I am an author who supports libraries and Controlled Digital Lending, but I vehemently opposed the Internet Archive's uncontrolled digital lending stunt at the start of the pandemic.
The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law.
IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that.
I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work.
So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.
> IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned.
They had the full support of other physical libraries, which could not loan out their collections at the time because of COVID. The overall amount of copies was never exceeded as you seem to be implying here. For all intents and purposes, the basic principles of CDL remained in effect.
I am open to being convinced of this, but could you please provide a source?
As far as I know, the Emergency Library was a unilateral decision by IA, not a partnership with a consortium of shuttered libraries.
The announcement did mentioned receiving support from other libraries, but it didn't indicate that those libraries owned sufficient copies to cover all CDL usage.
Indeed, if that were the case, I would expect the language to have been very different -- something like "expanded access" versus "suspending all waitlists," the latter of which only makes sense if lending is unlimited and thus not CDL.
That's why controlling the discourse is so important. You don't have to lie by telling falsehoods, you only need to be able to omit details that are inconvenient to you.
> The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned.
As far as I know, even "wear" of physical copies is simulated in this model: After 30-ish lendings, the digital copy "breaks", requiring the library to "buy" (really: license) a "fresh" one. (And for physical copies, reinforcing a book's binding seems to be prohibited as well, all to keep the number of acceptable lendings per copy predictably low!)
I get that it's effectively the only compromise many publishers and libraries have been able to achieve, but after taking a step back, it should hopefully become apparent that it's completely ridiculous.
Not even digital video streaming works that way – I find it scary to believe that publishers are being more complicated than the movie/TV industry! Count how many people are lending a given book and pay the authors accordingly, crunch some numbers about physical library lending and extrapolate from there, etc. There has to be a better way to still pay authors, but to isolate library patrons from this absurdity.
Here's hoping that this tacky skeuomorphism will age about as well as brushed metal.
> (And for physical copies, reinforcing a book's binding seems to be prohibited as well, all to keep the number of acceptable lendings per copy predictably low!)
This is awful! Where's the exact wording of this prohibition available at?
I can‘t seem find the source for that, unfortunately, but I remember stumbling upon that when reading up on the ”simulated wear“ model for ebook loans.
It was an unpopular opinion at the time and probably still is, but I couldn't help but feel like IA was trying to push something by placing itself in danger during a crisis.
"Now that you need us more than ever, we're going to step in front of a train. Someone better stop it." Something like that. They had to know they were courting trouble, so we have to ask why they did it anyway.
Idk, i think copyright law has totally broken down with the digital world and none of it makes sense.
Doctrine of first sale does rely on natural friction of physical items to work as a compromise.
To take the CDL thing further, i think the natural extension would be for all the people who own a copy of the book to get together and create a transparent lending market with a reserve of enough copies that all members of this lending co-op can still get a copy whenever they want (think how a fractional reserve bank works). I doubt copyright holders would like that very much.
But then again, my personal politics is copyright abolition...
Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial, so this was not exactly calculated to smooth over the troubled waters between authors and publishers.
There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold.
The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...)
As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.
> The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...)
And that's a bad thing because?
i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.
If it's that few copies and the publisher isn't providing any help marketing, then an author is better off self-publishing with a platform like Lulu or CreateSpace. Per https://blog.lulu.com/self-publishing-vs-traditional-publish... traditional publishers take almost all of the profits and also have baroque processes with wait times of months to years.
That's up to the author. Nobody is forcing them to use a publisher. Making a bad business decision might be bad for the author, but as long as everyone is playing fair (e.g. no fraud or coercion) its not a problem for society.
I'm also a bit unclear how those numbers compare per year vs per the entire life time of the book, which seems like an important distinction.
However i imagine lots of people go with a publisher in the hopes that their book is a hit. In which case the publisher comes in handy. But you dont know beforehand if you are going to win the book lottery so you have to balance the probabilities.
Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists.
So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles.
In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.
Sadly, I suspect they may be right. If they weren't, you'd expect way more self-published authors to have risen to the level of "published authors" but that number, while it exists, is small.
I’ve seen several posts and comments claiming the DOJ made the “less than 12 copies” claim but I’ve yet to see any actual evidence the DOJ made that claim. The “source” linked to is always a tweet, or a comment on an article, or occasionally even to an article... that doesn’t even mention the DOJ made the claim in the first place.
> The Association of American Publishers put out a statement falsely claiming that the letter ... was actually “disinformation in the Internet Archive case.”
I think that The Association of American Publishers, together with other players, are in the process of re-defining the meaning of English word "disinformation". These days, the word "disinformation" basically means "something you disagree with" or "something you strongly dislike". I wonder if the online dictionaries would be catching up at some point.
Labeling something as "disinformation" or "misinformation" isn't an attempt to convince people it's not true, rather, it's an attempt to get tech companies to remove it, and to de-platform the people who post it. It's a bit like calling someone a witch in the 1600s. You only do it because you want someone burned at the stake.
To me, this is a signal that I should pay closer attention to something. Calling something "misinformation" is expressly saying that you want this information suppressed, which is more interesting than the information itself.
Just only a year ago, many people believed that taking horse paste was more important than taking a vaccine -- which may or may not have had microchips embedded in it which the CIA could control. People would practically inject bleach rather than question their own belief system.
Participate in our collective objective reality -- or don't. But don't expect social media to spread your lies about the holocaust so you can preach the gospel of hate.
I don't sense any "hatred and vitriol" in that comment. At worst, I sense frustration - and in light of the million or so needless deaths from COVID in my country alone, that seems rather justified.
1. Deny fact "X" either historical, scientific, or otherwise provable -- meanwhile never disclosing your ulterior motives.
2. Argue from first principles that people who believe "X" should be allowed to say it no matter how repulsive or dangerous it is.
3. Debate endlessly to make it seem that "X" is more controversial in its widespread belief than it is. (Search HN for the Ivermectin). Aso, make sure to engage in whataboutery, false premises, strawman arguments, or demonization of those who support "X". (See Dr. Fauci)
4. Complain when someone (or a group of people or a corporation) decide to not let your arguments against "X" on their network as censorship.
Just because you see somebody's behavior as obviously wrong doesn't mean it is. Whenever I see this kind of arrogance I remember a story about westerners discovering some indigenous tribe in the jungle and seeing how they do a magic ritual to tell them the best place to go hunting. The ritual seemed to be just random and pointless but the tribesmen believed it gave them useful knowledge. Turns out, the value of it was exactly in the randomness which helped to prevent prey from learning their routines or over-using some areas. Many other "obviously" pointless beliefs are valuable simply for being beliefs, not for accurately reflecting the real world like some non-human information processing machine.
If you believe that bleach injection is really about a practical decision to choose the best medicine and making the wrong choice due to misinformation, then you're lost in your own bigotry.
I am a big fan of the cosmere built by Brandon Sanderson, and his achievement in pulling off the most popular Kickstarter to date, publishing four novels independent of the big publishers, should have them nervous.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of books written are complete crap. And that’s true even among the select few books that actually manage to get published. Crowd funded novels would have a terrible return on investment. And unlike the VC model where one unicorn can make up for hundreds of garbage investments the same strategy won’t work when allocating you’re limited lifetime reading hours.
I see much use of the word "piracy" in the comments as an unquestionably derogatory term. I'd like to question it.
In terms of the current capitalist model, we're agreed, piracy is a bad thing: People pirate media, the industry suffers monetary losses, the media producers don't get paid enough to keep producing, and as a result of all this there is less media. I'm with you.
What if the entire premise that this was a bad thing was wrong though?
The only thing that would go away is _this iteration_ of media creation and distribution.
"In the old days", things like music and stories were _meant_ to be copied, shared, and even expanded, by everyone. I'd argue this was a better system because it's literally what "culture" means:
"the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively" — my Apple dictionary, don't know it's source ;)
The standards were high, because the motivation was in great part the art itself, not as much the monetary gains (compared to today). Of course the artist has to earn money to live, but they used to before too! This part is a whole argument in itself, so I won't expand on it here.
My point — and believe it or not, I have a point — is that technology seems to be naturally supporting my world view on this, and we're trying to artificially cripple it not to.
Why are we all walking around with clown make up on but pretending to one another like we're not. The cat is out of the bag. All of human literature can be stored on something that fits in a bag I can carry. Why are we so adamant to live 100 years in the past?
because of the possibility (a dream for most) that you too will be able to live off the rent genereated by your artistic creations for up to 70 years after you die.
You can also murder someone with a hammer. Why are we all walking around pretending we can't? Laws exist to serve the interests of people, not to reflect natural laws. Copyright is no different. If you don't like it, make the case for why it doesn't benefit people.
The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law.
IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that.
I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work.
So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.