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

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

#91

Post by Vaslo »

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 works fine. You are welcome to write and release any book you want at whatever cost you want. Authors require lots of money, support costs to create, illustrate, bundle, bind, and ship books. And they won’t waste their time doing that without a profit. Lots of people work for and support those companies and it’s getting more expensive as minimum wages increase.

You are just reacting to this because “free for me”. What industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try and explain in your response when I say the same about your “product” needing regulation.

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

#92

Post by AnthonyMouse »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #50
Retric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are often brought up as becoming cheaper with less regulations. While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room for a cheaper fair. That’s exactly the kind of thing regulators and the free market may come to a different compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.

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

The market in question was airlines. US airlines have rather a lot of competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_the_United...

How many does Boeing have?

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

#93

Post by AtlasBarfed »

beej71 wrote: post #49
JKCalhoun wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, surprised (not surprised?) to see the used-textbook market seemingly gone now when I was recently visiting my daughter at the University of Kansas. It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.

One of my students told me they all pirate textbooks. I haven't been a student in a university for almost 30 years but I remember what it was like. It was a scam back then. When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as…

Is the state of open source textbooks that bad? I guess the top link is a U of MN site, which is laudable and a Big10 school, but not exactly a banner carrier.

It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition, but basic math? physics? chemistry? economics? history? languages?

Of course institutes of higher learning have well exposed themselves as being anything but in the last couple decades. So it doesn't really surprise me. The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.

But like your father, I'm surprised some retired teachers don't do this as a side project, or an emeritus professor, or SOMEONE that wants to leave a legacy.

You could have a site that presents concepts in entirely different fashions, so you could choose a path that suits you, or if a particular concept didn't stick, have it presented a different way.

State institutions in particular should be required to produce and use open textbooks and courseware. Rile up some republicans to make it contingent on getting their state funding (they love doing that).

This is even more egregious since there is the entire British Commonwealth of nations/english speakers and their educational systems to leverage.

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

#95

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harvey9 wrote: post #84
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?

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

If one company has a monopoly on faucets, another has one on pipes, another has one on valves, you're trying to argue that there is plenty of competition for "plumbing supplies" but that doesn't help you if you need a faucet and there's only one supplier.

Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.

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

#96

Post by zinodaur »

armchairhacker wrote: post #71
habosa wrote: post #62

This sucks but was inevitable. Libraries are such a weird and wonderful thing. Even though books are widely sold, there’s a place where you can go and read them for free instead. And it’s not some weird loophole, it’s a basic unit of our society and an assumed part of every community. Unfortunately this is America. Nothing can beat out profit motives forever. The libraries really never stood a chance.

Libraries for the purpose of getting information simply don't make sense in the digital age. The internet is far bigger and more accessible than any library, and you can find information on nearly any topic in exclusively ad-free, public domain sites like Wikipedia, the Gutenburg project, and arXiv. Libraries now exist more as a place for community: somewhere quiet anyone can freely hang out, access resources like 3D…

The internet is better for factoids - for learning something, a book is a lot better, if you can get your hands on one.

E.g. for a niche topic there's maybe a 5 page wikipedia article, a thousand useless seo fodder blogs, and a bunch of academic papers on the topic. At the library, I can get a 300 page comprehensive text written by an expert whose motive is to actually teach me the topic.

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

#97

Post by bsdpufferfish »

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.

This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers aren't buying it with their own money.

The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is you do not have consumers spending their money on products they use.

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

#98

Post by pastage »

magnetowasright wrote: post #31
perihelions wrote: post #17

[flagged]

> I think it's fine if libraries die out. Honey, a new copypasta just dropped! This made me laugh almost as much as the first time I read the navy seal 'nothing personnel, kid' copypasta. Amazing. I genuinely cannot tell if this is sincere or satire (a hallmark of satire!). It's peak HN. I don't know what's funnier, this being sincere or it being a well crafted satire of the utterly insane beliefs of the deeply out-o…

These are feelings not argumentation. Since the dawn of ebooks this has been true. Referencing electronic material is amazing. Books are incredible with physical libraries being one of the most important aspect, but the current form of digital libraries is a dead end.

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

#99

Post by ghaff »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #93
beej71 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my students told me they all pirate textbooks. I haven't been a student in a university for almost 30 years but I remember what it was like. It was a scam back then. When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as…

Is the state of open source textbooks that bad? I guess the top link is a U of MN site, which is laudable and a Big10 school, but not exactly a banner carrier. It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition, but basic math? physi…

>The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.

My sense is that there's quite a bit of "open coursework" out there if you're talking about mostly raw materials.

If you're talking about MOOCs, universities started pulling back after it became obvious that they had mostly "not lived up to expectations." The combination of the students most needing them largely lacking motivation, the fact that credentials weren't generally viewed as valuable, the lack of lab and tutorial resources, and VC-companies pivoting are probably just the main factors.

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

#100

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #86
thaumasiotes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The bad communism is when the government takes your stuff and you don't have it anymore. This is "communism" in the same way that everyone being able to breathe the air or speak English without paying a proprietor for the right is "communism". This is often a motte and bailey that communists use, but you're attacking the motte.

You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters.

If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.

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