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> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or e

> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license. Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?

zozbot234 6y ago
Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect. Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      > it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for. > I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately. > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it. "Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people. The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
      - matwood 6y ago
        > Creation must act like an investment, not a product. This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.
      - 6y ago
    - coldpie 6y ago
      > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.
      - Ajedi32 6y ago
        That's an interesting perspective. What system would you propose to allow people to be "paid to do" this sort of creative work in a fair manner? Particularly since it's not always clear what the value of that work is until you see the finished product. (E.g. It's possible for two movies with identical multi-million dollar budgets to be produced, and one to turn out to be unwatchable garbage and the other a masterpiece that everyone loves.)
        coldpie 6y ago
        It's a good question, and I don't know. Perhaps some model like Patreon; perhaps just having voluntary payments (actually not dissimilar to what we have now, which seems to be working reasonably well); perhaps sponsored by wealthy individuals or corporations; perhaps something I haven't thought of. People would figure it out, and we could finally stop trying to pretend that you can prevent computers from copying bits.
        Zonulet 6y ago
        I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".
      - manigandham 6y ago
        What did you have to put up with? How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      Interestingly a lot of films (like Transformers and Fast and Furious franchises) cost a lot, yet are incredibly boring. Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner had much smaller budget. And Youtube rocks on modest earnings. It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are). I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        That's an entirely different issue. There are still good movies being made but the high budget blockbusters have to appeal to an ever broader audience, often with international releases, so the story is usually just mediocre enough to pass.
        sergeykish 6y ago
        Yes, sorry if that was not clear, there are good movies. I mean can it be that current system is not fair to the customer? We compare ownership with physical object. What if movie is not good? Can I get a refund? File is in perfect condition. Companies spent a lot on advertisement, some products I would consider fraud. Trailers usually the only good parts of the movie. Yet it is aired from every corner. Part of book store experience is reading. I have a lot of child books, I like them all, we read again and again. When kid grown up he can present them, donate or sell. In my mind Internet Archive made mistake. Not better than cracking Windows or jailbraking iPhone. These should become niche products, no need to advertise them, better help other communities.
  - thescriptkiddie 6y ago
    This comes down to the distinction between labor-value and use-value, and how they relate to exchange-value. The marginal labor-value of information is zero, therefore the exchange-value should also approach zero. However, if there is an artificial constraint on supply, the exchange-value can be driven up until it approaches the use-value. So naturally shortsighted publishers have every incentive to come up with increasingly hair-brained schemes to artificially constrain supply.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Publishers should not both get copyright AND the ability to DRM the books while removing all the other properties of that physicality. Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess. If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  So it is like software license - different plans for individual, commercial, education, no ability to transfer ownership. And it run on DRM hardware only... oh my, we live in the future https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  > Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.) Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
easytiger 6y ago
eBooks and paper books share very little in common legally. e-ownership is generally a best efforts service to which you have a license. In some jurisdictions they are even taxed differently. Just to highlight to morose creeping evil that is VAT. Paper book is a necessity. eBook is a luxury. Apparently
matwood 6y ago
The problem is libraries got into the game of paying for first run titles. They started measuring themselves on checkouts and not what they provide for the community. Is the library really helping the community by overpaying for 50 Shades of Gray the week it comes out so all the soccer moms can read it for 'free'? I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The problem is that without the political support of soccer moms, the libraries are not used by the majority of the population and they wither and die.
dhosek 6y ago
If you donate a print book to the library, it will almost always be handed off to the Friends of the Library (or similar organization) for their book sale to raise money. If there's something special about the book, it might be added to special collections (e.g., if you're an important public figure or you've donated a research collection on a special topic). Almost never will the book be added to the lending collection.

zozbot234 6y ago

Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.

matheusmoreira 6y ago
> Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect. Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for. > I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately. > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it. "Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people. The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
    - matwood 6y ago
      > Creation must act like an investment, not a product. This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.
    - 6y ago
  - coldpie 6y ago
    > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.
    - Ajedi32 6y ago
      That's an interesting perspective. What system would you propose to allow people to be "paid to do" this sort of creative work in a fair manner? Particularly since it's not always clear what the value of that work is until you see the finished product. (E.g. It's possible for two movies with identical multi-million dollar budgets to be produced, and one to turn out to be unwatchable garbage and the other a masterpiece that everyone loves.)
      - coldpie 6y ago
        It's a good question, and I don't know. Perhaps some model like Patreon; perhaps just having voluntary payments (actually not dissimilar to what we have now, which seems to be working reasonably well); perhaps sponsored by wealthy individuals or corporations; perhaps something I haven't thought of. People would figure it out, and we could finally stop trying to pretend that you can prevent computers from copying bits.
        Zonulet 6y ago
        I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".
    - manigandham 6y ago
      What did you have to put up with? How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Interestingly a lot of films (like Transformers and Fast and Furious franchises) cost a lot, yet are incredibly boring. Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner had much smaller budget. And Youtube rocks on modest earnings. It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are). I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
    - manigandham 6y ago
      That's an entirely different issue. There are still good movies being made but the high budget blockbusters have to appeal to an ever broader audience, often with international releases, so the story is usually just mediocre enough to pass.
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        Yes, sorry if that was not clear, there are good movies. I mean can it be that current system is not fair to the customer? We compare ownership with physical object. What if movie is not good? Can I get a refund? File is in perfect condition. Companies spent a lot on advertisement, some products I would consider fraud. Trailers usually the only good parts of the movie. Yet it is aired from every corner. Part of book store experience is reading. I have a lot of child books, I like them all, we read again and again. When kid grown up he can present them, donate or sell. In my mind Internet Archive made mistake. Not better than cracking Windows or jailbraking iPhone. These should become niche products, no need to advertise them, better help other communities.
- thescriptkiddie 6y ago
  This comes down to the distinction between labor-value and use-value, and how they relate to exchange-value. The marginal labor-value of information is zero, therefore the exchange-value should also approach zero. However, if there is an artificial constraint on supply, the exchange-value can be driven up until it approaches the use-value. So naturally shortsighted publishers have every incentive to come up with increasingly hair-brained schemes to artificially constrain supply.
sitkack 6y ago
Publishers should not both get copyright AND the ability to DRM the books while removing all the other properties of that physicality. Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess. If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
sergeykish 6y ago
So it is like software license - different plans for individual, commercial, education, no ability to transfer ownership. And it run on DRM hardware only... oh my, we live in the future https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Ajedi32 6y ago
> Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.) Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.

easytiger 6y ago

eBooks and paper books share very little in common legally. e-ownership is generally a best efforts service to which you have a license. In some jurisdictions they are even taxed differently. Just to highlight to morose creeping evil that is VAT. Paper book is a necessity. eBook is a luxury. Apparently

matwood 6y ago

The problem is libraries got into the game of paying for first run titles. They started measuring themselves on checkouts and not what they provide for the community. Is the library really helping the community by overpaying for 50 Shades of Gray the week it comes out so all the soccer moms can read it for 'free'? I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.

MattGaiser 6y ago
The problem is that without the political support of soccer moms, the libraries are not used by the majority of the population and they wither and die.

dhosek 6y ago

If you donate a print book to the library, it will almost always be handed off to the Friends of the Library (or similar organization) for their book sale to raise money. If there's something special about the book, it might be added to special collections (e.g., if you're an important public figure or you've donated a research collection on a special topic). Almost never will the book be added to the lending collection.