Live data from Hacker News

Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

annas-archive.org

381–390 of 560 posts

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

#381

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.

I never heard of the site. But looking at it now, I can't see how it's anything else other than piracy.

I looked up one of my favorite authors ( https://annas-archive.org/search?q=scott+sigler ) and you can download practically his lifetime's worth of work in 5 minutes. This is not some author who lived 200 years ago - he is living and writing books now and this is his livelyhood.

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

#382

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.

[flagged]

Do you like to give away your work for free? Please do tell us what it is you work on and where we can get it for free.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these are (relatively large) pdfs, right? I wonder how much space it is as highly compressed, deduplicated, plain text files. Does the sum of human scientific knowledge fit on a large hard drive?

In text form only (no charts, plots, etc)- yes, pretty much all published 'science' (by that I mean something that appeared in a mass publication - paper, book, etc, not simply notes in people's notebooks) in the last 400 years likely fits into 20TB or so if converted completely to ASCII text and everything else is left out. Text is tiny. The problem is it's not all text, you need the images, the plots, etc, and smar…

> In text form only (no charts, plots, etc)- yes, pretty much all published 'science' (by that I mean something that appeared in a mass publication - paper, book, etc, not simply notes in people's notebooks) in the last 400 years likely fits into 20TB or so if converted completely to ASCII text and everything else is left out. Text is tiny.

20 TB uncompresssed text is roughly 6TB compressed.

I just find it crazy that for about $100 i can buy an external hard drive that would fit in my pocket that can in theory carry around the bulk of humanity's collected knowledge.

What a time to be alive. Imagine telling someone this 100 years ago. Hell, imagine telling someone this 20 years ago.

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

#384

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.

[flagged]

It appears to be "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture".

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should be asking why aren't most books available in a DRM free format? Because most people don't care! I wish they did, because I'm like you, I do care about owning DRM free media! I buy videos game from GOG wherever possible, and audiobooks from a combination of downpour.com and libro.fm. Guess what most people do? They buy games on Steam and audiobooks on Audible. Audible is the one that really breaks my hear…

>but I can find just about any [DRM-free] audiobook I want on either Downpour or libro.fm Just had a browse of Downpour. They say that it's mostly DRM-free. I don't get it. How come the rights holders don't complain? My experience of DRM-free e-books is that the available titles are, let's say, nothing I would want to read. And audiobooks have higher production value because of the voice acting. What A-list authors a…

Unless something changed recently, every title on Downpour is DRM free when bought (as opposed to rented). I've been using Downpour for more than a decade and own tons of books. Libro.fm is slightly newer and IMO has slightly nicer UX, but both websites have mostly the same (wide) selection of titles.

I can't tell you why publishers make the decisions they do, but there's no trick here, if that's what you're asking. DRM free audio books are widely available and have been widely available for a long time now.

The real question is, why does Audible insist on putting DRM on their Audiobooks when the publishers clearly don't care? I don't know the answer to that either, but the upshot is that everyone should stop buying from Audible!

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic. I agree with the Anna's Archive team, it serves noone to have one of these players in the space hoarding their own collections and not sharing them to other archiving projects, it make the collection extremely vulnerable and at risk of becoming lost knowledge as time goes on.

>If efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic that is an odd demand for a site that thrives on piracy. Don't steal from the thieves? When you take from others it's liberation, when others take from you it's parasitic, that's certainly a convenient coincidence

They steal it, but give everyone free access. You can download it for free, but can also torrent everything. They don't hoard for themselves, but everyone gets access to what they have. That is the crucial difference.

Only giving access to your material over downloads means that people have to pay if they want to get more of it. If those people don't share it then the material is going to be lost again.

Torrenting all the material slapping using their frontend as a base and just making money is different.

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

#387
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…

Same here. Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it. So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it fo…

If you haven't read it, The Long Ride by Lloyd Sumner is (as I remember it) an excellent read.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything beca…

The default is to not buy something . People don't like loosing money. If you can get something without loosing money, it's super easy to rationalize why you you're skipping the loose money part. People tend to make decisions which are in their financial interest.

I've seen lots of people on this site that pay for YouTube. I've met real people that have subscriptions to porn sites. They fork out money for stuff that's pretty much always already freely available, for basically no reason except maybe convenience or slightly better service. People spend money all the time, for stuff they want and care about. If they didn't want or care about it, they wouldn't buy it or pirate it.

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

#389
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Oh, gotcha - if you'll permit me to paraphrase: it's not culture itself that you find evil; but that the powerful tend to warp the culture to protect their own interests.

Right. IMHO culture, at least for a very long time now, is used as a vehicle to push agendas, and people should be very wary about what to believe from what society says about a great many things.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the consequences for others. The only people facing consequences are the license-holders. Online lending libraries aren't missing a copy now that AA archived it, and there's not really a substantial cost to the hosters in network bandwidth. Am I missing something here? As a user I don't empathize with anyone but the archivers.

IA can be painted in court as an “unwilling enabler” of something like Anna’s Archive, instead of a regular library

If I go to the public library, check out a movie on disc, back it up, and share the back up file online, is my public library legally liable
Post reply on HN