Z-Library to let users share physical books • Hacker News Board

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#71

Post by beej71 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

vba616 wrote: post #62

Mezzie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, books aren't abandonware. Legally, sitting on the rights to something is allowed. The odds of such a thing being allowed are low, particularly in this age of reboots, adaptations, etc. One of my favorite book series is basically book abandonware and the rights have always been retained so that things like graphic novels, shitty TV shows, etc. are a possibility. Allowing out of print, difficult to get b…

Used books appear to me to be largely unaffordable these days due to the internet creating a global market. If an obscure out of print book costs $500, because (my hypothesis is) it is priced for the single most desperate buyer in the world, then the market for used books no longer has any relationship to my life or needs. On the other hand, if there are only a dozen people who would buy it at say $5 then it's not in…

In addition, there's this crazy effect:

"How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon"

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#72

Post by beej71 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

hkt wrote: post #41

andai wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gutenberg? At least, if it's old enough!

Not everything though. There are some books I've only ever found through antiquarian shops and private libraries (eg http://londonlibrary.co.uk/ ) which are of historical and cultural value but which will probably never be digitised. Unless I do it, anyway. There's also a whole world of professional texts in law and other subjects which I've had to access by taking the £200 train down to London to physically sit in t…

I'm amazed at both what I can find and what I can't find at Anna's Archive.

Part of me dies inside when rare books like that become effectively dead due to loss. It sucks when the copyright holders would prefer that to letting the book be free, but what possible incentive could they have for freeing a book?

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#73

Post by beej71 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #25

codetrotter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement. Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.

Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials,…

> Well we need to change copyright then.

We absolutely do. I'm for much shorter terms, e.g. 14 years, the original term in the US.

But I would be willing to correct for changes in life expectancy since 1790. I haven't run the math, but I suspect it would be 20-25 years, discounting infant mortality. This is a far more sensible figure than "authors death + any ridiculous number". (I do sell books I wrote with my copyright, so I'm not completely unaware of the needs of authors.)

That said, I do want the same copyright protections for the wimpy kid and Dan Brown, because the alternative--differentiating copyrightable material or charging to make it--is am undesirable alternative to shorter terms.

> I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.

Amen to that.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#74

Post by beej71 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #47

suddenclarity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.

vFlat Scan [0] automates the unwarping. [0] https://www.vflat.com/

I just tried this with a thumb-held warped page and Tesseract for OCR--worked pretty well! (Tesseract by itself struggles with warped pages.)

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#75

Post by wiml » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

hkt wrote: post #44

leobg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.

Graphics or any kind of symbols. I tried this with an out of print edition of an economics textbook from the 70s: the scans were fine but I never found any OCR that could even semi-faithfully reproduce the equations, nor anything in a table. It occurs to me that a place where scans and first-pass OCRs of this stuff are shared with the intention of version controlling the resultant epub would be handy, such that small…

That's not too far removed from what Distributed Proofreaders did/does.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#76

Post by carlosjobim » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

leobg wrote: post #11

They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users. Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan t…

> They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives.

Who are "they" that you are giving orders? What difficulties have you found with scanning books that "they" could solve for you? Since you write "just" it must be quite easy? What incentives have you provided for people to scan books?

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#77

Post by kristopolous » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 7:34 PM UTC

hkt wrote: post #42

kristopolous wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials,…

> Well we need to change copyright then. I'd like to recommend a book to you: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97804293414... Sadly it isn't the lawyers who should attract your ire. It is the legislators and the people who fund them.

right, we can't attack the lawyers. There will always be another disreputable sellout around the corner. we need to change the laws. absolutely.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#78

Post by vba616 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

beej71 wrote: post #71

vba616 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used books appear to me to be largely unaffordable these days due to the internet creating a global market. If an obscure out of print book costs $500, because (my hypothesis is) it is priced for the single most desperate buyer in the world, then the market for used books no longer has any relationship to my life or needs. On the other hand, if there are only a dozen people who would buy it at say $5 then it's not in…

In addition, there's this crazy effect: "How A Book About Flies Came To Be Priced $24 Million On Amazon" https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/

I think I remember that, but I don't see it as a problem, just an amusing glitch. I don't see how it could be economically rational.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#79

Post by hkt » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #77

hkt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well we need to change copyright then. I'd like to recommend a book to you: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97804293414... Sadly it isn't the lawyers who should attract your ire. It is the legislators and the people who fund them.

right, we can't attack the lawyers. There will always be another disreputable sellout around the corner. we need to change the laws. absolutely.

I've no objection to invective against them, but the people making the rules are quite content for us all to be distracted from the task of working out what change would look like and then agitating for it.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#80

Post by tomodachi94 » Sun, Apr 09, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

kennethologist wrote: post #58

codetrotter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner. Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.

You can use a device like www.czur.com to scan a book pretty fast and have a perfect pdf/epub version in under 30 minutes.

There's also the various https://diybookscanner.org variants. Not the quickest imaginable system, but it's much better than going snap snap snap with a cellphone.