4 ms·

Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sal

Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sale was great while we had it, but digital makes it obsolete? When you die, screw donating your collection of “licenses” to somewhere productive; those contracts died with you? Everything is streaming, so you never purchased anything anyway? It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.

bfrankline 5mo ago
Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
- piperswe 5mo ago
  But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.
- nemomarx 5mo ago
  can I donate my ebook to them?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- presbyterian 5mo ago
  They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases. The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
  - blairbeckwith 5mo ago
    Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is. A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?
    - wolvoleo 5mo ago
      The difference it's that in the physical case the choice is up to the library, in the other it's forced upon them by the publisher.
    - nemomarx 5mo ago
      They sell them at the end of their life, sometimes, so you recoup a bit of the cost there. And you can also get books donated which reduces the up front cost. I don't see a good way to do that for digital copies, and of course the expiry would be wholly artificial scarcity for them even if it was only a little bit more expensive than physical.
      - doctorwho42 5mo ago
        It really comes back to IP law. In the past, the idea was you own the content for 20-30 years and then after that... It is owned by all of society. Digital content is a great example of why we should fight back for old IP timelines. Without it, we stagnate as a society. Our stories don't evolve, they just rot on the vine.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? The main difference I see is the centralisation of censorship vectors. Pulling physical books off library shelves is visible and rightfully prompts a shitshow. Bullying a publisher into not renewing lending licenses strikes me as way easier to pull off.
- mjcl 5mo ago
  Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-audiobooks-for-libraries/ https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...
mgr86 5mo ago
I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them to. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
  As society's repositories of knowledge, I feel like AI should fall under libraries. Especially considering how AI utilizes others knowledge/text they don't legally have rights to. The carveout we made slightly similar (in that they have special rules for their use) is for libraries.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
    An 8-bay Synology costs about $1000. It'll hold an eighth of a petabyte pretty comfortably (with sufficient redundancy). It's bizarre and disturbing to me how few of you seem to be interested in having your own libraries, even though technology has finally delivered that ability to you. You'll come on here once every 3 months and whine about how we have to do more for public libraries, even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts, and you don't even want libraries for yourselves. The "library" is dying for the same reason the newspaper (and the book!) is dying. Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds. I don't need a carveout. Some large fraction of my internet bandwidth is downloading books and whatnot off of Libgen and Anna's.
    - bathtub365 5mo ago
      The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago. This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.
uyzstvqs 5mo ago
Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.
- jonhohle 5mo ago
  > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Physical vs. digital is a red herring. It’s about access to copyrighted works. The benefit to authors/publishers comes with a benefit to the public. We’ve lost the latter.
CSMastermind 5mo ago
> It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law. You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.
- rangerelf 5mo ago
  That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-
- killerstorm 5mo ago
  That's a shitty kind of a deal. There are other options, e.g. Greg Egan sells his books on SmashWords - you get full text of the book (epub) via email, no DRM, most money goes directly to the author. Getting unencumbered full text is much better - you can use it with TTS read of your choice, search, summarize, whatever you want. So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers
outside1234 5mo ago
We need to create libraries like Anna's Archive that are impossible to take down. Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.
NoSalt 5mo ago
This right here is why I either (1) still buy physical media [my preference], or (2) make sure all digital media I purchased is DRM free. With my physical media, I digitize it, then store the media for any future use.
- 382hi 5mo ago
  I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.
BobbyTables2 5mo ago
It’s crazier to me that a number of Anthropic managers and executives aren’t in prison.

bfrankline 5mo ago

Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.

piperswe 5mo ago
But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.
nemomarx 5mo ago
can I donate my ebook to them?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
presbyterian 5mo ago
They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases. The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
- blairbeckwith 5mo ago
  Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is. A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?
  - wolvoleo 5mo ago
    The difference it's that in the physical case the choice is up to the library, in the other it's forced upon them by the publisher.
  - nemomarx 5mo ago
    They sell them at the end of their life, sometimes, so you recoup a bit of the cost there. And you can also get books donated which reduces the up front cost. I don't see a good way to do that for digital copies, and of course the expiry would be wholly artificial scarcity for them even if it was only a little bit more expensive than physical.
    - doctorwho42 5mo ago
      It really comes back to IP law. In the past, the idea was you own the content for 20-30 years and then after that... It is owned by all of society. Digital content is a great example of why we should fight back for old IP timelines. Without it, we stagnate as a society. Our stories don't evolve, they just rot on the vine.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? The main difference I see is the centralisation of censorship vectors. Pulling physical books off library shelves is visible and rightfully prompts a shitshow. Bullying a publisher into not renewing lending licenses strikes me as way easier to pull off.
mjcl 5mo ago
Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-audiobooks-for-libraries/ https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...

mgr86 5mo ago

I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them to. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.

_DeadFred_ 5mo ago
As society's repositories of knowledge, I feel like AI should fall under libraries. Especially considering how AI utilizes others knowledge/text they don't legally have rights to. The carveout we made slightly similar (in that they have special rules for their use) is for libraries.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  An 8-bay Synology costs about $1000. It'll hold an eighth of a petabyte pretty comfortably (with sufficient redundancy). It's bizarre and disturbing to me how few of you seem to be interested in having your own libraries, even though technology has finally delivered that ability to you. You'll come on here once every 3 months and whine about how we have to do more for public libraries, even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts, and you don't even want libraries for yourselves. The "library" is dying for the same reason the newspaper (and the book!) is dying. Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds. I don't need a carveout. Some large fraction of my internet bandwidth is downloading books and whatnot off of Libgen and Anna's.
  - bathtub365 5mo ago
    The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago. This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.

uyzstvqs 5mo ago

Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.

jonhohle 5mo ago
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Physical vs. digital is a red herring. It’s about access to copyrighted works. The benefit to authors/publishers comes with a benefit to the public. We’ve lost the latter.

CSMastermind 5mo ago

> It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law. You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.

rangerelf 5mo ago
That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-
killerstorm 5mo ago
That's a shitty kind of a deal. There are other options, e.g. Greg Egan sells his books on SmashWords - you get full text of the book (epub) via email, no DRM, most money goes directly to the author. Getting unencumbered full text is much better - you can use it with TTS read of your choice, search, summarize, whatever you want. So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers

outside1234 5mo ago

We need to create libraries like Anna's Archive that are impossible to take down. Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.

NoSalt 5mo ago

This right here is why I either (1) still buy physical media [my preference], or (2) make sure all digital media I purchased is DRM free. With my physical media, I digitize it, then store the media for any future use.

382hi 5mo ago
I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.

BobbyTables2 5mo ago

It’s crazier to me that a number of Anthropic managers and executives aren’t in prison.