I wonder, is there a nice site for searching and usage of open source and other free books? There are software repositories, places you go for free video (especially youtube) and more. I see many complaints about missing openness of knowledge. So I think something like that would be nice.
Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
281–290 of 498 posts
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can argue that people can go to the library, Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cutting edge science books. "Just go to the library" is such a first-world-and-megacity thing to say.
Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice. I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks…
As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system.
It NEEDS to be consolidated.
I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best.
Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection.
I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active.
In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring.
Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc.
I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible.
The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible?
Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#283I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
10 USD is the average cost for an e-book from my anecdotal experience, some even 20. 200 USD our average salary range approximately.
It's not easy for us, you can say "well if you can't afford them then tough luck" which I could understand but that'd be your point for most of the third world. There's a reason Steam videogames regional prices exist for example (which people with VPNs ruined it exploting the system)
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#284I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
> but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden Sorry, but by "pretty much anywhere in the world" you clearly mean "first world". If you live outside of US/Canada and EU it is much harder to obtain books legally. Publishing agreements usually cover specific countries, and no-one cares about, for example, selling books in English in Central Asia. So even if you have means to pay for the…
>Interesting that Steam solved most of that problems for game distribution though. They have worldwide publishing agreements, regional prices AND good support of local payment providers in many countries. I think a lot of people underestimate how these factors allowed Steam to overtake piracy.
Sadly it is being ruined by people from first-world using VPNs. Many AAA stopped using regional prices and we're stuck paying the same cost as in the first world.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#285I respect the copyright of publisher and author, I also admire people sharing expensive knowledge to those who do not have the ability to get one. This is a hard choice to me.
The problem with allowing piracy will always be that no one really wants to spend money. Just because I have a spare $200 doesn't mean I want to spend it if I don't have to.
If you give people the choice between free and $x amount, 99% of people will choose free. You see this with just about anything that let's people name their own price.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
What could be more Brazilian than law students breaking the law in order to be able to understand the law? Sounds like those specimens collectors from the 19th century that helped on the extinction of species (e.g. dodo bird, great auk) by collecting and embalming them for "preservation".
In most countries downloading a book is not illegal. What might be illegal is to distribute copyrighted material. I say "might" because often distributing is not even illegal. Sending to friends and family without making money is usually not illegal. And how do you determine "friends"?
> And how do you determine "friends"?
This!!
This exact lawsuit took place in Canada where the supreme court ruruled that you don't necessarily need to know someone to "lend" to them.
They cited public libraries as an example of where books and video s are lent out free of charge and the librarian and the borrower are not "friends".
https://www.iposgoode.ca/2012/07/the-pentalogy-the-supreme-c...
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's human culture. The idea that it should be the sole provenance of rich multi-nationals to decide who can afford to read is disgusting. It should all be freely accessible. Removing money from the equation would also solve other quality issues.
So let's totally remove the heat-transfer agent from the thermodynamic machine of society and instead rely on an army of maxwell demons to decide how much food and floor space each human element in the system should be given for its work, right? That was called 'communism', had been attempted to implement, resulted in millions of deaths and miserably failed regardless due to the physics of the process. The heat trans…
Monkey see "communism", monkey downvote
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#288Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects. Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books. You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber. I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my unive…
Use Library Genesis. It's also free and there is no download limit, and you have access to approximately the same books. https://libgen.is/
Yes, but it is hard to tell whether LG will stay up for long either. Their non-commercial nature makes it harder to hit them with heavy damages, arguably, but the underlying threat is the same, and there is no reason to think they are somehow protected from the same dynamic.
Download anything you need and then some. And spread your own writings widely and freely.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#289A lot of the typical and expected takes for these sort of discussions: - on one side, people who are in favour of the arrests , because they see their a activities as crimes. They have point - on the other side people that one way or another, believe that the distribution of the information should be free in some sense. Justifications always abound. A d it's Ok I offer a third take: Theres no reason why authors shoul…
Creative works can't be valued just by the number of hours it takes to make them. Good books must be paid for more than bad books.
The way I think this would work is like this:
- A "good writer" sholud release the first chapter of their book (or first N pages or whatever) for free. As a sort of "Resume"/"Portfolio"
- Then, he lists the rest of the TOC for the next chapters of the book, and the price of each of them.
- He raises that money in a place like Kickstarter or similar platform, for each of the chapters. And as he gets the money, he publishes/uploads the new chapters of the book.
- Once he gets the 100% of the price of the book, he has delievered/published all the chapters. He may offer the whole book in one file, printed copy, audio or whatever other medium for an additional prodcution and distribution fee.
With this approach writers who write good books would be able to demand more money per chapter (hence, $ per hour of their work) than writers who write bad books. While at the same time, they would be able to ask for some fixed amount of $ per hour of their work. Sure, a writer like Stephen King may ask for $1000 USD per hour of his work, so one chapter of one of his book will take $40,000 USD. But I am sure given his fame, he won't have any trouble in raising that.
This appraoch would also work for music and software. It is kind of based on the Shareware model used in the 90s.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#290The American Empire strikes again. You'd think they would have seen this coming though. I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.
> I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc. So, just another publishing and distribution monopoly, no matter who runs it. Still a good improvement over the current status quo, I'll agree. Flawed as they may be, Spotify and…
But government naturally has a monopoly.
Like the US already forces publishers to send books to the Library of Congress with the mandatory deposit.