461–470 of 498 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Download video games have the same issue. same price as physical release, cant resell it, never goes on sale, still the same price it started at 4 years later when a physical copy is 50% discounted. Already have a physical copy? no you cant download it.
Physical copy degrades over time and can be destroyed or lost. Download can't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really se…
I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really se…
I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It is fantastic! Each individual library is kind of small near me, but collectively they have a massive collection. Occasionally you have to wait a few days for a book to come from some remote location, but it is pretty rare for them to just not have something.
Library systems really should be managed at a larger level, they are much more powerful when networked.
I was delighted when my book showed up on Z-library! I of course was never paid for authoring that book; indeed I paid a subvention to publish it with Harvard University Press. At some point, the rights were sold to the giant publisher Brill, which was charging $30 per chapter for a book that has no value by chapter. Luckily, some kind soul at University of Marburg uploaded it and Library Genesis still has it. https:…
If online libraries can be made even more streamlined, the demand for piracy would diminish eventually. The same applies to academic papers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Russia is out. Some books on the platform directly contradicts government ideals, and it seems that the operators aren't willing to filter it out. Any source on this specific claim (ie. not Russian censorship writ large)? I get that Russia is unpopular right now, but is this just conjecture?
Good question. It's not really about the war, it's more its negative perception of LGBT+ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law ). This is not speculative, it is currently applicable to children, and as of this comment the Duma is working to expand this to even adults. Also, generally information critical to the government, information on suicide, information on banned substances (this is the offi…
Don't believe that is true for libgen, plenty of content critical of Russia, Putin, and also content that will teach you to make bombs on there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every person in the world doesnt use a single library with a single copy. Every local library purchases one or more. How many did Zlib purchase? How many Zlibs are there?
That's a logical race to the bottom that makes me think you have never checked out a book from a US library. If you were to calculate how much an author makes from their book being in libraries it's miniscule. For starters most library books are donated secondhand and not purchased new by libraries. Secondly, most libraries only have a single copy of a given book unless it is a major title (It's not uncommon for wait…
Other libraries I've been in have used book sales with donated books to raise funds for the library.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pirating doesn't hurt sales because it is rarely if ever done by people who would've paid for the stuff anyway. > making stuff easily accessible (e.g. Steam, Nerflix) reduces piracy by orders of magnitude. So it's rarely done by people who would've paid for the stuff but it's mostly done by people who would have paid (just not as much)? Schrödinger's pirates: none of them would pay - but all of them would.
> So it's rarely done by people who would've paid for the stuff but it's mostly done by people who would have paid (just not as much)? No. People who would pay actually pay for stuff, and very few of those people pirate. People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway. The "omg pirating makes it impossible for people to sell their works" has been proven to he false many times over .
How can then Steam, Nerflix, etc. reduce piracy by orders of magnitude? That means that at least 99% of the people getting stuff without paying would instead... pay?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really se…
There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars.
Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross..
+1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us.
Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong.
PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them..
Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long that remains the case with at least two of its principals arrested may be somewhat uncertain. Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.
On Tor, the location of the the servers and the identities of the operators are protected. No way for the feds to find them even if both are well within their jurisdiction. Unless the operators make a big mistake, the site should stay up and even if it goes down, there are plenty of other pirates around the world with full copies of the data that could replace the site.
They require maintainers to continue operating.
Bills must be paid.
At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed.
There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex:
https://how.complexsystems.fail/>
I'm ... disappointed that it seems necessary to point this out explicitly.