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Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Libraries pu

Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Libraries purchase books, increasing payment to authors Libraries have a limited quantity of books and check them out for a limited time, making them inconvenient compared to purchasing a book. For very popular books this means there's a high incentive for people to buy rather than wait to be able to check them out. Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books. This means that for very niche and valuable books the market allows books to be sold at the higher prices necessary to sustain incentives. Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.

gizmo 4y ago
A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
- phone8675309 4y ago
  That seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Sure, there might be a lot of people who want to _write_ a book and may do it for free or very little, but the people editing books still need to eat.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- remus 4y ago
  > If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss. Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still be work for professional programmers: I want software that does X. There is no free software that does X. What are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write it for me.
    - 6510 4y ago
      Then you release it, get modest praise and you've contributed to the future of humanity - which should be good enough for anyone.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you release that software to the public, then I got the software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me. Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
        6510 4y ago
        It is never good to explain something in terms of what it is not and it is better to travel towards some place new than to travel away from something. If you build your philosophy or movement on [say] anti-capitalism success can be glorious as always but in the long run you will need real life examples of capitalism for any of your arguments to make sense. One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around. If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place... What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that? The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest. The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible. They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms. The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition. We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds. The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes. Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate. It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction. If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains. Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else! We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable! yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable. Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license. Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars! Piracy? Surely you mean heresy? In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk. How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years. Go read a book about it, its free!
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  But a very small number of people want to edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing for no pay. The publishing industry is a whole lot more than someone drafting in word…
  - 6510 4y ago
    That we can put under wage slavery. People don't have time for it.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Academic publishing says this too, and for them at least it turns out not to be true, because they insist that typesetting be done before they see it. The value-add from the publishing industry in general is payment advances and marketing. Same as the music industry. They're both a whole lot more and a whole lot less than somebody drafting in word. Anybody can hire an editor.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Anybody can indeed hire an editor, but you have to hire them. Nobody edits (or copyedits) for free. Which is Kasey's point.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        > Nobody edits (or copyedits) for free. They absolutely do and would do more often without copyright laws holding them back. Every person who finds a book they want to share with others would be free to make improvements as they saw fit, and that would certainty include edits and correcting errors. Even today we have rouge editors who take copyrighted works, then illegally edit and distribute them along with their changes because they feel it improves the works in question. Examples include fan edits of films to improve the narrative and streamline edits of mythbusters to remove obnoxious repetitive cruft. Other examples of free editors can be found in Wikipeida articles, fanfic projects, fan translation projects, and video game walkthroughs. Even mods/patches for video games can be a form of "free editing". There are very few forms of media where I haven't seen people providing some form of editing services for free. (I can't say I've seen it for oil paintings yet I guess)
- tzs 4y ago
  > A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
  - more_corn 4y ago
    Writing gets better the more you do it. And many writing styles people have initially complained about turned out to be wildly successful. See Karl Ove Knausgaard.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      > writing gets better the more you do it. Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Writing a book takes a long time and will take even longer or never get finished at all if you also need to work at McDonald's to make rent and keep the electricity on.
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Plenty of people have produced great works of art while working day jobs. It’s hardly a new concept.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      When it comes to populations it's about statistics, not about what is possible at all. If we want many great works, we need to make it possible for more people to succeed with that not make it harder. Same fallacy as saying that discrimination or poverty don't impact success, since some people have pulled it off despite those.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    You have no idea what you are talking about. The greatest books were written by people having other occupations and full time jobs aside.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Sorry but this is such an american trope, that people need to write themselves off to prove something to somebody or themselves (not sure what exactly, there are other ways to gain respect but maybe some folks struggle to find other, more effective means of deeper introspection). Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great). That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts. I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word. To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book
- theptip 4y ago
  I don't think one has to go this far. It's already a hard job being an author, and if you make it less well-paid for the median author, we'd get less art, and less knowledge shared. However I think one could easily make a case for making it less well-paid for the big winners head of the power-law curve (the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc) which extract huge paychecks from the copyright monopoly. I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    I would be shocked if the median pay for an author was more than $2/hour. I'd actually be shocked if it was that much. Not sure what effect lowering it to $1.50/h would be.
    - joak 4y ago
      Most authors never make a dime. Most authors never get published. Most authors have no readers. Still they write. I think the point is to pay successful writers so they keep writing. Pay them and distribute ebooks for free. Where is the contradiction? The money just have to come from other sources than selling the books. Free ebooks mean more readers. This is something desirable, no?
- dojomouse 4y ago
  I have an innate desire to write a book. But I haven’t because the effort would be significant and I have other things to do, including work. I am glad that the many professional authors whose work I’ve enjoyed had financial reward providing them both the motive and means to write for me. You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions. Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
  - LaundroMat 4y ago
    Maybe the profit motive is the reason why you can't find books you genuinely love.
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
      What’s a book that you love written without a profit motive?
      - dalke 4y ago
        Survey of Chemical Notation Systems - A Report of the Committee on Modern Methods of Handling Chemical Information. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, 1964. It's an excellent snapshot of the world of chemical information on the cusp of computerization.
  - krolden 4y ago
    I'd much rather have doctors that weren't motivated by profit. There would be many more that actually give a shit about people rather than paying off med school or their Porsche loan.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  Yes, but very few people can afford to write full-time without getting paid for it. The money isn't the deciding factor between writing vs not writing. It's the deciding factor between writing 40 hours a week vs 5 hours a week after doing their day job.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Why do you have to write full time?
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      You don't have to, but I certainly appreciate that many good writers do and produce a lot more because of it.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Many other good writers are restricted from producing a lot more because of it too. For all we know Steven King could have authored the best Harry Potter novel of all time, but we'll never know that because even if he wanted to, laws would have prevented him from writing one. King actually might have enough money to make that happen anyway, but billions of other humans, each of which might also write the best Harry Potter novel would never be able to afford to under current laws. It's easy to look at the good works that get created despite our copyright system and think that it's working out pretty well without giving consideration to what we're being denied because of it.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  I think you live in a different world than 99% of the people where money is not an issue.
moonchrome 4y ago
>Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
- david38 4y ago
  Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright. I’ll take today’s world any day.
  - derefr 4y ago
    There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.) Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
    - georgyo 4y ago
      A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press. And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business. This is very different from the digital age.
      - thatcat 4y ago
        You mean bc they were just printing the bible over and over?
swayvil 4y ago
>The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. Which is awesome if we are striving to optimize the social benefits of media. We want to optimally benefit society, right?
- tsol 4y ago
  That doesn't remain beneficial in the long term if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    A better society means greater financial stability for everybody, including the author. Maybe more indirectly than a check in your hand, but still.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    > if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability This is less about want and more about means (people wanting to write books but not having the freedom to invest their time in it if they don't have pre-existing financial stability). But... this is currently the case. 50% of books published by the "big 5" publishing houses sell less than 12 copies (source: recent Penguin Random House antitrust case). The chances of any writer making any money on a book they write is close to zero even if they get a publishing deal with a major publisher. The current system of copyright doesn't protect writers (nor motivate them to write); it only protects monopoly.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    I think a big part of the argument for Universal Basic Income etc is that you can make a meager living doing just that. You could make an argument that UBI and free information would go well hand in hand.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> Libraries purchase books The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to the premise of libraries.
- sen_armstrong 4y ago
  That first lowercase "library" formed a garden path that reminds me: How (nearly) nominatively deterministic of Elbakyan! In a way your comment makes sense there too, when considering Sci-Hub's purported use of donated credentials.
  - Qem 4y ago
    Hope the next Alexandria library is named Elbakyan library. She surely deserves. And this time I hope it doesn't catch fire. Fortunately bits are not as flammable as paper. But on the other side they are higher maintenance to last thousands of years.
systemvoltage 4y ago
This is a really good insight. Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do it. If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over destroying long term incentive structures that led us here with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned exceptions). Purchase books. Please. Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things other than books.
- V__ 4y ago
  > Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. I would argue this is more or less already the case.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  Stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are talking about is just copying digits.
  - blowski 4y ago
    That pirate ship has sailed.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      If we use words to refer to things they don't mean, words will lose their meaning.
      - blowski 4y ago
        You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.
greenhatman 4y ago
I'd love a Spotify/Netflix subscription for books, if it can get me almost every book.
- ar_lan 4y ago
  I’m surprised this doesn’t yet exist, to be honest. I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
  - blowski 4y ago
    O’Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues, not current best-sellers.
- secabeen 4y ago
  Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    > Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance Funny, I was just thinking of this. In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience. Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
  - 4y ago
ItsMonkk 4y ago
This is far outside the Overton window, but I think it will be what wins out in the end. All information deserves to be free. The society that used it will grow with the value of the information. That value can then be captured through increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual process. Since all information released in this process is free-to-use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.
- soared 4y ago
  Is this argument saying authors should get a payment from land owners based on the value provided by their books? How do you measure the value of Harry Potter’s impact on society?
  - ItsMonkk 4y ago
    That's an implementation detail. Do we first agree that the system proposed would lead to a better society? Would lead to the pie growing by a lot? Would stop heaps of wasteful processes? Since people already give away information for free - see open source software, wikipedia, all sorts of other sources, you wouldn't need to be even close to accurate to start with. Can we agree that Wikipedia provides at least $1b/year in value? Great, give them $100m/year and we'll work from there. Linux? Let's go with another $100m. Firefox? Stable Diffusion? That guy in Nebraska[0]? I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation, but a way is through a very small subset of people, when trying to download a book or use other information, they get entered into an auction shared by some others who also want to use that information. Anyone who bids more than the median gets to use the information and pays the median, anyone who bids less than the median doesn't - but gets the median value in return. [0]: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      It's not just an implementation detail. It's a detail that impacts whether or not the proposed system is a net gain.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>"Libraries are [a] part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it." Not convinced.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing books for the interested to read them. Any function they provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the mission of most libraries is to support the publishing industry. The history of libraries has been to defend themselves from the publishing industry, which historically has always fought to have them shut down.
lucideer 4y ago
> keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out of financial motivation. It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks for the craft of writing.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  You make a claim without substantiating it.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    The unsubstantiated claim is "writing must be financially incentivized". That's not my claim to substantiate. If you think that claim is somehow self-evident, it may be worth considering your biases.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
      That's pretty clear. I start from "work should be financially incentivized" as evidenced by, well, the world around us. Then you argue that writing is very special (maybe a form of art, and many artists are hobbyists). To which I reply that while writing could be considered a form of art, the kind of books I read (and sometimes write) require hundreds of hours of work (that could be very satisfying, for sure). The enormous time investment means that you either get money for it in some way or you don't do as much of it as you'd want to, because you need to get a paying job to survive.
      - lucideer 4y ago
        > you need to get a paying job to survive Exactly. The idea that people who have an ardent need for financial support to survive would choose an activity that is statistically unlikely to provide sufficient financial remuneration seems odd, don't you think? The separation here is nothing to do with "art". It's to do with a person's ability to choose an occupation based on desire/interest or pure financial need. Writing is in the former category not because it's "art", but simply because one needs to be comfortable to have the luxury of taking such risk. To put it another way: people choose the vocation of writing despite financial motivation to pursue alternative more lucrative undertakings.
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zarzavat 4y ago
> Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books Libraries as in the Library of Congress or the British Library are offered a copy of every book that is published in those countries. And you can go there and read them. If you’re lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and have the right passport. But if you weren’t, if you have a citizenship that does not come with the right to knowledge, then Library Genesis is there for you.
lovelearning 4y ago
I think the industry is ignoring ideas like micropayments, donations, short-term rentals, and similar. The average reader wants a centralized repository of knowledge with a smart search engine. They may not always want to buy the whole book. But hundreds may want to read something relevant and even pay for it. The publishers should notice all this and collaborate with one another to provide what people want. Instead, they lock up their books in silos, expect separate registrations and logins, demand annual subscriptions upfront, or require university accounts to access. It seems short-sighted to me. Spreading knowledge doesn't appear to be part of their balancing act at all half the time.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. What you are describing is a wonderful result that happens to fail due to our economic system which requires everyone to constantly seek profitable activities to survive. If seeking profitable activity was optional, authors could write books as their passion drives them, and then share them with everyone for free on a global library. Most creators create because they want to do so, and the profit is incidental as they require some profit to survive. But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Ok, go ahead and consider alternate economic systems. But until we have that new system, would it be alright to continue to respect the wishes of authors who have created creative works under the current economic system? Consent is important. We can’t opt them into our hypothetical passion-driven economic system where is everything is free against their will. Individual authors might opt in, and it’s fair game to pirate their work. But let’s not decide on behalf of other people.
  - mcculley 4y ago
    The decision is not entirely on the author. Jurisdictions have to decide how much they are willing to spend and how far they are willing to go to enforce copyright, potentially forever. Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright. Alternately, technological advances are going to make it much easier to control everything a person has access to, constantly monitor everything they access, and identify/punish those who access unauthorized material.
efficax 4y ago
most books are written with no expectation of financial reward. the book that pays the writer well is by far the exception and if books were made free by law tomorrow books would still be written. we’d lose some fiction authors sure, but even those would keep being written. in general the importance of money to the creative process is greatly exaggerated. barely anyone gets rich from art or knowledge production but it keeps happening because beauty and knowledge are ends in themselves, things we seek out for no other reason than to behold them. money is just what we need to eat and have shelter.
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alexvoda 4y ago
People have written books and will continue to do so regardless of any other factors.
hansvm 4y ago
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. They certainly don't have to operate that way. You could have nearly the same incentive structure (minus the cost of actually commuting to a library) if they purchased their goods and only offered time-limited checkouts up to the number of copies they've purchased.

gizmo 4y ago

A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.

phone8675309 4y ago
That seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Sure, there might be a lot of people who want to _write_ a book and may do it for free or very little, but the people editing books still need to eat.
- deleted 4y ago
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remus 4y ago
> If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss. Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still be work for professional programmers: I want software that does X. There is no free software that does X. What are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write it for me.
  - 6510 4y ago
    Then you release it, get modest praise and you've contributed to the future of humanity - which should be good enough for anyone.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you release that software to the public, then I got the software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me. Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
      - 6510 4y ago
        It is never good to explain something in terms of what it is not and it is better to travel towards some place new than to travel away from something. If you build your philosophy or movement on [say] anti-capitalism success can be glorious as always but in the long run you will need real life examples of capitalism for any of your arguments to make sense. One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around. If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place... What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that? The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest. The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible. They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms. The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition. We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds. The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes. Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate. It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction. If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains. Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else! We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable! yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable. Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license. Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars! Piracy? Surely you mean heresy? In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk. How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years. Go read a book about it, its free!
kasey_junk 4y ago
But a very small number of people want to edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing for no pay. The publishing industry is a whole lot more than someone drafting in word…
- 6510 4y ago
  That we can put under wage slavery. People don't have time for it.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Academic publishing says this too, and for them at least it turns out not to be true, because they insist that typesetting be done before they see it. The value-add from the publishing industry in general is payment advances and marketing. Same as the music industry. They're both a whole lot more and a whole lot less than somebody drafting in word. Anybody can hire an editor.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Anybody can indeed hire an editor, but you have to hire them. Nobody edits (or copyedits) for free. Which is Kasey's point.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Nobody edits (or copyedits) for free. They absolutely do and would do more often without copyright laws holding them back. Every person who finds a book they want to share with others would be free to make improvements as they saw fit, and that would certainty include edits and correcting errors. Even today we have rouge editors who take copyrighted works, then illegally edit and distribute them along with their changes because they feel it improves the works in question. Examples include fan edits of films to improve the narrative and streamline edits of mythbusters to remove obnoxious repetitive cruft. Other examples of free editors can be found in Wikipeida articles, fanfic projects, fan translation projects, and video game walkthroughs. Even mods/patches for video games can be a form of "free editing". There are very few forms of media where I haven't seen people providing some form of editing services for free. (I can't say I've seen it for oil paintings yet I guess)
tzs 4y ago
> A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
- more_corn 4y ago
  Writing gets better the more you do it. And many writing styles people have initially complained about turned out to be wildly successful. See Karl Ove Knausgaard.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > writing gets better the more you do it. Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
ajmurmann 4y ago
Writing a book takes a long time and will take even longer or never get finished at all if you also need to work at McDonald's to make rent and keep the electricity on.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Plenty of people have produced great works of art while working day jobs. It’s hardly a new concept.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    When it comes to populations it's about statistics, not about what is possible at all. If we want many great works, we need to make it possible for more people to succeed with that not make it harder. Same fallacy as saying that discrimination or poverty don't impact success, since some people have pulled it off despite those.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  You have no idea what you are talking about. The greatest books were written by people having other occupations and full time jobs aside.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Sorry but this is such an american trope, that people need to write themselves off to prove something to somebody or themselves (not sure what exactly, there are other ways to gain respect but maybe some folks struggle to find other, more effective means of deeper introspection). Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great). That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts. I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word. To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book
theptip 4y ago
I don't think one has to go this far. It's already a hard job being an author, and if you make it less well-paid for the median author, we'd get less art, and less knowledge shared. However I think one could easily make a case for making it less well-paid for the big winners head of the power-law curve (the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc) which extract huge paychecks from the copyright monopoly. I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
- rfrey 4y ago
  I would be shocked if the median pay for an author was more than $2/hour. I'd actually be shocked if it was that much. Not sure what effect lowering it to $1.50/h would be.
  - joak 4y ago
    Most authors never make a dime. Most authors never get published. Most authors have no readers. Still they write. I think the point is to pay successful writers so they keep writing. Pay them and distribute ebooks for free. Where is the contradiction? The money just have to come from other sources than selling the books. Free ebooks mean more readers. This is something desirable, no?
dojomouse 4y ago
I have an innate desire to write a book. But I haven’t because the effort would be significant and I have other things to do, including work. I am glad that the many professional authors whose work I’ve enjoyed had financial reward providing them both the motive and means to write for me. You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions. Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
- LaundroMat 4y ago
  Maybe the profit motive is the reason why you can't find books you genuinely love.
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    What’s a book that you love written without a profit motive?
    - dalke 4y ago
      Survey of Chemical Notation Systems - A Report of the Committee on Modern Methods of Handling Chemical Information. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, 1964. It's an excellent snapshot of the world of chemical information on the cusp of computerization.
- krolden 4y ago
  I'd much rather have doctors that weren't motivated by profit. There would be many more that actually give a shit about people rather than paying off med school or their Porsche loan.
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
Yes, but very few people can afford to write full-time without getting paid for it. The money isn't the deciding factor between writing vs not writing. It's the deciding factor between writing 40 hours a week vs 5 hours a week after doing their day job.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Why do you have to write full time?
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    You don't have to, but I certainly appreciate that many good writers do and produce a lot more because of it.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Many other good writers are restricted from producing a lot more because of it too. For all we know Steven King could have authored the best Harry Potter novel of all time, but we'll never know that because even if he wanted to, laws would have prevented him from writing one. King actually might have enough money to make that happen anyway, but billions of other humans, each of which might also write the best Harry Potter novel would never be able to afford to under current laws. It's easy to look at the good works that get created despite our copyright system and think that it's working out pretty well without giving consideration to what we're being denied because of it.
Valakas_ 4y ago
I think you live in a different world than 99% of the people where money is not an issue.

moonchrome 4y ago

>Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Libraries and books existed long before copyright.

david38 4y ago
Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright. I’ll take today’s world any day.
- derefr 4y ago
  There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.) Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
  - georgyo 4y ago
    A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press. And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business. This is very different from the digital age.
    - thatcat 4y ago
      You mean bc they were just printing the bible over and over?

swayvil 4y ago

>The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. Which is awesome if we are striving to optimize the social benefits of media. We want to optimally benefit society, right?

tsol 4y ago
That doesn't remain beneficial in the long term if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability.
- swayvil 4y ago
  A better society means greater financial stability for everybody, including the author. Maybe more indirectly than a check in your hand, but still.
- lucideer 4y ago
  > if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability This is less about want and more about means (people wanting to write books but not having the freedom to invest their time in it if they don't have pre-existing financial stability). But... this is currently the case. 50% of books published by the "big 5" publishing houses sell less than 12 copies (source: recent Penguin Random House antitrust case). The chances of any writer making any money on a book they write is close to zero even if they get a publishing deal with a major publisher. The current system of copyright doesn't protect writers (nor motivate them to write); it only protects monopoly.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  I think a big part of the argument for Universal Basic Income etc is that you can make a meager living doing just that. You could make an argument that UBI and free information would go well hand in hand.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> Libraries purchase books The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to the premise of libraries.

sen_armstrong 4y ago
That first lowercase "library" formed a garden path that reminds me: How (nearly) nominatively deterministic of Elbakyan! In a way your comment makes sense there too, when considering Sci-Hub's purported use of donated credentials.
- Qem 4y ago
  Hope the next Alexandria library is named Elbakyan library. She surely deserves. And this time I hope it doesn't catch fire. Fortunately bits are not as flammable as paper. But on the other side they are higher maintenance to last thousands of years.

systemvoltage 4y ago

This is a really good insight. Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do it. If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over destroying long term incentive structures that led us here with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned exceptions). Purchase books. Please. Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things other than books.

V__ 4y ago
> Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. I would argue this is more or less already the case.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are talking about is just copying digits.
- blowski 4y ago
  That pirate ship has sailed.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    If we use words to refer to things they don't mean, words will lose their meaning.
    - blowski 4y ago
      You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.

greenhatman 4y ago

I'd love a Spotify/Netflix subscription for books, if it can get me almost every book.

ar_lan 4y ago
I’m surprised this doesn’t yet exist, to be honest. I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
- blowski 4y ago
  O’Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues, not current best-sellers.
secabeen 4y ago
Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  > Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance Funny, I was just thinking of this. In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience. Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
- 4y ago

ItsMonkk 4y ago

This is far outside the Overton window, but I think it will be what wins out in the end. All information deserves to be free. The society that used it will grow with the value of the information. That value can then be captured through increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual process. Since all information released in this process is free-to-use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.

soared 4y ago
Is this argument saying authors should get a payment from land owners based on the value provided by their books? How do you measure the value of Harry Potter’s impact on society?
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  That's an implementation detail. Do we first agree that the system proposed would lead to a better society? Would lead to the pie growing by a lot? Would stop heaps of wasteful processes? Since people already give away information for free - see open source software, wikipedia, all sorts of other sources, you wouldn't need to be even close to accurate to start with. Can we agree that Wikipedia provides at least $1b/year in value? Great, give them $100m/year and we'll work from there. Linux? Let's go with another $100m. Firefox? Stable Diffusion? That guy in Nebraska[0]? I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation, but a way is through a very small subset of people, when trying to download a book or use other information, they get entered into an auction shared by some others who also want to use that information. Anyone who bids more than the median gets to use the information and pays the median, anyone who bids less than the median doesn't - but gets the median value in return. [0]: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    It's not just an implementation detail. It's a detail that impacts whether or not the proposed system is a net gain.

InCityDreams 4y ago

>"Libraries are [a] part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it." Not convinced.

pessimizer 4y ago

> Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it. Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing books for the interested to read them. Any function they provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the mission of most libraries is to support the publishing industry. The history of libraries has been to defend themselves from the publishing industry, which historically has always fought to have them shut down.

lucideer 4y ago

> keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out of financial motivation. It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks for the craft of writing.

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
You make a claim without substantiating it.
- lucideer 4y ago
  The unsubstantiated claim is "writing must be financially incentivized". That's not my claim to substantiate. If you think that claim is somehow self-evident, it may be worth considering your biases.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
    That's pretty clear. I start from "work should be financially incentivized" as evidenced by, well, the world around us. Then you argue that writing is very special (maybe a form of art, and many artists are hobbyists). To which I reply that while writing could be considered a form of art, the kind of books I read (and sometimes write) require hundreds of hours of work (that could be very satisfying, for sure). The enormous time investment means that you either get money for it in some way or you don't do as much of it as you'd want to, because you need to get a paying job to survive.
    - lucideer 4y ago
      > you need to get a paying job to survive Exactly. The idea that people who have an ardent need for financial support to survive would choose an activity that is statistically unlikely to provide sufficient financial remuneration seems odd, don't you think? The separation here is nothing to do with "art". It's to do with a person's ability to choose an occupation based on desire/interest or pure financial need. Writing is in the former category not because it's "art", but simply because one needs to be comfortable to have the luxury of taking such risk. To put it another way: people choose the vocation of writing despite financial motivation to pursue alternative more lucrative undertakings.

deleted 4y ago

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zarzavat 4y ago

> Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books Libraries as in the Library of Congress or the British Library are offered a copy of every book that is published in those countries. And you can go there and read them. If you’re lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and have the right passport. But if you weren’t, if you have a citizenship that does not come with the right to knowledge, then Library Genesis is there for you.

lovelearning 4y ago

I think the industry is ignoring ideas like micropayments, donations, short-term rentals, and similar. The average reader wants a centralized repository of knowledge with a smart search engine. They may not always want to buy the whole book. But hundreds may want to read something relevant and even pay for it. The publishers should notice all this and collaborate with one another to provide what people want. Instead, they lock up their books in silos, expect separate registrations and logins, demand annual subscriptions upfront, or require university accounts to access. It seems short-sighted to me. Spreading knowledge doesn't appear to be part of their balancing act at all half the time.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. What you are describing is a wonderful result that happens to fail due to our economic system which requires everyone to constantly seek profitable activities to survive. If seeking profitable activity was optional, authors could write books as their passion drives them, and then share them with everyone for free on a global library. Most creators create because they want to do so, and the profit is incidental as they require some profit to survive. But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.

nindalf 4y ago
Ok, go ahead and consider alternate economic systems. But until we have that new system, would it be alright to continue to respect the wishes of authors who have created creative works under the current economic system? Consent is important. We can’t opt them into our hypothetical passion-driven economic system where is everything is free against their will. Individual authors might opt in, and it’s fair game to pirate their work. But let’s not decide on behalf of other people.
- mcculley 4y ago
  The decision is not entirely on the author. Jurisdictions have to decide how much they are willing to spend and how far they are willing to go to enforce copyright, potentially forever. Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright. Alternately, technological advances are going to make it much easier to control everything a person has access to, constantly monitor everything they access, and identify/punish those who access unauthorized material.

efficax 4y ago

most books are written with no expectation of financial reward. the book that pays the writer well is by far the exception and if books were made free by law tomorrow books would still be written. we’d lose some fiction authors sure, but even those would keep being written. in general the importance of money to the creative process is greatly exaggerated. barely anyone gets rich from art or knowledge production but it keeps happening because beauty and knowledge are ends in themselves, things we seek out for no other reason than to behold them. money is just what we need to eat and have shelter.

deleted 4y ago

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alexvoda 4y ago

People have written books and will continue to do so regardless of any other factors.

hansvm 4y ago

> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience. They certainly don't have to operate that way. You could have nearly the same incentive structure (minus the cost of actually commuting to a library) if they purchased their goods and only offered time-limited checkouts up to the number of copies they've purchased.