5 ms·

RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and

RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and sheet music. HN readers, let's not forget to donate to these websites that keep the Internet worth surfing.

zozbot234 1y ago
While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.
- kragen 1y ago
  That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public. Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user. Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&ft=ft&lookfor%5B%5D=a&type%5B%5D=title&yop=in&fqor-publishDateTrie%5B%5D=1927&fqor-format%5B%5D=Book https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&... • The trustee and the A. L. A. • The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A • The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A- • A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton. • The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated • A book of shanties • A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken • A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw. This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter. Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do. This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be. I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value. Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa. ______ ¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.
  - eszed 1y ago
    No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that list put together. Still, prefaces? Generally I try to avoid reading those.
      - eszed 1y ago
        Heh. That's why I'm intrigued by it! My bet is that it's some kind of satire based on that (almost universal) avoidance. Regardless, Mencken's wicked clever, and less-known than I think he deserves to be.
        kragen 1y ago
        Comedy is often somewhat dependent on shared cultural assumptions, although that Sumerian fart joke is still kind of funny.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    > But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be. Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.
    - kragen 1y ago
      For a couple of different reasons. The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people. If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter. This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way. Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.
kidsil 1y ago
You just opened my eyes to IMSLP and I would like to thank you for that. For years I have been chasing music scores that were just the right level for my kids.

zozbot234 1y ago

While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.

kragen 1y ago
That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public. Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user. Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&ft=ft&lookfor%5B%5D=a&type%5B%5D=title&yop=in&fqor-publishDateTrie%5B%5D=1927&fqor-format%5B%5D=Book https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&... • The trustee and the A. L. A. • The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A • The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A- • A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton. • The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated • A book of shanties • A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken • A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw. This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter. Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do. This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be. I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value. Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa. ______ ¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.
- eszed 1y ago
  No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that list put together. Still, prefaces? Generally I try to avoid reading those.
    - eszed 1y ago
      Heh. That's why I'm intrigued by it! My bet is that it's some kind of satire based on that (almost universal) avoidance. Regardless, Mencken's wicked clever, and less-known than I think he deserves to be.
      - kragen 1y ago
        Comedy is often somewhat dependent on shared cultural assumptions, although that Sumerian fart joke is still kind of funny.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be. Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.
  - kragen 1y ago
    For a couple of different reasons. The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people. If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter. This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way. Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

kidsil 1y ago

You just opened my eyes to IMSLP and I would like to thank you for that. For years I have been chasing music scores that were just the right level for my kids.