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Article from 2014, which looks at people engaging in digital book piracy not as thieves but as modern-day librarians or collectors, who are focused more on pres
by y7 10y ago
Article from 2014, which looks at people engaging in digital book piracy not as thieves but as modern-day librarians or collectors, who are focused more on preservation than providing easy access to the materials. Mainly, the authors write about various online libraries and how they're organized, with a small amount of technical details.
I found it a somewhat interesting article, but I'd hoped they'd go a little more into the ethics of it, and also give more of a view from the perspective of the various stakeholders they mention (publishers, authors, etc.).
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe biggest thing I'd like to see, is fine, DRM everything you want, but file an unencrypted digital master with something long-lasting like the Library of Congress, along with a firm public release date. So much software, media, and books today are not readily available anymore, without a lot of good reason for it. And if it's temporary while copyrights run out, I guess I have to understand that. But my biggest fear is how much of our culture may be lost entirely a few decades from now. Games should store their source code in similar locations, along with MMO server software and the like. Someday these developers and publishers will be long gone. But hopefully their creations won't be.
- ravenstine 10y agoIt's definitely even worse for games, as copyright law and the nature of the industry can mean that a game might not be legally obtained again for over a century. Nintendo, for example, goes out of its way to punish people for distributing games that they no longer publish or license, even despite their abandonware status.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIn Nintendo's case, the interesting thing is that they do resell a lot of their titles. Virtual Console is a big market for them now, with NES and SNES titles especially. They at least demonstrate a clear desire to monetize their old properties. The biggest thing we often lose is access to third party titles on Nintendo platforms.
- danthejam 10y agoThere was a very nice spanish community that would scan/ocr books and convert them into epubs. They had very high standards and their forums were full with epub documentation, best practices, boilerplate/skeleton files, scripts, etc. To the point their curated epubs were better than those of some publishers. It all died when one of the founders was arrested. Edit: it seems my information was incorrect, the site's owner sold it and the new owners wrapped the download links with malware and closed the forum. Users left and the site closed.
- jackfrodo 10y agoSounds awesome. Any links to remaining documentation?
- danthejam 10y agoI just googled and it seems like the users have moved over to https://www.epublibre.org/foro/ https://www.epublibre.org/foro/ On the front page it shows a warning about how applications for editor are closed due to having too many. So it seems the community is still alive and well. Here's their documentation as an epub (in Spanish): https://www.epublibre.org/libro/detalle/2398 https://www.epublibre.org/libro/detalle/2398