It would be great if a bunch of libraries pooled their single copies, split the files apart into individual pages, and wrote an app that allowed members to automatically check out one page at a time as they read.
Of course the real answer is sci-hub and the like. Libraries have always fought the good fight for public access to information (threatening signs by the xerox [sic] machines notwithstanding), but they're chained to playing by the rules of an obsolete copyright system that gets continually worse. They will only be able to truly re-focus after larger society moves to Free copying, such that basic access is taken for granted.
The big problem with the e-books is that they are not sold, they are licensed. I would be very surprised if the license allows the libraries to do what you suggest. In general, with licenses, the licensee is given as few rights as possible and all other rights are reserved for the licensor.
True true. That's a large part of what makes the copyright regime steadily worse.
Though I've got to wonder about buying paperbacks and self digitizing. Google did a decent job destroying much of that angle, but I would think there could be a little opening left if you destroyed the originals such that you were completely format shifting.
Then the same idea of one viewer at a time could be applied, with the system moving the work between devices rather than copying. If you lost your device with checked out pages on it, you'd get a library fine...
You'd probably still get hit with an eventual legal kneecapping, but it's fun to think about.
Also, one company (overdrive, a rakuten subsidiary) controls Ofer 90% of the US ebook lending market. This makes innovation in the space even less likely.
Which is why I refuse to buy ebooks while they are at the same price as paper books. Unless publisher get their act together I will keep buying a hard copy and then pirating the ebook. I think this should be a right just like ripping CDs.
As your parent says, they're already pirating the e-book. The difference is in how it appears to the publisher. If an e-book is bought and then ripped, the publisher doesn't become aware of the latter but they still see an e-book sale.
> If it's just about being able to keep your copy forever
It's not just about that. It's also about not supporting a sale one is opposed to on principle.
Sibling poster replied for me better better than I would have myself. Regarding price I wanted to add that a physical artifact that I can resell or pass down for generations is worth much more than the bits it encodes.
I also think we have a somewhat different definition of forever.
I think it's important to distinguish between scientific papers, which the authors want to make as publicly accessible as possible, and fiction (and non-fiction) books, which the authors are trying to make a living from. There are a lot of issues with current copyright law, but "free copying" isn't a solution that's going to appeal to working writers.
Whether authors approve or not, that is the reality we're headed towards unless the copyright cartel actually manages to stuff the Internet back in the box.
If that’s the case then many authors simply won’t write. Some books are written for reasons that aren’t primarily about royalty checks. But largely eliminate those checks and far fewer books will get written.
Have you seen how many books are published at any given time? Maybe “writing fewer” might not be such a bad outcome after all.
(It’s not going to happen, btw. The existence of things like self-publishing and vanity publishers is proof that supply will continue to outstrip demand, probably forever. Economic incentives are fundamentally secondary in this particular activity.)
If I have to choose between paying $15 to read the next Sanderson in a heavy DRM'd Kindle vs reading some random self-published book I think the choice is obvious to me.
I don't think we want to move to a system where you can't monetize books, but very few authors are able to live a middle class life by writing books in the current system.
> which the authors are trying to make a living from
You can monetize content a lot more effectively via "free copying" combined with crowdfunding ala Kickstarter/Patreon.
(That model only hits a potential failure case for something like movies or AAA games, where currently you can only ever hope to defray your costs if close to 100% of your audience pays up, and they're already paying "premium" prices, so they can't be reasonably expected to pay even more as a "patron"'s contribution to the creative process. But then again, that's just another way of saying "this content is unreasonably expensive - there's plenty of stuff that's vastly cheaper to create, and we should be funding that instead!")
> Under the old rules, a large library system like New York's or Chicago's might have ordered hundreds of e-book copies. Now each system — large or small — can buy only one when it goes on sale.
Interesting, so the incentive seems to be to break up larger "library systems" into smaller ones? Sounds terrible.
In general, I've found the ebook selection at my library (San Mateo County Libraries) to be terrible. I can't remember the last time they had a book I wanted to get. I have done title searches many times, and they always autocomplete the name, but then there are no search results. I assume these books are available in hard copy, but they just choose not to get them in ebook format for whatever reason. Too bad, since I'm pretty much never going to check out a physical book from my library.
The problem with Library Genesis is that it suffers from the single point of failure problem, even though it does have mirrors. One cannot be sure whether libgen is going to exist next year.
To that I would like to add that there are numerous alternatives (although not as convenient as said site) to libgen. They are not as prominent, but they definitely exist.
It's not "just" piracy, it also makes DRM-free versions of the content available. Which is something that libraries should be insisting on as well in any "reasonable" agreement, given their archival function. If they can't achieve that, I'd rather they not "buy" any eBooks at all, and just stick to paper.
Yes. I tend to avoid it with ebooks. But textbooks are fair game because of how predatory the buisness model is. Piracy gives people a choice where there would otherwise be a monopoly.
Publishers will never give up on DRM, so I don't see a point in involving them. A modern day electronic library would look something like Bandcamp - pay what you want for DRM free copy of the book. The whole raison d'etre of libraries is to keep physical books, but once you go digital, there's no point to making a difference between a shop and a library.
Perhaps the one concession I could make is to have the library provide a remote access system where you can log in and view books, but anything that manufactures digital scarcity is repugnant.
Says who? There are markets today where DRM-free content is widely available, such as recorded music. DRM-free ebooks are an interesting possibility especially for the "long tail" of content that normally would see very few sales or even go out of print entirely. We just have to make it clear that DRM-unencumbered content is valuable to us, and we expect it.
I know it would be relatively trivial to circumvent, but it seems to be blocked for me (UK with Virgin Media).
Interestingly, it fails to load at all using the domain name and when I tried the IP address, I got this message:
Sorry, this page is not available through Virgin Media
Virgin Media has received an order from the High Court requiring us to prevent access to this site. For more information about the order and your rights, please click the relevant link below.
That would be enough to deter a lot of people.
As it happens I find it extremely irritating that they've ported the real world model into the digital world.
edit:
Actually, just tried another domain name and that wasn't blocked
I've got no problem with waiting for a book. You're trading off immediate gratification for money. This is an acceptable value exchange for me.
E-book borrowing is so good these days. I walked down to the library, they reissued my card, I punched that into Libby and picked a book and it was on my Kindle. Now I just borrow. So good.
Christchurch in NZ is hooked up with Libby and a video service just recently. It's pretty great having a solid physical library with books for the toddler/baby and the digital for me. (though apparently I'm supposed to actually read physical paper books to encourage the youngins to read as well). As a student I'd be in the school library all the time, now as an adult with kids having the public library is amazing, so glad I didn't need to buy the 60+ books we've been through so far (they wouldn't be exposed to books..)
I love putting books on hold on Libby. I basically pick out a few books I want, and when I get one, I suspend any that are close to being available so I don't have to go through the whole queue again. I usually have a problem with too many books available.
Yes, I need to wait to read a specific book, but I don't need to wait to read something I have on my list.
This isn't true for most small publishers and self-published books. Libraries can get lots of great books from these sources, but they usually don't.
Librarians complain it's too hard to find good books unless they buy them from the big publishers. Libraries even hire a company called Baker & Taylor to tell them what to buy -- B&T is a distributor that's deeply connected to big publishers and won't even handle most small publisher's books. When a small publisher tries to get library sales, usually librarians say it's too much work to evaluate their books. This doesn't of course always happen -- there are ways that small publishers can sell to libraries, but it is often too costly and difficult and I know of many small publishers who've just given up on doing business with libraries. It's a disservice to readers and authors who aren't in the big publisher system, but it's how libraries do business.
Now big publishers are starting to say, libraries are in competition with them. It's ridiculous - books become popular because of word of mouth, and libraries can be very helpful in this sort of "dandelion" marketing. So hopefully more authors will wise up and look for alternative publishing approaches. And maybe libraries will start actually looking for other sources of books, but, librarians are by and large a very traditional and hide-bound lot, especially when it comes to picking books, and probably will resist changing their approach no matter how badly the big publishers treat libraries.
This implies that librarians are able to filter through the vast troves of the endless self- or small-scale publishing stream. That is what big publishers and influential reviewers do for you when they push big names.
I have yet to find a way out of this rabbit hole because the modern publishing world is stacked with junk now that everyone can create printed and digital content.
Finding good original non-mainstream content on the internet is difficult enough as it is. There is no DuckDuckGo for books with sensible PageRank (yet).
My library accepts request forms from members and then evaluates the purchase. It doesn't seem like a stretch to accept waiting lists on books you don't have using a reference to them in a marketplace.
The Seattle Public Library has 769 holds on the ebook of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, with 146 copies! One copy is ridiculous. This is almost three times the number of holds on physical books (376 physical books total, I'm 286 on the waitlist for it).
Encrypted "borrowed" DRM books that self-destruct after a certain period of time (like many of those historic tech books on Internet Archive) are garbage and a waste of my time. I'll either borrow the real thing or steal a DRM-free ebook. The. End.
> According to Sargent, 45% of Macmillan's e-books were being borrowed from libraries, a number he says is growing rapidly.
That sounds like a big number. I don't know how much an author makes from a library borrow compared to a regular purchase, but I'd wager increased library borrowing is a net bad thing for author paychecks. So MacMillan is trying the same tactics movie studios use (I sure can't borrow a DVD from my library when the film is in theaters, let alone buy it) to throttle free access when a book's value is highest (new release). This seems reasonable to me.
44 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadOf course the real answer is sci-hub and the like. Libraries have always fought the good fight for public access to information (threatening signs by the xerox [sic] machines notwithstanding), but they're chained to playing by the rules of an obsolete copyright system that gets continually worse. They will only be able to truly re-focus after larger society moves to Free copying, such that basic access is taken for granted.
Though I've got to wonder about buying paperbacks and self digitizing. Google did a decent job destroying much of that angle, but I would think there could be a little opening left if you destroyed the originals such that you were completely format shifting.
Then the same idea of one viewer at a time could be applied, with the system moving the work between devices rather than copying. If you lost your device with checked out pages on it, you'd get a library fine...
You'd probably still get hit with an eventual legal kneecapping, but it's fun to think about.
As your parent says, they're already pirating the e-book. The difference is in how it appears to the publisher. If an e-book is bought and then ripped, the publisher doesn't become aware of the latter but they still see an e-book sale.
> If it's just about being able to keep your copy forever
It's not just about that. It's also about not supporting a sale one is opposed to on principle.
I also think we have a somewhat different definition of forever.
(It’s not going to happen, btw. The existence of things like self-publishing and vanity publishers is proof that supply will continue to outstrip demand, probably forever. Economic incentives are fundamentally secondary in this particular activity.)
Not all of those guys are Hugh Howey.
"Free copying" is not a solution, it's a reality that can't - and shouldn't - be avoided.
You can monetize content a lot more effectively via "free copying" combined with crowdfunding ala Kickstarter/Patreon.
(That model only hits a potential failure case for something like movies or AAA games, where currently you can only ever hope to defray your costs if close to 100% of your audience pays up, and they're already paying "premium" prices, so they can't be reasonably expected to pay even more as a "patron"'s contribution to the creative process. But then again, that's just another way of saying "this content is unreasonably expensive - there's plenty of stuff that's vastly cheaper to create, and we should be funding that instead!")
Interesting, so the incentive seems to be to break up larger "library systems" into smaller ones? Sounds terrible.
In general, I've found the ebook selection at my library (San Mateo County Libraries) to be terrible. I can't remember the last time they had a book I wanted to get. I have done title searches many times, and they always autocomplete the name, but then there are no search results. I assume these books are available in hard copy, but they just choose not to get them in ebook format for whatever reason. Too bad, since I'm pretty much never going to check out a physical book from my library.
I'd much rather have public libraries come to a reasonable agreement with publishers.
Perhaps the one concession I could make is to have the library provide a remote access system where you can log in and view books, but anything that manufactures digital scarcity is repugnant.
Says who? There are markets today where DRM-free content is widely available, such as recorded music. DRM-free ebooks are an interesting possibility especially for the "long tail" of content that normally would see very few sales or even go out of print entirely. We just have to make it clear that DRM-unencumbered content is valuable to us, and we expect it.
Oreilly tried selling drm free books. They gave up, and went subscription only (you can buy drm books of theirs through other services).
Manning still has drm free books (though they insert your name into each page, which is a neat trick)
Interestingly, it fails to load at all using the domain name and when I tried the IP address, I got this message:
Sorry, this page is not available through Virgin Media
Virgin Media has received an order from the High Court requiring us to prevent access to this site. For more information about the order and your rights, please click the relevant link below.
That would be enough to deter a lot of people.
As it happens I find it extremely irritating that they've ported the real world model into the digital world.
edit:
Actually, just tried another domain name and that wasn't blocked
E-book borrowing is so good these days. I walked down to the library, they reissued my card, I punched that into Libby and picked a book and it was on my Kindle. Now I just borrow. So good.
Yes, I need to wait to read a specific book, but I don't need to wait to read something I have on my list.
Librarians complain it's too hard to find good books unless they buy them from the big publishers. Libraries even hire a company called Baker & Taylor to tell them what to buy -- B&T is a distributor that's deeply connected to big publishers and won't even handle most small publisher's books. When a small publisher tries to get library sales, usually librarians say it's too much work to evaluate their books. This doesn't of course always happen -- there are ways that small publishers can sell to libraries, but it is often too costly and difficult and I know of many small publishers who've just given up on doing business with libraries. It's a disservice to readers and authors who aren't in the big publisher system, but it's how libraries do business.
Now big publishers are starting to say, libraries are in competition with them. It's ridiculous - books become popular because of word of mouth, and libraries can be very helpful in this sort of "dandelion" marketing. So hopefully more authors will wise up and look for alternative publishing approaches. And maybe libraries will start actually looking for other sources of books, but, librarians are by and large a very traditional and hide-bound lot, especially when it comes to picking books, and probably will resist changing their approach no matter how badly the big publishers treat libraries.
I have yet to find a way out of this rabbit hole because the modern publishing world is stacked with junk now that everyone can create printed and digital content.
Finding good original non-mainstream content on the internet is difficult enough as it is. There is no DuckDuckGo for books with sensible PageRank (yet).
1. eBooks are for copying, not borrowing.
2. So, no, you never have to wait... unless there's some artificial DRM standing in your way.
That sounds like a big number. I don't know how much an author makes from a library borrow compared to a regular purchase, but I'd wager increased library borrowing is a net bad thing for author paychecks. So MacMillan is trying the same tactics movie studios use (I sure can't borrow a DVD from my library when the film is in theaters, let alone buy it) to throttle free access when a book's value is highest (new release). This seems reasonable to me.