrine. When a library book falls apart, the library may rebind it and continue lending it.
You are relying on unenforceable government incentives (copyright law) to create an income for yourself. Find a way of commercialising the information in your head that makes it technologically difficult to propagate without yourself being paid. Books aren't the answer if you want $$$.
Copyright law is actually enforceable though. At least enforceable enough to keep book piracy more inconvenient than Kindle for most people of any means.
I wasn't able to find your book in any pirated source. Do you think you're losing at least 50 sales per month from piracy since you sell the book for a suggested price of $20 each?
The only book you ever published is https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun/ which, according to the website, has 460 readers, despite being available for free.
Not only are you not losing thousands dollars worth of sales a month right now, you also never were, even when it wasn't available for free.
I would probably reply to your statements (that you believe are true), but first you have to learn how to be nice :) Plus, not only your communication is broken, but also your ability to make your way to final and correct conclusions. But don't worry, it's a common thing today, you're definitely not unique here
Are you actually losing $Xk worth of sales every month due to piracy though? I remember this author with a wildly influential book inside a small online community. He too claimed that due to piracy he suffered great economical loss. He posted a detailed account of this on his blog and i delved on it a bit and I came to the conclusion he was delusional. For sure piracy dented his revenue, that was without the shadow of a doubt. But the major reason that he lost revenue was due to the fact that a book, as with many products, has a lifecycle and he wasn't considering that as a factor at all.
His book was considered "the bible" of that subject, but it was also starting to become old and the community was becoming more established. At that point there were tutorials, youtube videos, other resources talking about the same thing, explaining concepts of that book and so on. So while, in the beginning a user strictly needed to buy the book to have access to those niche information, now info were more readily accessible (even the reddit wiki had basically the same stuff in it). So buying the book was more of a choice ONLY if the user wanted to dive deeper into the subject. All the rest of potential users that a few years back would have bought the book due to the "monopoly of information", now weren't interested in it anymore. Even more established community users only recommended the book as an advanced thing for people that wanted to go to the next step. That's quite an evolution for a product that is guaranteed to lower sales.
Besides this, the community was still relatively niche and this means that doesn't have a huge influx of new users. This means that over time people won't buy his book because the only people interested in it already have it.
The product lifecycle was clear from the data and kinda textbook behavior, with the product having surpassed it's mature phase and been declining. On top of this, for sure piracy further made things worse.
The point is that the author was convinced that piracy was the only reason revenue was dropping. He was convinced that his book (being influential et all in the community) would give him constant revenue potentially forever. That was delusional and so was his analysis.
Are you entirely sure that piracy is the only thing to blame? Maybe that's just one factor in a more complex situation and writing another book is specifically what you need to do. The previous one was successful, you have a brand and an audience to leverage. That's valuable and, maybe you just need to develop a new product because the old one is, well, getting old.
You are really losing a huge personal branding opportunity.
Alternatively: people now trust you, there is some way to monetize that for sure such as organizing events, conventions etc. Make them pay a bit more than you would to recoup the cost of piracy.
In the end it's the strategy used by the GOAT. Bill Gates knew he couldn't fight piracy and also it just charged Fortune500 companies a tad more so they'd essentially subsidize pirates all over the world. Ranging from PirateBay to CD sellers in Subsaharan Africa
- first as an author, want to be read, the more people read your books the better.
- second as a human, you need an income.
Imagine a charity (it could be government taxes as well) paying you proportionally to how much your books are read and providing the books for free to the readers.
What's wrong with that?
You will have more readers and you'll get paid for writing books (according to their popularity).
Do you really want to sell your books? (and get less readers)
Or do you want instead to have as many readers as possible and get paid for that?
I don't have a good answer for you but I believe that we are transitioning to a new form of society where content creation is very hard to make money from. However, as a society we are richer than ever because of this new technology so I propose the following:
* People should receive grants to create things. The grants should come from the value we create as a society with new technology
* The money should be taken from those who benefit from the internet traffic, i.e. large tech companies. Money should be taken from Google and Apple and given to content creators. That is because without content, Google and Apple would not exist
* We can already say that ads do this a little, but it's not enough. And ads are annoying and unsustainable and they also encourage slimy practises such as extreme SEO optimization
* Therefore, I propose a heavy tax on the largest tech companies, especially CEO salaries. That money should go to a government trust and content creators will get an income whenever they produce something people like
* For example, it could be made available for free but yet the author will be compensated. How much and how to measure its worth still needs to be figured out.
I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place. The RIAA's members tried the same propaganda and it didn't work then either.
I've published a few short stories and made $27.00. Like 99.999% of authors cannot live off of writing. It's like acting. If you include all the actors the average yearly salary is like $2,000. Some fields are just like that, and I'm not convinced that there's anyway to change that for either career. Nor am I convinced it should be. With programming I'm not paid for the work I've done, I'm paid for the work I continue doing. Why is writing supposed to be any different? Because publishers like it that way? They pay the author once, and get paid for 120 years?
And honestly as an author my biggest issue isn't that I'm not making much money, it's that almost no one is reading my work. I didn't do it for the money. And if I could charge less than $1 on amazon, I would.
This is obviously not the situation under discussion. The book wasn't released before he earned any money on it.
He clearly states "My income dropped almost immediately", which makes it clean that he was earning money from it, and that a specific event—the piracy—coincided with a drop of "$Xk worth of sales" per month.
The analogy being drawn is to losing a job and consequently losing the income you would have earned from it. You've switched from "you never had that income" to "you never had that job".
Thanks! I was wondering specifically about how the logic of “you can’t claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place” meant that you can never lose a job or source of income, but it sounds like that’s not really what they meant in the post I was replying to.
No, the notion that you can lose something you never had is the silly obtuse take.
It's like saying "I lost a Tesla because Elon Musk hasn't given me one." It's a pathos appeal by trying to paint the speaker as a victim to generate enough sympathy that you stop reasoning logically. Claiming to have lost money you never had is exactly as absurd when you eradicate the appeal to emotion embedded within it.
It’s exactly what happens when someone who’s experienced the “biweekly paycheck lifestyle” hits it big on a non-salaried income source and expects the music to keep going forever.
YouTube videos that hit ~1M views famously rarely keep up the pace beyond a week or a month. Hard to find data, but what I’ve heard is that after a year or two, looking back, most popular videos get 75-85% of their views in their first month after release.
Unless you have a contract to be regularly paid $X, or constantly put out new and engaging content, you really can’t get mad when your income peaks and then nosedives.
You're rather inaccurate though. Not sure if you're talking about "Ruby for fun", but anyway:
- you wrote it for your own son;
- you're distributing it now on CC BY 4.
So, no, we're not at risk of losing good books from good authors, there are more incentives than just money.
Fun little story goes here, I used pseudonym when I first registered my Facebook account ~10 years ago or so. I later tried to change the handle to my real name, but Facebook didn't let me do that - moderators though my last name isn't real. So I ended up using a couple of names because of that.
Plus, I bet your googling doesn't work quite right, until you translate these names correctly.
I'm happy you found one, but there are 2 more to go. I'll give you a hint though:
* The one you're looking for is about computer security (that's why pseudonym worked fine)
* The book cover was done by the same artist
I almost revealed my second identity, but if you ever find the second name, please don't post it here.
I think there's a distinction between vocational materials (your book is one I should absolutely have to pay for - which is why many places of work have an education budget) and literature. I don't quite know what, though.
Exactly this, thanks for highlighting this here! I find it astoundingly upsetting that the people who run this pirated library ask for donations at the bottom of the linked page (of course in Bitcoin), citing they can only keep the library online if they’re getting paid for it… what arrogance!
Like they cannot see that they’re inserting themselves in between the readers and the authors, whom they effectively try to steal the money from. Authors of course can also only continue to write books if they’re getting paid for it. It’s truly parasitic behavior.
I’m sorry this happened to you and I share your pain. :(
I find it unlikely that people who pay for technical books were ever going to be your customers. There could be other explanations - maybe once people could flip through your book without paying for it they realized there wasn't any value there for them? Maybe you had sales for a while and then they dropped off like sales do.
I don't think people have the right to spread work that isn't theirs, but i also don't think you can assume the book will always make the same amount of money, or that book pirates were ever your customers.
Knowledge and information want to be free, know that by trying to control its spread -- such as by trying to profit from it -- you are fighting that principle. And it is a fight that you will lose.
By the same token, you should have no privacy, because knowledge and information (about you) wants to be free, and you will lose that fight. I don’t think that’s a sensible argument.
Used to be that people had to find innovative ways to adopt their business models to new technology. But not authors. They can just say "show me how I would earn money" and that justifies IP rights. It is your job as an entrepreneur to find a working business model.
To answer the question: Because just spreading information does not violate anyone's rights.
Ownership as a concept does not make sense to apply to non-physical things.
The vast majority of the writing I consume is free or donation supported and I personally donate around £1500 a year to a range of authors after having read and found their writings useful.
This is a far superior model to paying in advance, you get access to far more writing and the authors get paid.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
Oh interesting question. I could probably answer but need some information first. What % of revenue went to you and what % went to the people who printed the book, chopped the trees, made the pulp, delivered the books across the world, etc? My guess is probably 10-50% to you, and the rest to the others. Am I close? That's probably fair.
Now, what % of your proceeds did you send to the creators of the letter "A", the letter "B", et cetera? Or did you use a different alphabet that you yourself created?
Was the book written in American English? If so, what % of your revenue are you sending to the widows and orphans of American soldiers killed in the wars who died protecting our freedom, language, and values?
Once I get those data points I can probably answer your question.
Internet will copy whatever is valued. You had wrong expectations. Moral indignation is not going to help you. If you can't make a living writing and selling books, let go and think of a different thing to do.
Can you tell how much would you normally make on a book, ie what’s the expected amount of money for those two years? I wonder if it could be made back by eg Patreon instead of traditional copyrights?
Turns out other countries still haven't gotten the point of public libraries. Once you own a book, it's your property. You don't have to pay a fee to lend out your own property. This is how it works in America, where free public libraries were invented.
Not comfortable sharing for PTSD reasons. However, if you're interested, some people reached out back to me with apologies. For example (auto-translated to English):
===
Good day. Roman, my name is Alexander. Once a book was stolen from you and posted on the net. People then divided into two camps, some sympathized, some did not, for various reasons. I belonged to the second category. I wasn’t happy, but at the same time I didn’t sympathize. I considered that price too high, and then for some reason it seemed to me that the book itself was not for the sake of being useful, but solely for the sake of profit. Although, even then I believed that work should be paid.
Then I released a few comments, I don’t remember exactly the content, perhaps boorish, I don’t think so. You then blocked me in the Telegram and chat, said, for the lack of empathy on my part or something like that. I think you misunderstood me, and perhaps I expressed my thought incorrectly. After that, I left a couple of caustic comments on the forum.
I somehow forgot about that situation, but then I came across your videos on YouTube and remembered. Thoughtful. Damn, I myself got into similar situations, which made me so hooked on that price list ...
In general, I was wrong and I apologize if I somehow offended you. Of course, you have the right to ask as much as you like for your work, and the buyer has the right to agree to the conditions or refuse.
And you assume that the only reason anyone would want to advocate for the freedom of information is because they don't like to spend money, which is also untrue.
For example, there are many research papers posted on sci-hub, which would otherwise be kept behind an expensive paywall by academic journals. This includes research that was conducted using public grants.
For those of you who play PC games, how many times have you felt cheated by the hassle a game's DRM or the built-in 'phone home' featured caused on your experience?
How about being electronically denied access to trying to repair your own vehicle, even while fully acknowledging that it would invalidate any warranties and responsibilities on the manufacturer's side?
Some of the laws and regulations impacting intellectual property are quite simply dysfunctional.
Talking about recent works, released in the past few years getting pirated specifically:
First is the unfairness of the system. Disney and other publishers have lobbied to push copyright up to the ridiculous life + 70 years using their political power. Publishers collectively have a totally ridiculous entitlement to governments being compelled to spend public money on enforcing their monopolies. So if you're say living in poorsville, you have no realistic opportunity to wait for your book to be published for free, because any work that is copyrighted during somebodies lifetime will be copyrighted until they're dead. Sure there's libraries but if your book is obscure enough it may not be available in one.
The second reason I'll give is accessibility. If your book isn't offered in a free electronic format from a library, and somebody is blind, and they can't afford the kindle, they're out of luck. The publishing industry has no problem being exclusionary towards disabled groups so long as it enables a better profit model, pirates on the other hand are totally inclusive and scan everything making everything OCRable.
So besides accessibility/fairness arguments, I'll also bring up that paying for books is a really shitty way to support authors. I paid $250 for physical books this week. Am I a hero to authors? Not at all. Maybe $200 of that went to the estate of some authors and most went to the publishers. $50 of it went to authors maybe closer to scraping by, for whom piracy can mean not putting food on the table, it means having to give up authorship. However of that $50 maybe $5 went to such authors. So I paid $250 and gave $5 to authors who really needed it. Does this prove I give a shit about authors? I think it proves that I don't, if somebody cares about authors they'll pirate the ebook and directly donate $250 to them.
Finally there's the issue of how books are secured. Frankly the legal methods for acquiring books are frequently broken and bad. DRM that auto-deletes books from people's devices is an abomination. Waitlists for ebooks are the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life. A huge reason people use zlibrary is their local library has broken software and it's like 8 steps to download something. Most of the money is in Amazon, so that's what gets funding to make the ebook/audiobook experience as seamless as possible for the wealthy of the world.
My proposal to fix all these issues would be for public libraries to require public ID authentication to download books, for copyrights to essentially ignore copyright, and then based on which books are being downloaded to compensate authors out of a public fund. This would not come with any enforcement efforts to shut down pirate sites (due to censorship/privacy concerns and concerns with the library's software being broken, not everybody has to use the library just a good number of people do), the libraries would essentially act as a voting system to direct monies to different authors which you could also use as an e-book distribution mechanism. This makes the availability of books for the wealthy contingent on them financing books for the poor, the disabled, and compensating authors.
Until such a day happens, if somebody pirate $100 of a books and donate $30 to some random author I think they're a better person that somebody who buys legally. We're in times where lawlessness enables the most ethical option available, so you know, maybe the law is screwed up.
I would add one more point, as a general policy you might want people to read more not less.
If ebooks can be distributed at no cost why make people pay for reading? It makes no sense.
This cannot be the right way to incentivize and provide income for writers.
I think Zlibrary and scihub (for scientific publications) are heroes: how do you think poor people get access to books? How do you get access to books when you are poor in a poor country?
For billions of people this is the only access to books. Otherwise they wouldn't read... What a loss for human kind!
Probably you shouldn't write a book in this age if you are motivated by making a profit from book sales.
Or you need to find a different business model other than revenue from sales. If you have an audience of a few thousand people, especially in a narrow professional field, you can monetize it.
Book will help you to establish your authority. Then, you can use this authority to make profit. Sell courses, lections, offer consulting services, etc.
>Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they please?
This is my whole problem with the idea of copyright, patents, and Imaginary Property laws.
We finally invent ways to share information for basically free planet wide, and a bunch of fuckin lawyers fuck it all up for the exclusive benefit to themselves and the oligarchs who can afford them.
When I was 17 I wrote a TI-85 program for the chemistry class I was in, and sold a copy to a classmate. I only charged $1 because it would have felt awful to chart $50 for something I still had after I "sold" it.
Some laws should be broken because they were created by corrupt governments at the behest of oligarchs.
Publishers, and the authors whose work they publish, and the estates of dead authors - they like money. I don't blame the authors: writing a good book takes a lot of time, effort and frustration. But when a book leaves copyright for the public domain, there needs to be mechanisms in place which allow anyone to find, download, copy and read that book without paying the full price. We don't yet have robust mechanisms in place to make that happen.
My personal view is that the length of current copyright laws are a joke, and should be more in line with patents. It's a very minority view. At least we still have a few second-hand bookshops around where we can pick up used books at an affordable price.
Google could also provide free access to their algorithm for people to tweak and improve, as well as their raw index for others to provide better search on top of it.
But they like free distribution with other people's intelectual products, not theirs.
The Google web search infrastructure consists of dozens of different services hitting hundreds of different databases, most of which obviously contain PII. We're talking about layer upon layer of abstraction and refinement. Thinking that there's one 'algorithm' to be open-sourced which tackles one of the most sophisticated software problems we've ever concocted is a bit juvenile, IMO :)
Thinking that external developers can't work on those layers if publicized is a bit juvenile, IMO. :)
We have open source projects with layers upon layers of abstraction tackling problems equally if not more sophisticated than Google search.
Developers involved in those problems are not juvenile, IMO :), and I bet some of them would like to work on Google's "sophisticated" layers.
Next time you disagree with some idea, present your arguments in a mature way. Casting demeaning personal judgements like "juvenile" is not mature, IMO. :)
I think a major advantage of these online libraries is that many books go out of print, and these archives are often the only way to read them. Some books on Permaculture come to mind...
I was just trying to find "The Search for the Elements" by Asimov.
It's annoying to me that obscure 1980s children's books from authors no one's heard to are out of print and hard to find, but here's a science history book by one of the most famous authors around, and it's out of print with no ebook ever published. I can buy a used trade paperback for $35, use OpenLibrary, or pirate a PDF.
Because it frequently isn't knowledge that is being spread, it's a creative work.
There's nothing intrinsic about Harry Potter that the world needs access to it. An encyclopedia would be a great thing to be freely available. But why would someone need free access to Harry Potter?
Yup, and piracy advocates make no distinction between the two - there's an argument "everyone deserves access to knowledge!" (ignoring the fact that everyone does have access to knowledge, just not specific literary renderings of it) and then they swap out "knowledge" for "any written work". Intellectual dishonesty.
My issue is that buying most ebooks means I can’t even share them with one person in real life and I have to use an Adobe app to read them. I’m certain that means I’ll lose them all some day.
I would buy books if they were open. I will pirate if they are not because if I own something I want to actually own it.
I’d be fine with not owning it by using a library but I don’t want to wait 6 weeks for any decently popular book, and from my experience their supply is very limited and I can’t request an ebook from another library system like you often can with real books.
You can legally share and spread everything that's in the public domain, which albeit varying by country includes lots of books. More than anyone could read in a single lifetime.
Because then there is no incentive for new content to be created. It’s not rocket science, please think about what you’re saying.
Movies and entertainment media I understand piracy for. It’s not essential and people like it a lot so it will probably continue to exist. Not a big deal if it goes away either.
"Google Books was 90% there, I wish it had been allowed to succeed."
Yes, it would be so much better if an opaque "tech" company was collecting data on every "patron" to inform its online advertising services business and other commercial projects.
While Google might have access to some of the same material, not to mention an endless stream of garbage one would never find in a library, as an organization, it does not share the same principles.
Spend a long time writing a good quality book (like my father did, he wrote several, years of work went into each) then give it away for free. See how it feels.
Better yet, spend a long time writing a good quality book, with the expectation of making a modest sum for your efforts, then have people take it without paying you at all.
Substitute "book" for "any creative work" for bonus points.
This comment is completely absurd, emotionally manipulative, and a highly distorted picture of reality.
> Always saddens me
Typical emotional manipulation prevalent on here and other forums - "oh, the humanity!" "wouldn't someone think of the children?"
> under threat of persecution
Absurd hyperbole. The worst that can happen to you for the crime of theft in modern-day America is fines and jail time. No cutting off of hands or execution, like in the past.
> people who take the >2000 year old concept of a library into the digital age
People are taking the ancient concept of a library into the digital age - it just doesn't look like a normal library, because technology changes it. Saying "ok, now this book can be lent out an infinite number of times simultaneously" - that's nothing close to the translation of the concept of a library into the digital age. And this kind of piracy is, uh, more than that.
> Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they please?
You're perfectly free to do that! With some edge cases like classified information, you are perfectly free to share any knowledge that you wish.
You are not free to share specific literary works as you wish, because those literary works are products of the time and effort of individuals, which you have no right to.
But knowledge itself? Go for it. You want to communicate the fact that the area of a circle grows proportionally to the square of its radius? Nobody is stopping you. (paywalled journal articles are an entirely different issue, but only because most paywalled articles were written using taxpayer funding)
I wonder why these services don't generate vanity TOR domains. I can generate about 21 TOR addresses beginning with "zlib" per second and it would make bookmarks so much more recognisable if they weren't completely random.
I know relying on names to recognise onion addresses is unsafe, but so is following random links. Why not add at least a little recognisability to the official URL?
It's obviously not a security benefit, it's just nice to have a little branding so you have some idea what the link you're clicking is pretending to be
As you said, it's effectively the same thing, so why not do the tiniest amount of effort and generate some slightly indicative address?
How is that any different from the random character address? I can generate a random address and pretend to be another website and you won't know the difference because all you'll remember about the address is "a while bunch if random letters".
Yea, I guess a stupid computer user would probably fall for it either way, so I admit defeat on this front.
My argument was going to be along the lines of: "a stupid computer user who knows the real address starts with zlib would be tricked easier by another zlib address than if the real site were random, where they might check more thouroughly that they were on the right site..." before being fooled, anyways, probably.
That's just about 80. Any client can handle that. Use a watch directory or a client that allows to add *.torrent or drag them all to a GUI and hold down Enter or sumthin ;-)
I like the way Bandcamp works (don't want to talk about the business model of their new owner, just about the service they offer in general): bandcamp nags me to pay after spending a decent amount of time on sth. I could use an alternative client app and never pay, but I do not.
I love digital libraries for the fact that I am able to quickly look into a book without going through some tiresome payment and DRM stages only to discover that I wasted money. Also I like that I can buy hardcopies (even limited ones) . Further I can support creatoes with subscriptions.
To add to that Bandcamp triggered quite a few archiving efforts and releases of remastered obscure music. Artists like atom TM are releasing there whole back catalogue easily accessible...
I understand that books needs to be financed but why should we deprive the poorest from accessing culture knowing that marginal cost of ebooks is zero.
We should incentivize reading books not making it harder or more expensive.
- E-books should be free and of easy access.
- Writers and editors should be paid according to the popularity of their work.
Not OP, but their suggestions, ebooks free AND paid according to the popularity, are already implemented and working excellently on royalroad. All stories on royalroad are free and some popular authors make over $10000 a month from patreon donations.
OK, but is that viable on a large scale or will only the top 1%-10% be able to make a living. Though to be fair, the current situation probably isn't much better.
> why should we deprive the poorest from accessing culture
Because "culture" isn't something that anyone is entitled to. It's not a human right. And because if you, joak, want to help provide culture to the poor, then you can personally spend your own time and effort producing a work of culture.
Taking a work of effort made by someone else, and giving it away for free, when that person did not consent, is theft. It has nothing to do with the "marginal cost of ebooks" - it's the fact that you don't have the right to someone else's work.
Again - if you want to provide culture to the poorest, then you can either (1) purchase a work of art from an author and give it to an individual, or (2) you can invest your own effort into creating your own work of culture.
Where would the money come from? Who would decide how popular a book is? I agree that in theory these are not incompatible statements, but I fail to see a practical way to make it work.
the technical book writing no longer makes financial sense to me these days, unless you wrote them to become well known domain expert and possibly get more leads for future profit, and you don't care about how much you can make directly from the books sale.
I think a viable approach is:
1. publish your book in e-format, it will be pirated but only those who paid will get continuous update such as new contents added, errata fixes etc easily and regularly.
2. offer a print-on-demand service for those who prefers to have a printed version.
3. offer a pay-me-later link to those who read it without pay(e.g. pirated version), later realize your writing indeed helped them so much to the point they want to "tip" you for a sense of rightness.
A proven approach is Michael Hartl's (@mhartl) Rails tutorial, which has grossed multiple six figures with the entire content free to read online, plus upgrades for DRM-free PDF, videos and print. That's well more than 10X the average return on technical books.
That's effectively a substack rather than a book though, and incentivises unfortunate habits (only providing morsels of information in each installment to encourage people to buy more, and dragging the book out).
Interestingly enough, there are a lot of books on archive.org that are not on LibGen, usually high quality scans. That's another source that should be mirrored, given the legal trouble surrounding archive.
I’ve found that the archive.org OCR generates epubs that might work for an emergency but can’t be read for leisure because of all the errors. The formatting is also often off. Libgen books don’t have that issue.
If you invest more than 10 seconds of thought in this line of reasoning, its flaws become obvious and it applies to every field in which this argument is made - stories, drugs, software, movies. Compensating creators based on the marginal cost of reproducing their work is not a paradigm for maintaining the flow of creative works.
Maybe you have some junk counterargument that creative people will work for free as well as for material goods. Or who cares about the future, let's distribute what we have now. If you think creative people will work for free just for the joy of creating, then you've never worked on the last 20% of a project which is often not that joyful.
I don’t think they said anything like what you said they said. They said it’s a Wonder.
Like, I don’t think it’s right to spend thousands of lives and decades of time of slave-labor building the Great Pyramids, but it’s absolutely a Wonder, and nobody denies this.
This library project is absolutely a Wonder, however right or wrong you might ultimately believe it to be, and as the poster said, it has been attempted many times and never come anywhere close to this effort.
It eventually still boiled down to some kind of forced labour. Feeding those laborers for decades consumed ressources, which the rulers couldn't just magically conjure out of thin air... so e.g. farmers had to probably suffer from that.
Fair enough. I guess I assumed that in the context of a community that surely appreciates the marvel that is the internet, there was a secondary objective in mentioning it.
Let me explicitly state this, then. I do not care at all if a new movie is never made or a new book is never published. We have multiple lifetimes of quality music already, why do we need to incentivize creations relevant to the modern culture?
I'd like to start from a worldview of abundance and invite you to imagine a future in which we (as a society) will be able to answer a related question: What are the prerequisites for accomplishing the missing, painful 20% of any project out there?
I'm curious about whether people who think that copyright is a good idea, think that we should go to a publisher's site, and pay $50 or whatever to access an old journal article, out of principle, rather than download it from Sci-Hub.
True, but we’re not talking about generally available information like wikipedia, we’re talking about people’s work who didn’t expect it to end up like this. Should they have a say in it? If not, why not? And if you just mean information, does that mean you think fiction for example should be excluded from this sort of initiative?
Copyright law is a very clear restriction on freedom of speech. That's not to argue that it might not be a valid restriction, or justified or something, but I don't really see how it could be argued not to be a restriction of freedom.
And it becomes very obvious that if people can share stuff for free, someone somewhere will. That combination of freedom to share speech and ability to do so at 0 marginal cost results in books being shared for no cost.
Because copying information from one computer to another costs nothing (except for the electricity and internet access). Any attempt to restrict that capability is restricting your freedom.
The moment my work (I assume you mean work as in "labor") becomes that easy to replicate, it will become worthless. But there are certain laws of physics which make it quite improbable to happen.
I don't think that works - the freedom he's talking about is the freedom of the person who owns the computers, devices and digital records.
In the world of IP and copyright law, the ownership rights that go with owning a piece of media with particular patterns are restricted. You are not allowed to dispose of the patterns on a DVD as you might wish despite supposedly 'owning' it. This is clearly a difference from previously understood models of what ownership was.
> The ordinary subjects of property are well known, and easily
conceived . . . But property, when applied to ideas, or literary and intellectual
compositions, is perfectly new and surprising . . . by far the most comprehensive
denomination of it would be a property in nonsense - Lord Gardenston 1773
"You think books having a cost is a restriction of your freedom? Why? And why books, but not your work?"
"Because copying information from one computer to another costs nothing (except for the electricity and internet access). Any attempt to restrict that capability is restricting your freedom."
Why do you think the author of the comment is not applying the same principle to themselves? I assume that they either have a job where they don't need the government to restrict other peoples rights of freedom of speech in order to get paid, or that they do apply it to themselves.
I don't think anyone is arguing that everyone must make all digital information freely available to everyone else. Nobody is saying that books must be provided for free. The argument is that nobody should be restricted from sharing their data if that's what they want to do. That will naturally result in most widely shared digital files being made available for free, but it's because those with them exercised a right to share rather than because anyone was compelled to do anything.
> The argument is that nobody should be restricted from sharing their files if that's what they want to do.
Don't you want to restrict people from sharing their files - even if that's what they want to do - when those files are things like your banking documents or medical records?
> Don't you want to restrict people from sharing their files - even if that's what they want to do - when those files are things like your banking documents or medical records?
Yeah, I'm not strongly arguing for this view, merely arguing that it genuinely does represent a restriction on freedom (sometimes restrictions on freedom are sensible, although in this case I think it'd be better to try to find other ways to solve the problems of recompensing creators).
If I have to take a stance on it, I'd probably say that people sharing personal and private information on me without my permission (and by the way credit agencies, governments, friends with facebook accounts and advertising companies do in fact do this) should be treated as a separate issue, and considered much more under laws against harassment or libel (which are themselves restrictions on freedom of speech too!) or perhaps breach of contract.
I'm not even sure banking documents or medical records actually fall under copyright - and if they do, I don't think the copyright belongs to the patient, so I don't think it's copyright that is used in these cases anyway.
Ok. By the way I don't suggest that those examples are related to copyright. They were about the more general "The argument is that nobody should be restricted from sharing their data if that's what they want to do." There are many reasons why people is being restricted from "sharing their data".
Pricing something beyond its marginal cost of delivery is a restriction on your freedom? I suppose it’s true, in the way not being allowed to punch someone is a restriction on your freedom.
> Pricing something beyond its marginal cost of delivery is a restriction on your freedom?
No. Choosing to price something you own beyond its marginal cost of delivery is not a restriction on freedom.
What is a restriction on freedom is not allowing others to take something they have (a collection of words / pattern of bits / a SD card / a hard disk) and choose to give that away to others. The fact that in an internet-connected world allowing that will result in most people being able to acquire most files for no more than their marginal cost of delivery is a result of freedom, not a restriction on it.
It seems extremely unlikely that you can keep the price on any widely distributed collection of bits much above 0 for an appreciable length of time without governments intervening to remove that freedom of sharing and copying from people.
If I had not shared the files with you, and they cannot be found in a public database, then the only way you could have obtained my files is through illegal means, such as breaking into my house or planting malware on my computer. In that case, the issue of sharing those files is beyond the point, since you already invaded my privacy and broke the law.
If I had shared a file with you, however, then you should feel free to share it with others as much as you'd like.
The apple tree gives away its fruit so that its seeds might spread.
When a fence is built around the apple tree, it is a restriction on the ability of the apple tree to spread its seeds and on those that desire the apples, both.
I don’t personally have a strong stance on this particular issue, but perhaps this analogy will help you understand the view of people who believe that knowledge should be free.
It’s a good analogy and I do understand the perspective.
But I think it is very convenient that it applies to the work these people want to consume (which should be free), and not to the work they perform (which should be paid).
Why should the software engineer be paid but the author not? Why is the written word information but not the code?
I would trust the motives more if there was a general coherence to it all, beyond the consumption of media. Information comes in many forms.
I generally assume that when people talk like that, that they believe that software engineers should not be paid, and that they get over their cognitive dissonance by saying something on the order of, “but since they are paid there’s no point in me working for free,” without noticing that there’s still a disconnect there.
There’s a very big Open Source / Free as in Freedom / AND Free as in Beer contingent on HN.
Usually these kinds of views come along with ideas about other models that can recompense creators (including software engineers).
For example, the Lawyer example is used often - once the lawyer makes the argument, it's in the public domain and can be used by others, but you still pay the lawyer to compose the argument. There are also models where the durable software artifacts are free, but you pay people to support your use of them. Then there are the older models that used to be used a lot in the music and art world. A wealthy benefactor (or in this day and age, crowd) pays for a trusted artist / musican / architect / coder to create something, both for their enjoyment but also for their fame and renown.
Great, so if you never needed to be paid for anything then you either don’t live on earth or we’re obviously simply born to rich parents and inherited most of what you needed, or maybe even everything. Even then you could strive to figure out how skewed and subjective your perspective is.
It seems like it would cost around 2k for the hardware to make a complete mirror of this library (31TB for this library, and similar again for Lib Genesis). It's a lot, but considering what used to be spent on the beautiful buildings to host major libraries, it's something that is within the reach of a very large number of people.
It does require being OK to fall foul of copyright law in most countries though, which I expect keeps a much larger number of people away.
For the lazy, this is a blog article. As they say themselves: “ We only host our own words here. No torrents or other copyrighted files are hosted or linked here. If you want to access the Pirate Library Mirror, you'll have to find it yourself”.
Mixed feelings about this. I want to have access to millions of books and I also support archiving information this way. 20 years ago I would be drooling over this. But now, I think about those writers who spent countless hours creating their masterpieces and their stolen work.
A slightly off-topic but still relevant - the app Libby is currently as close to that ideal library of everything for free. You have access to vast amount of books, especially most of the recently published ones (and some popular older ones that have digital versions published) and available for free, at your fingertip. Since I have started reading books through Libby, I read a lot more books, and started collecting more library cards :) Surprisingly few people seem to know about Libby. If you haven't installed one, you really should. And I am surprised there's no mention of Libby in HN when the topic is about books and its availability.
How is this any different than buying a second hand book (which I assume no one has a problem with)? The author doesn’t see a single dime from a second hand purchase.
Without a lot of difficulty I was able to find the actual mirror site[0] but it consists only of a long list of torrent files with uniform names. How would one find a given book in all that? Well, per the FAQ, "You can search the SQL file in the first torrent after loading it into a MySQL database. Keep in mind that our goal here is not to make it easy to access the data, but to make the long-term preservation easy."
So on the subject of library science, I think a really valuable use for machine learning would be the automatic derivation of classifications in systems like UDC [0]. That would open the door to easier traversal of this absolutely massive dataset.
Why dont we pay just 1 $ or less for every published books. 1$ * 1 mio reader. that 1 million $. make the payment channel as easiest as possible. all in the digital format.
if readers wanted the printed version, they just go to nearby printing services.
share the income between readers, authors, and publishers.
rather than listed hundreds dollar pricing in amazon. but author just get 10 or 100 buyer. After that the books also ended in the "pirate worlds".
The same way many empires fell to obsoletion were their inability or lack of foresight to adapt from Blockbuster to Borders to Toys R Us. Music streaming and Cable TV too.
Authors should shift to paid newsletters and drip content over time. Imagine a book with 250 pages would keep your subscription going for a year or two while you work on the next. And once you're about ready to launch the next book, you can compile the "old" content to physical book for a flash sale. Ofc lack of distribution channel and exposure might hurt sales. OTOH, you'd likely see more profit than publishing it whole unless there's a marketing / branding / political advantage.
Your model exists, it's called royalroad.com coupled with patreon and kindle unlimited. But it's fairly genre specific to Fantasy.
But, it's not a model that really supports high standards, you get typo's, grammar errors, bad prose and quite a lot of filler pages due to the pressure of maintaining the 5 x 1500+ words per week many of the most popular authors work too.
It's not specific to rrl, it's pretty much what webnovels are - it's the same at the other platforms too. And there are also some really successful writers that just do it on their own pages.
There is also another source of revenue for them you've omitted: Amazon unlimited.
But besides that I think you're overstating the quality issues.
Most successful webnovel authors write really well and have proofreaders before the chapters get released to the general public.
Sure, there are extremely bad works too, but they're not really getting money either.
Is Amazon unlimited different to Kindle unlimited? Because I did mention that.
In terms of typo's, one of the biggest on RR is Defiance of the Fall which has its fair share.
I should be clear, I frankly don't care about typo's or grammar and have about 15 active follows on RR, but it is a major criticism I've seen from other readers who have a harder time tolerating such things. The thing I do have an issue is that often stories are stretched out with tedious filler content because the web serial model relies on regular updates to work, even if the author is stuck or has nothing meaningful to say in order to move the story on.
That being said, I still expect this model to significantly eat into the traditional fiction publishing model because it just has too many advantages for both the readers and the authors.
Manga writers and artists often redraw or rewrite major portions even after initial online publication. For example, One Punch Man comes to mind which has many redrawn chapters published online before the artist puts it down on printed manga.
There are many serial services like this, and Amazon recently launched its own with Vella.
This can be a valid model, but in my opinion it would be unfortunate if it totally replaced the model of publishing the entire book at once. These kinds of episodic projects usually require installments that end on some kind of cliffhanger; something to keep readers going to (and paying for) the next installment. While there needs to be a certain amount of this in a book that is published in its entirety as well, the short-episode serial format morphs what the final result looks like to a much greater extent, and not always for the better imo. The goal to meet that market's demand is no longer to produce a complete standalone work, but to drag out the reader's attention for as long as possible episode by episode.
We're not doing this for money, but we would love to quit our jobs in finance and tech, and work on this full time.
Are they actually being paid for work in finance and tech? Can that be open sourced? In the name of ethical purity, will they only be accepting funds from work that is arranging physical objects like laying bricks, plumbing, carpentry, etc.?
Yeah. I don't think so. They want the information that others have created to be free - whee... But they're 1) being paid for their non-physical, presumably proprietary, creative efforts and 2) think people should pay them (but I guess not from funds derived based on the protection of IP) so they can pursue some different intellectual pursuit.
While this effort is hugely appreciated someone needs to make an open source alternative to Zlibrary where books can be freely searched without rate limitation. Right now I don't know how to even download and sort through 31TB of this data.
Why does Hacker News like to support some industries, like Electric Cars, and Rust, and Nuclear Fusion, and wants to destroy others like the ability for people to make money writing books?
If some people want to pay for books (and they do) then they will. If they don't want to pay (and some don't) then they won't. My vote is for freeing as much information as possible so people can have options at their fingertips without draining their bank accounts.
Based on what's on ZLibrary and LibGen: various formats, though principally PDF, ePub, and DJVU (similar to PDF), with significant additional instances of Mobi (Kindle), FB2, RTF, DOCX, DOC, and a few others to a lesser extent.
Every time I pay one of my contractors with NEAR the first time they get a smile on their face they can't believe how fast and simple it is [after a not so simple —but not too diicult—setup of course].
It's like earning your first dollar bill. Feels a little magical. (I'm paying people in India, Pakistan, Phillipines, Yemen, UK, Germany, all over USA, Canada, etc)
Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they please?
Google Books was 90% there, I wish it would have been allowed to succeed.