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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

#151

Post by llm_trw »

c0pium wrote: post #122
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certa…

Given that book prices are rising faster than _anything else in the economy_ the market place isn't working at all.

Let them eat competition.

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

#152

Post by aleph_minus_one »

j_maffe wrote: post #129
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.

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

#153

Post by j_maffe »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #152
j_maffe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical. It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.

Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation depending on both the reader and the publishere/author. An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely. For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a novel written by a niche author? probably not the right thing to do.

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

#154

Post by WalterBright »

c0pium wrote: post #144
WalterBright wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know what will happen. Germany had no copyright protections in the 19th century. The country's economy boomed, making Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe.

Can you expand on this point? Having no copyright being a leading cause of industrial expansion seems pretty tenuous. Especially given that they now have copyright and other countries also had booming economies at about the same time.

The printers went looking for things to print, and they printed anything and everything. The easiest way to get material to print, besides copying other printers' output, was to commission how-to manuals. Germany was flooded with how-to informational manuals on every topic.

Much like the software industry. Free software runs the world.

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

#155

Post by lukan »

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…

"Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop. I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students."

Thanks for that. My professors were in part like yours. But some other professors (I think it was about MBA folks, not IT people) apparently urge everyone to buy their really expensive book. And if you did not, you would have no idea about the weird case in chapter 2, he makes the exams about ..

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

#156

Post by margalabargala »

wolverine876 wrote: post #148

The answer may be to change copyright law to allow book owners to freely shift mediums (I forget the term for it, but converting a paper book to PDF by scanning, or vice versa by printing), and to restrict the ability to lease everything - you buy it, you own it (a debate older than this issue, and there's term for that too). Then I could donate my book to the library, they could scan it (or buy a scanned copy), and…

> The Internet Archive seems to do something similar, though it seems to be an issue in the courts.

There was a brief period of time at the beginning of COVID when the Internet Archive decided to do away with the "one digital copy per purchase" restriction, essentially arguing that since libraries across the country were closed, this was justified. [0]

The courts disagreed.

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...

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

#157

Post by c0pium »

llm_trw wrote: post #151
c0pium wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certa…

Given that book prices are rising faster than _anything else in the economy_ the market place isn't working at all. Let them eat competition.

Huh? In the United States books have inflated by -0.1% per year since 1997, compared with the overall economy which inflated at 2.46% per year on average during the same period. Because of the stiff competition.

Unless you mean specifically textbooks, which are inflating because piracy has destroyed the demand (the annual revenue of the textbook market is down ~33% since 2014, despite increases in both prices and enrollment in colleges). You can see the causal link here as increases in pricing are lagging decreasing sales. If the prices were driving the decreasing sales you would expect the opposite behavior.

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

#158

Post by tacocataco »

samtho wrote: post #42
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.

This is classic rent seeking behavior. The more insidious aspect is that this is foisted upon a captive audience of kids/young adults that agreed to tens of thousands in non-dischargable debt when they turned 18.

Didn't the kids go into debt to learn how the world really works?

This is how we are. For now.

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

#159

Post by miki123211 »

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…

> Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there.

Most of these problems wouldn't exist if not for copyright law, which is nothing but regulation.

You can either fix the problems by introducing more regulation for publishers or by lessening the regulatory restrictions on libraries. Make it legal for them to break DRM (and discuss / purchase / commission DRM-breaking tools), offer scans of physical books to more than one person at a time etc, and your problem is gone.

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

#160

Post by miki123211 »

Retric wrote: post #40
ryandrake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, if you got rid of or reduced copyright, publishers would just find other ways to engage in cartel-like behavior and continue to screw everyone. I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.

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.

During the era of heavy airline regulation in the US, the Los Angeles to San Francisco route was significantly (about 4x IIRC) cheaper than other routes of similar length. This was because it was the only (popular) route of this length that didn't cross state lines, and so the onerous federal airline regulations did not apply.

So no, it wasn't just manufacturers building more efficient aircraft.

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