321–330 of 543 posts
Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow. I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!
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I think what you consider the hardest part, putting it together so that someone who does not speak any human language today deciphers it, is actually one of the least of your problems. Unless you deliberately encrypt the information (which you wouldn’t), I have a feeling that even Wikipedia alone might be sufficient for a motivated civilization to figure it out. Linguists and archeologists in our time have to do with…
Off world would help, no atmosphere on the moon for instance makes for less deterioration, and a cave system would shield it from radiation. On earth clay tablets have done a great job : we have tablets 6000 years old, so we know that works. That’s 60% of 10k already. Titanium seems expensive and might be melted down in time of need, like bronze has been often in the past. Clay tablets survived partly because it’s a…
What surprised me was that there is something called "United States Postal Inspection Service" that has some police-like law enforcement powers. Every so often you TIL something about the US.
God, so its over?
It seems like ZLib was seized mainly because they started running donation drives and potentially earning money on piracy, although that's just conjecture. Libgen does not do any such thing.
As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.
If a book (even an ebook) is in the library, it's already bought and paid for so the author gets whatever compensation they get as if it is a normal sale. I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are, but, by using libraries, you are supporting the arts, whether you liked the book or not, and this is not a silly distinction.
Perhaps more importantly, the cost of books in libraries is not assigned based on the number of books checked out or read. It tends to be people in lower and lower-middle economic classes who use libraries more, even while they pay less than the per-capita average cost to keep those libraries running and their shelves stocked.
Libraries are communist entities. Even worse than that, from a capitalist perspective, although checking out books requires you to be connected with the tax base or funding source for the library, you can generally go to any public or academic library and read books on-site even if you're from another country or planet and aren't entitled to check anything out.
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> It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, Ah, you’ve mistaken capitalism (which had been developing for centuries earlier) with 18th century liberal economic theory, which is not its foundation but instead a rough ex-post-facto rationalization for large parts of the way it had developed. What capitalism is, tho…
I think GP was using this definition: >an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market[0] >which had been developing for centuries earlier The use of capital has existed for thousands of years already. One could…
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Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I'm Anna, the one who made the backup). We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)
Hey, why not push the collection (the extra books) back to libgen
Additionally working on a UI for libgen that is far better as an open source project might be worthwhile.
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No, the impact is different. The library doesn't pay for the ebook just once. When the library buys the ebook, they're allowed to lend it a certain number of times before they have to buy the book again. Or they pay for a number of lends per day and payments for the books checked out are distributed to the appropriate publishers. The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less di…
If you break a book at the library, you usually have to pay for its replacement. Sure there is some normal wear and tear that isnt "breaking the book", but if you browse through your library you will find lots of books that were purchased 20-40 years ago that are still in good shape. I don't really think normal wear and tear is very significant.
Libraries argue similarly that the wear-and-tear model is miscalibrated, but they are in a weak negotiating position.
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6.5 million plates at $500 each is 3 billion, not 35 million. Just don't make them look gold (even if they're not solid gold), or they'll get looted and melted. Though it would be fun if a murderous warlord ended up with a gotten crown made of the Wikipedia article for toilet paper orientation. [1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
i think it's a brave assumption that gold will forever be as valuable as now.