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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

#171

Post by rahimnathwani »

samtho wrote: post #168
WalterBright wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library can buy the stuff used and the publishers make nothing off of such sales. I buy nearly all my books used.

Libraries cannot buy used because they need the asset prepared for circulation. This includes a protective cover, barcoding, etc. They usually have a vendor do this preparation, and the assets (books, usually) are often not the same as what you would find in a store, they can be different sizes to fit in Automatic Materials Handling Systems, have more robust binding, etc.

The books are often the same as what you would find in a store.

It's possible to put a protective cover on a used book.

The books at my local library come in many different sizes, including the size of a paperback novel.

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

#172

Post by c0pium »

llm_trw wrote: post #167
c0pium wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enr…

Why start at 2014? https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-coll... Between 1975 and 2014 college books outpaced inflation over three times.

You should look at that chart a bit more carefully.

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

#174

Post by zelse »

thayne wrote: post #114
harvey9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 'Project Farm' reviews on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm) really have been eye-opening for me in that regard; sometimes there is still a strong correlation between price and quality but half the time the best quality (not just price to quality ratio -- subjective or otherwise) ends up clustering in decidedly interesting places.

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

#175

Post by ClumsyPilot »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #166
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.

I mean digital - of course you can have a market for physical things.

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

#176

Post by crotchfire »

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.

By 1919, more than half the libraries in the United States had been built by an unabashedly profit-motivated industrialist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library . Most are still around, including the one I spent a large part of my childhood wandering through.

It's one of those fractal issues. The more you zoom in, the weirder it gets.

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

#177

Post by Mindwipe »

prepend wrote: post #74
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.

Is this unique to America? It seems the same problem exists for libraries globally, right?

Broadly every other system of library lending in the world has mandatory collective licensing, but coupled with a significantly larger state funding to pay for said license.

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

#178

Post by harvey9 »

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…

No. I have a monopoly on faucets made to my design, not on faucets generally. Bloomsbury have a monopoly on Harry Potter books, Penguin can still publish Percy Jackson.

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

#179

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Copyright owners are monopolists. Of course the free market doesn't work: the government grants them a functionally eternal monopoy on what's essentially numbers. Copyright must be abolished or we'll never move forward as a species.

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

#180

Post by thaumasiotes »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #175
thaumasiotes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.

I mean digital - of course you can have a market for physical things.

Songs are not physical things, but that has never stopped them from being produced for the market. Same goes for stories, and for all other forms of oral content. These are not things that we've ever been short of.
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