Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers • Hacker News Board

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#81

Post by BeetleB » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #17

[flagged]

You do realize that most people still borrow physical books, right?

> A pirate can run a local LLM for natural-language queries, and find a semantic needle in a thousand-page haystack; or select a dozen excerpts and present them side-by-side for immediate comparison. How can the clunky system of DRM-locked lending e-book readers compete? Near-future. A personal LLM could track a researcher's progress page by page, and pro-actively recommend reading suggestions for an individual chapter from an individual book from a million-volume library—and instantly display it, highlighting special lines, glossing words, annotating jargon, hyperlinking (other) books, writing explanations in the marginalia, translating languages. Transformative creations. What's the poor schmuck stuck in Andrew Carnegie's library doing?

Almost all these capabilities exist. Yet we do not have pirate libraries doing this. I will not simply assume they will happen if/when libraries disappear.

At the moment, the library offers more utility than these pirate libraries. Perhaps not more features, but definitely more utility.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#82

Post by harvey9 » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #64

giraffe_lady wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything else you've noticed the free market compromising on re: air travel.

Quality generally with many manufactured goods. There are health and safety regulations but if there were a requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would probably increase significantly. In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower…

The straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#83

Post by bluish29 » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 4:58 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #77

bluish29 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with paper textbooks, publishers will now provide online assignments (which is convenient for universities) and other online materials which you will not be able to sell (it will expire) with the book. So they force students to buy new textbook for each class.

The crazy thing to me is that for a lot of the classes that use these online materials, nothing has changed in 50 years. 100-300 classes are largely the same as they were before digital learning. The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation tha…

> I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students.

What will happen is that universities will pass these costs to all students where now paying students will pay more.

A better regulation will be encouraging and funding more open access materials that can be used and require public funding receivers to adopt them or decrease the funding and cap the tuition increases.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#84

Post by harvey9 » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

llm_trw wrote: post #19

bluish29 wrote: post #4

The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a public/university library to get it. This became actually more of a cliché than an argument over time. Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend…

>Free market hardly work there. You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?

On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a novel with the same themes as yours has.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#85

Post by AtlasBarfed » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

bluish29 wrote: post #4

The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a public/university library to get it. This became actually more of a cliché than an argument over time. Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend…

I've never actually heard that argument, must have been invented by the highway robbery textbook market since I was in college.

Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling, there won't be any free market in specific publications within living human lifetimes.

Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for remasters and releases on new platforms.

The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up, scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#86

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:03 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23

llm_trw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Free market hardly work there. You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?

I mean, the free market is working pretty well. http://libgen.rs/ The government-granted monopoly, not so much.

How is this a market if Boone is paying? If anything, this is communism?

You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.

This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#87

Post by derbOac » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:03 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #39

derbOac wrote: post #6

I get so frustrated by these games. Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format, and there should be no postsale restrictions on any item beyond what is implied by copyright.

> Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say, 1 billion USD.

But they don't do that with physical books.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#88

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #87

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say, 1 billion USD.

But they don't do that with physical books.

I do know examples where publishers did stop printing new editions (i.e. stopped publishing) some books.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#89

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

snapplebobapple wrote: post #24

bluish29 wrote: post #4

The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a public/university library to get it. This became actually more of a cliché than an argument over time. Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend…

Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be mini…

What you really want here is for ebooks to be subject to First Sale. In general "licensing" should be restricted to the rights of the copyright holder, e.g. giving someone a license to permanently increase the number of copies that exist in the world, as when an author licenses a publisher. If someone has bought a copy, that should be theirs, they should be free to transfer it to other devices and other people as long as there continues to be only as many permanent copies as they've purchased, and the copyright holder can't impose any further restrictions on that, essentially as an anti-trust anti-tying rule because copyright is a monopoly.

Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do the thing they've always done.

Re: Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

#90

Post by ghaff » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

harvey9 wrote: post #82

ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality generally with many manufactured goods. There are health and safety regulations but if there were a requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would probably increase significantly. In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower…

The straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.

Or tools for the occasional household use. You might not want junk but that table saw you use maybe a handful of times a year may not have to be as high-end as what a carpenter might use most days.