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Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

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Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#281

Post by mathgeek »

jmye wrote: post #194
TFNA wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even…

[flagged]

GP is arguing that piracy is not the cause. That part is directly after your quote.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#282

Post by incompatible »

"If you work at Google and have access to this data, then we realize that $200,000 means little to you, but you'd be hailed a legendary archivist if you're able to sneak out this data."

Yeah, but still, I think I'd prefer to do it anonymously than be the legendary archivist rotting away in prison.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#283

Post by mathgeek »

abrookewood wrote: post #190
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

This is such a ridiculous statement. The people who spent their time building up this body of work deserve to be compensated. Take whatever job you do and imagine people confidently stating that you should work for free.

A better argument here is that yhe work you do should earn you income for a century every time someone else benefits from it.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#284

Post by Tajnymag »

logicchains wrote: post #62
neilv wrote: post #18

The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving". Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out. We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfi…

>the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out. Most of the best literature in the English language was written before modern IP law was even a thing. There's very little good literature written by authors primarily motivated by money.

Do you think that in "the old times" authors didn't need money and wrote books just out of a good will?

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#285

Post by yreg »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #175

> Plead read [this] carefully before working on a bounty. [this] appears as a link to a .li address, and that goes bad places. Should be https://annas-archive.gl/volunteering#bounties

So how did this happen? Is https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist a legitimate staff account? Is this a scam?

Or did they lose the domain to scammers and never update the link in the bounty?

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#286

Post by globular-toast »

zerobees wrote: post #159
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character…

The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users.

Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#288

Post by vishnugupta »

zerobees wrote: post #159
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character…

And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#289

Post by mikeocool »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #265
bruce511 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I think it is hard in the US is because there is a very strong "work or die" ethic in the US. Everything is driven by money. Even basic things like healthcare are driven by money. Your life after retirement is determined by how much money you accumulated. The word-association between "poor" and "lazy" is strong. Taxation should be light. Each man should keep what he accumulates. BI by contrast values peopl…

I have an Irish friend that got a Ph.D, while on the dole. That would never happen, in the US. We have a strong “Why do they get special treatment?” thing going on.

I think I get your point, but few PhD candidates pay tuition in the US and most actually receive a living stipend. In exchange they act as teaching and/or research assistants.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#290

Post by esrauch »

TFNA wrote: post #84
pull_my_finger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara

I’ve noticed that people today often bristle at any suggestion that one connect a device to a phone or computer with a cable – on Reddit, one will often get downvoted for this. Apparently, a lot of younger people are hardly aware this is possible and it strikes them as overly complicated or for old people. People want to wirelessly transfer stuff, and what the OP linked to is a popular way to do that with Kobo.

I'm old enough to have used computers before having any Internet, and in 2026 the idea of plugging in devices to transfer files to it does feel like a fiddly relic of the past to me.
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