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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

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Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#261

Post by trinsic2 »

fwip wrote: post #251
trinsic2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultures are created to protect power structures. Culture is the enforcer of authority. Culture distorts principles in order to defend the authority of evil. Culture must convince you that it is not wrong when law subjugates your worth and destroys your freedom. Culture convinces people of this by perverting the concept of morality. Morality is liberty. Immorality is evil. The exercise and defense of freedom are mora…

I think you must be using an unusual definition of culture. As I understand it, culture is, broadly speaking, the shared values and practices of a group of people. The only way to avoid having culture, in the usual sense, is to prevent groups of people from existing.

It is unusual. We have been condition to believe that culture is created by shared values. But actually is guided and molded by authority to create the illusion that its driven by society. Obviously this isn't true in all cases, but for most, its my belief that it is.

People can exist out side of the constrains of a culture that is imposed on then by understanding their own human value and worth that they are born with instead of looking to institutions and governments to give it to them.

In a society that doesn't have a centralized governing factor where the powerful impose their will on the people, then yes, I agree that its created by a shared understanding by its people. But that's not the case for 95% percent of the worlds cultures.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#262

Post by kelnos »

akkad33 wrote: post #188
slt2021 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they already work almost for free, since all the money goes to the publisher and retailer. out of $20 book, the authors earn about $1 - $1.5, for e-books its about $1.7 - $2 The value from book sales goes to retailer and publisher: two large corporations, and in case of amazon - a single big corporation so please cry me a river about amazon's lost profits earned at the back of the book authors

Then what's the economic interest for writing a book

Very little. Aside from high-profile/best-selling authors who do make a decent amount of money, the vast majority of writers do it because they love doing it, not because they expect to become rich.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#263

Post by vsri »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #165
lolive wrote: post #140

I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY…

> Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media t…

> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to.

This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?

Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by people reading.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#264

Post by thomassmith65 »

brianstorms wrote: post #174

Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.

We could hold all the following thoughts simultaneously...

• Anna's Archive is a delightful resource for readers

• the more widely the public reads, the better for society

• copyright law should be changed

• it would be good if society made it easier for authors to make a living

• some authors will rightfully feel exploited to have free copies of their works distributed illegally and without their permission

...or we could collapse under the cognitive dissonance, and lash out at @brianstorms instead.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#265

Post by baq »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #197
hereme888 wrote: post #167

Isn't it humorous how citizens are pro Anna's archive, but governments are against it? Bit of additional evidence for elitism and such.

It is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors . How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it? I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.

The law only benefits the most popular authors, otherwise it protects publishers primarily.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#266

Post by kelnos »

mavamaarten wrote: post #194
iLoveOncall wrote: post #114

> In recent weeks we’ve seen increased attacks on our mission. A pretty rich thing to say when your mission is piracy. I'm not against piracy at all, quite the contrary, but this is quite laughable.

Right? I mean I love what they're doing. But at the same time please, stop claiming to be holy angels trying to build an archive for historical purposes. You're a terrific piracy site, period.

I mean, you don't personally know any of them, do you? How could you possibly know what their motivations are?

And even if their motivations are less than pure, I will 100% get behind the mission of preserving humanity's literary output. If that's the outcome, I don't care about their motivations.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#268

Post by mft_ »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #197
hereme888 wrote: post #167

Isn't it humorous how citizens are pro Anna's archive, but governments are against it? Bit of additional evidence for elitism and such.

It is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors . How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it? I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.

IMO, Scihub and the ebook parts of AA should be considered differently and not conflated.

In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.

In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.

(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#269

Post by troupo »

computerdork wrote: post #202

Know am going to be downvoted into oblivion, but as a composer, can see it from the side of creators. Yeah, making their products free is starving these industries. For instance, in music, there is already very little money in music (think about how many musicians you personally know who can make a living off of music, besides being a music teacher). And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was i…

Music got commoditized.

In the 90s the good bands got lucky that their distributors picked them up and promoted them etc. You just don't remember the amount of crap that was on at any given point in time.

Today you have instant access to millions of songs around the world in every genre imaginable: https://everynoise.com/ And not just to the whatever few records your local store carried, or what the Big Four paid the radio stations to promote.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#270

Post by kelnos »

oguz-ismail wrote: post #49

> We recommend not using them I've been using WeLib since April and had a good experience so far

They're not saying that the experience of using them will be bad; they're saying that participants in the ecosystem who are not cooperative are a net negative on the future of the movement. As a user, you may not see that directly, but only over time if resources are taken away from the cooperative parties.
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