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

#121

Post by c0pium » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 8:49 PM UTC

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…

What you’re proposing would require a literal quantum shift in DRM, where it’s only possible to use a copy of something if that thing hasn’t been itself copied somewhere else. That world would ironically unite the desires of publishers, creators, and actual archivists, leaving only the pirates out in the cold. Whoever figures out how to do that is going to make a fortune.

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

#122

Post by c0pium » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

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…

That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches.

There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.

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

#123

Post by leotravis10 » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Awful take dude, you don't realize that libraries are currenty on the front lines of America's problems where in a alternative universe, the nation should have done the job not to mention that libraries are under attack by mostly all fronts (governments, politicians, publishers, copyright cartel, right wing zealots just to name a few).

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/18/libraries-ebooks-hoopla-lib... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474151

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

#124

Post by briandear » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

How about eliminating libraries and provide vouchers for Kindle Unlimited for the poor? Work with Amazon to create some kind of Amazon library using Kindle as the platform.

People with money don’t need public libraries — you can buy pretty much anything easily. People spend $18 on a McDonalds meal, $9.99 for an ebook is nothing. Big city libraries are mostly homeless shelters at this point.

I’m not going to a public library to use the World Book Encyclopedia like I did 35 years ago. Pretty sure most people aren’t. I’m not going to check out some music CDs — I have Apple Music. Unless it’s some kind of rare collections library for academic research, the average library doesn’t need to exist. It’s a vestige like Blockbuster Video.

It would be cool though if people could buy library access for university digital libraries. Being able to access journal articles is pretty awesome.

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

#125

Post by briandear » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:14 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…

Free market needs to be allowed to work. If enough universities cancel contracts, then publishers will have to adjust right? Why are we going to ask government to regulate publishing? Everything else they regulate/manipulate gets far more expensive. Health care for instance. Housing (especially in rent control cities.) Education. Transportation (note with deregulation of air travel, flying places became significantly more affordable.

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

#126

Post by j_maffe » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

c0pium wrote: post #121

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…

What you’re proposing would require a literal quantum shift in DRM, where it’s only possible to use a copy of something if that thing hasn’t been itself copied somewhere else. That world would ironically unite the desires of publishers, creators, and actual archivists, leaving only the pirates out in the cold. Whoever figures out how to do that is going to make a fortune.

No you wouldn't. It's not about DRM, it's about the contractual agreements between libraries and publishers. They already track the number of times it's borrowed and for how long. OP is suggesting that it should be dealt with the same as a hard copy, i.e. only one person can borrow it at a time.

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

#127

Post by j_maffe » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

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.

If you're going to nitpick on this, fine... some research can be done on the number of uses a book can go through before it wears out and apply that to the e-book. It's certainly more than 26 and absolutely more than 2 years (how this 2 years condition is acceptable I'll never know)

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

#128

Post by EvkoGS » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:23 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…

>Free market hardly work there.

Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw, FBI seized all of their domains recently.

Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.

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

#129

Post by j_maffe » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #34

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.

> I mean, the free market is working pretty well. > http://libgen.rs/ Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.

Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.

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

#130

Post by snapplebobapple » Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #28

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…

>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 I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.

It is less regulation in that it gets the governmemt out of interfering with the market outcome (marginal price of dostribution is effectively zero so market outcome without copyright is zero price electeonic diatribution). The percentage sales requirement is just an easy way to force intelligent behavior by copyright holders for public libraries to lessen the market failure for the poors caused by copyright. I am open to simpler ideas as long as the outcome is copyright fuckery does not result in no provision of knowledge for the poors and only extractive pricing for a short time period that incentizes additional content creation for the rest of us.