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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

#111

Post by FloatArtifact »

Digital media costs library much more money than physical media.

In the US in the state of Wisconsin has a statewide digital library last time I was a resident there. That means all libraries share the digital library across the state. My experience was a incredible variety of content at the cost of somewhat longer wait times.

The same cannot be said of Minnesota. When inquiring why Minnesota does not have the same system when chatting with our local library it came down to publishers were no longer willing to have such an agreements. The library would love to have such a system in Minnesota but the publishers are against it. I wish there was a way we could bridge readers with their authors.

As a side note I don't quite understand the downside even with the Wisconsin system. For my understanding it was contracted per book for a length of time and also a fee per read.

https://www.wplc.info/wisconsins-digital-library-faq

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

#112

Post by bluish29 »

ghaff wrote: post #29
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For textbooks? No. And nowadays a lot of them also expire after a year since by then the student likely no longer needs it. It's a really gross industry

I would question that you don't need a university textbook after a year. I can't say I remember specific examples but I'm pretty sure I referred to earlier textbooks for later engineering classes.

I still refer to my undergrad textbooks in maths and physics till this day. There are usually the basics and you need to review them a lot if you are working in STEM fields.

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

#113

Post by gnicholas »

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…

Check out LibreText and OpenStax.

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

#114

Post by thayne »

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.

Which would be fine if you could tell if you could actually reliably find high quality products. But I'm increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between paying more for quality and paying more for overpriced junk.

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

#115

Post by 8note »

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…

In a zero regulation world, you consider either that there's no copyrights, or that copyrights have infinite length

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

#116

Post by ozim »

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…

Not trying to throw a straw man argument, but from what I understand in that space is that there is no free market there.

If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good luck no one will read it.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #95
harvey9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supplier…

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by CatWChainsaw »

perihelions wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is it's real. But you're right that it's peak-HN that one can't be sure it's not satire (or trolling).

I'm absolutely sincere and I'll reply to any well-intentioned questions. I don't think I'm out of touch. I think this is the future of society and technology—meaning for the future for absolutely everyone, not just a few tech elites. It's jarring to me to see that flavor of accusation, when pirate libraries are freely available to billions of people who don't even have theoretical access to the stuff you people are t…

You are out of touch, however much you think you aren't.

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

#119

Post by c0pium »

jzb wrote: post #107
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

It doesn’t really make sense to transfer the concept of first sale to digital goods. Even assuming a scheme that allows a library to fully control lending so that only one copy is in use at a time, a digital copy is not going to wear out. So publishers lose out on sales of popular titles when a library would need to refresh a physical copy.

I own multiple books that are over 100 years old. They weren’t even that expensive.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #89
snapplebobapple wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

[deleted]
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