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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>"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.
> 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:
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)
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.
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 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.
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?
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 $$$.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Readit News
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 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.
Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Which is awesome if we are striving to optimize the social benefits of media.
We want to optimally benefit society, right?
Not convinced.
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 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.
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.
We're talking decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
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:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
Later, the initial period was set to 28 years, with an optional 14 year extension.
IMHO, if one couldn't make a go of one's work after 2+ decades, then other people really should be allowed to have a kick at the can.
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)
Only hobbyists and people that have something to say independent of monetary value would produce music, books, blog posts, etc.
In this dream I always find weird, interesting thing that challenge or move me in directions that I could not foresee.
But then I wake up and see 10 ways I could make more money or the best 4K display that will make me a 10x programmer and life is back to businesses.
How do you know how much you're losing?
From [0]:
> The average U.S. book is now selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime.
It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact people do not buy books, period.
0: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...
Now, the recorded shows are effectively advertising for the live shows.
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.
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.
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?
https://leanpub.com/u/romanpushkin
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?
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.
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.
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?
* 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.
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 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.
To answer the question: Because just spreading information does not violate anyone's rights.
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.
http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Roman+Pushkin&open=0&res=25&...
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Grow up.
But I'm with you. Sell it and fuck it. If the guy made a million and you're happy with $1, all the better we are for it.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
B) Disney would like to have a word about when something becomes the public domain.
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.
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.
https://cdn.ifla.org/files/assets/faife/codesofethics/united...
So shadowy!
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.
Substitute "book" for "any creative work" for bonus points.
If everyone donated except practically no one, then the whole society would have bought in and the laws would change.
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> 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)
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Torrents can be obtained via their onion site: http://2urmf2mk2dhmz4km522u4yfy2ynbzkbejf2cvmpcbzhpffvcuksrz... (requires Tor to follow link)
Using onion.ws proxy: http://2urmf2mk2dhmz4km522u4yfy2ynbzkbejf2cvmpcbzhpffvcuksrz... (doesn't require Tor)
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?
Because it doesn't help at all. The first four letters of an onion URL are unimportant because they can be chosen with little effort, as you describe.
Following random links and following random links that start with "zlib" is the same thing.
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Here’s how I see it: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
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...
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.
The proposals are not incompatible.
They are, via public libraries.
I have two free library memberships, one offered to all residents of the state and the other from my town.
Combined, they grant me access to another DOZEN libraries in my state.
I have free access to a huge swath of the O'Reilly catalog with loan periods of 14 days, sometimes longer, available.
I've rarely waited more than a week or two to read award-winning fiction novels.
I can borrow the majority of popular magazines, ranging from junky to The Economist and New Yorker.
I get free access to the NY Times.
I get free access to a bunch of science journals.
I get free access to Lynda (now Linkedin Learning.)
I get free access to legal boilerplates.
The list goes on.
> - Writers and editors should be paid according to the popularity of their work.
By whom?
"This paragraph is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends! Join the fight hero."
/s
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.
I think a viable approach is:
It has been the goal of the Google cofounders, Carnegie, and great civilizations since antiquity to make something like this.
Are people's thoughts really so moulded by their surroundings, that they cannot recognize a wonder in front of them?
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.
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 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.