libgen and z-library must be Russia's greatest philanthropic contribution to the rest of mankind (despite all the other dodgy stuff it is involved in, which I am not belittling).
It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.
There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.
While the founders may have their origins in the Soviet Union (and not Russian), I don’t think the site has anything todo with the Russian government. Rather, it’s the reaction of some individuals to the difficult and expensive access to literature in the west.
As a Russian, I agree in the part that it seems extremely unlikely our government would even think about doing something like this. (Wikipedia says it started explicitly in 1990’s RuNet though, which I am inclined to believe.)
The Russian government is not inclined to prosecute Russian companies for breaking western laws which kind of aids this sort of thing, even if that wasn't their intention.
A further issue that’s often overlooked in English-language discussion is Russian-language books.
A lot of specialist scientific literature such as monographs only saw a single run of 300, 1000, or at best 3000 copies in the Soviet Union, and that’s it. If you’d missed it and didn’t have access to one of a handful of libraries that had it, tough luck. (To give an idea of what counts as specialist, the foremost textbook on general relativity, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, was translated into Russian in 1977 and had a single 3000-copy print run. The 1973 English original is still in print.)
Furthermore, when the Soviet Union fell, so for the most part did the publishing houses, and nobody knows where the offset printing films for the books went. So nobody can print Soviet books again without typesetting them from scratch, even those that weren’t rare. (Did you know that the new Russian edition of Gradshtein and Ryzhik’s special functions manual is technically a translation from Russian to English to Russian? Or so it says on the copyright page, anyway.)
In that environment, having widely available scans of books was absolutely vital; for those who teach students fresh out of high school who don’t necessarily know enough English, it still is. Today’s LibGen arose as an amalgamation of a number of those efforts from the early days of the Russian-speaking Internet.
One was maintained (unofficially) by people from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Another was mirrored (unofficially) by a Moscow-based particle physics institute that until several years ago originated a large part of the Russian presence at CERN. I’m sure other Russian-speaking research centers contributed just as much or more, I’m just not familliar with that part of the history.
As Russian-language scientific publishing stagnated, and subscriptions to English-language literature by and large did not materialize (what with them costing most of a typical money-starved institute’s budget), obtaining scanned and ebook versions of English-language literature from Western acquaintances became more important. People gradually unified under LibGen’s banner, and here we are.
And yes, none of this ever got government support, as far as I know.
Yes this has been a misdirection from the publishers for a while that even some librarians are repeating (other things are supposedly stolen credentials used to do more than just getting access to publications).
I think you’re overstating how much anyone knows or cares that Libgen is Russian (if that is a correct categorization). Also, as you imply, the hurt to publishers may be overstated - a download is not a lost sale.
> It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
An ancedote is not the same as data.
(Legal) libraries had an effect of increasing sales, much to the surprise of everyone when they were first introduced. Its entirely possible that piracy could have too. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows. I think the effects are non-obvious enough that actual studies are needed to know what the actual affect is.
I, on the other hand, have never purchased anything I was going to pirate if I couldn't find it. So for me it definitely is not correlated. If I couldn't find it I just moved on. I tend to pirate nice to haves.
Everybody's different. For me, an inverse correlation happens: libgen etc. act as a bookshop where I can freely browse and evaluate stuff before I buy. So I want to make sure I'm not cheated.
Sometimes the brand is enough, i.e. I know by experience that if a book is from Manning I can trust it, whereas if it's from Packt it's hit-or-miss-but-probably-miss. Self-published ones? 90% are worthless, 1% are gems with the rest on the verge. You can't really know this from reading a sample chapter or the ToC.
people overestimate the capabilities of the corrupt russian government to an absurd degree. Piracy is rampant in russia because it s not suppressed there. VK is full of all the movies you can think of.
My thoughts exactly; I recall stumbling across libgen back in 2018 - it even had a user forum; back then it was clearly just a one-person operation. I got the impression it was someone who liked collecting, organising and sharing PDFs that interested them. And then with time it, the site blew up in popularity.
PDFs also have a scripting language built in, right? Could that be a good attack vector?
It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.
I guess I’m thinking of somebody like myself, like I’ve known forever the prudent thing to do is disable JavaScript on my browser wherever possible. But I didn’t know PDFs had a built in scripting language until a couple years ago, I mostly use PDF for papers, where this isn’t as relevant.
In principle, any piece of software can have zero-days in it. PDF readers included.
Scripting languages can help with certain exploits, but arent vulnerabilities in and of themselves.
Anyhow, theoretically possible but also kind of unlikely. Such attacks usually have a shortish shelf life so are used in more targeted fashion to prolong the exploits life and get the most value from it.
More like post-Soviet. Regardless of the country of operation (which included e.g. Ecuador at some point, in which the owner of lib.rus.ec, the predecessor of libgen, moved), all these shadow libraries and knowledge preservation attempts represent consistent political action by the individuals with views formed by samizdat and the Soviet/post-crash reading culture. That includes Sci-Hub, Libgen, and those most never heard about but which were extremely influential, like the SU.BOOKS BBS or lib.ru.
There is a lot of evidence that it was originally made by someone Russian-speaking, starting from the fact that initial LibGen collection was some Russian and English literature taken from a Russian torrent-tracker. However I'm sure there was "no strategic point of view" whatsoever, just a pet project by some kind-hearted people.
American's still very much buy into the super-villain complex regarding Russia drilled into them over the decades.
Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.
I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.
> Hoping for a better outcome, textbook publishers Cengage, Bedford, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education
The same companies pushing subscription models, restrictive e-book licensing, bundling, single-use codes, needless revisions, and anything else they can do to eliminate the first sale doctrine (and with it third party used textbook sales and rentals) and extract more money from students.
On the modern internet, you don't need to know who runs it in order to shut it down. They already have a court order to pull down all of the known domains and the registrars have 20 days to comply.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
They're not on TOR because normal people aren't on TOR. We've had various ways to distribute files with almost no way of getting caught for decades, but they're all a pain in the ass to use, requiring at the very least a native client program to access, so most people won't ever use them.
Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.
That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.
We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc.
I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.
Anna doesn't have any advertising. Their income is purely driven off donations, most of which are part of subscription packages that offer faster downloads.
The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.
"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.
The Web hasn't required anything beyond what's installed for nearly the entirety of my life, and when it wasn't already there, someone would toss a CD at me in the parking lot and I'd be golden
Is this [0] not exclusively for the Tor browser? It states immediately below (on this [1] page) to "Make sure you're using Tor", and will only open in the Tor browser. I've actually used LibGen with Tor before, and treat it like the library not making ones borrowing history public knowledge
We're are talking about PDFs. A few mb usually. The speed hit of tor is probably fine. Also its a text book. Most users probably find some download latency acceptable.
I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.
Not a fan of the term “normies” but as a Tor “normie” isn’t Tor traffic identifiable and wouldn’t using it make it easier for authorities to focus on you?
For now. Right now DNS blocking is used because it works for 95% of people. Once it doesn't, they'll start demanding more serious means of blocking.
I'm surprised that didn't happen yet because DNS blocking is so ineffective. It's basically just akin to removing a business from the phone book or yellow pages.
Technologically? Maybe. Practically? I'm posting this while using uncensored Internet from within China, and not because I'm going out of my way to evade any blocking.
The GFW is more like the government put out an umbrella, but nothing is really forcing anyone to stand under it. Five steps and you're out. No doubt they could change that tomorrow if they so wished, but there are hurdles other than technical ones.
In my case I'm simply roaming using my German SIM-card, but plenty of VPNs would work too. They can detect and block these and do with certain ones, but for many they just... don't.
Isn't it the case that foreigners can just apply to be exempted from the GFW? I remember people mentioning that to me online in the 2010s who were semi-long term living in China.
The way I heard it was individuals could apply too with a valid reason and one guy I knew online several years ago said “I’m a foreigner who wants to access my own country’s internet” was a valid reason. May have changed since Covid for all I know he left around that time.
We already see mass censorship of legal speech via centralization and deplatforming, particularly via Cloudflare (which continues to happily host CSAM, animal SAM, and various other genuinely illegal websites). It is the unfortunate reality that the Internet will become various internets.
I don't think that's necessary as app stores are already regional and easy to put additional restrictions on, and desktop internet usage is slowly being overtaken by app usage. And who knows, maybe even Windows 15 will only allow software downloaded through Safe and Verified(tm) app stores.
Their datadump strategy is questionable. You end up needing perhaps 1 book for each shard. I guess they are made by sorting the ISBN or some other numerical field and then grouped until they reach a certain size. It is a bit annoying to put the shard of interest to download in your torrent client, pause it, figure out which book is the one you are after by looking at the ids, instruct your torrent client to only download that book.
My understanding was that's meant to be a way "ordinary people" () can contribute to the project by seeding one or more torrents with a part of their archive contents, to try and achieve a sort of "distributed backup", and it's not meant as a way for final users to get that one book they need.
() that is, people that can't run a IPFS node or other advanced options due to their limited space/network/skills/money.
Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.
The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.
Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there's no "meta-coordination" built in to the protocol. It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they're online).
It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.
The best effort I've seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.
Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.
> It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.
I don't know if it's strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).
It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though. Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most. A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.
Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the "hot" chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios). I suspect the only reason an "archive/sparse" variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn't exist is because it's useless for the normal "download a file" use case. Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.
IPFS is a network that solves your coordination problem, compared to torrents it allows you to decide which chunks you want to store and it will even de-duplicate automatically across different "torrents" that happen to include the exact same byte-identical file.
Well, it might take literally months for a file to become available/resolvable everywhere. Also if a host can resolve a file now doesn't matter it would be in ten minutes (the publisher is always running of course).
Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses.
(I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to.
Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
This does seem like it would be the way to handle such libraries, considering the immense size of them. I'd be curious to hear about any efforts in this area, of anyone knows of any.
Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent.
Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?.
Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.
You can still download specific files from torrents of many files, yes. You can pick a subset of files to download.
In theory, you could extend torrent clients to support archiving some subset of the files. You just tell it to keep around 100 GB of files in a 10 TB torrent. Since the client knows the status of each chunk in the swarm, it can make smart decisions about which chunks to download and seed. Clients already let to set preferences to seed the "least-seeded" chunks. So this isn't so far fetched.
The big problem with this is that it lets you work only with a fixed archive. Torrent files can't be mutated after they are created. So you'd be able to get people to archive a fixed version of a shadow library, but not an evolving one.
In practice, this should be fine enough. If we had high assurance that all the books added to the library before 2022 (or something) were copied in 50 machines, that's quite useful.
Being able to layer deltas on top would be amazing - you could evolve the collection as new books are added.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve used shadow libraries before.
1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal
2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one
3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.
4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.
5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.
If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.
There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.
Count me among those who don't believe in intellectual property. There are so many of us. Every time I express this, I find that I'm not alone.
Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.
Now guess which countries staged a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, which brought the current oppressive regime to its power:
A very narrow minded view. There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world, Iran is hardly unique and perhaps not even the worst. And so-called democratic countries are sometimes not much better - a trip through US foreign policy over the years is pretty horrific, the violent oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, and others. None of this should have anything to do with whether a country’s citizens and academics should have access to scientific knowledge and conduct research. In fact scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
American/Westerner tries not to condemn a nation of 90 million people because of their government's actions (impossible!). This is the same twisted, devilish logic that murdered millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans, and Viets, etc., because why not?
Condemn a nation? What part of "affection unspeakable" do you not understand?
All you have to assert is that Iran is not a totalitarian theocracy, and that academic research reliably benefits the Iranian people at the expense of their oppressive overlords' agenda.
I don't understand the rest of your comment. The answer to "why not murder millions of" any given nationality is because it is unspeakably horrible, grossly detrimental to human flourishing, and a violation of our highest ideals.
I really don't know why you're attributing to me the sentiment of "because why not?". I certainly don't intend to express it.
Sanctions against totalitarian states exist to prevent private companies from empowering murderers like Khamenei. You can argue that they're not murderers, but you can't argue that sanctions are imposed "because why not."
> Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists.
I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
Trump is a massive misogynist. Both Biden and Trump are internationally violent and both would actively support a genocide happening through their closest ally.
The next president of the US is either Misogynist Trump, or Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic. In this regard, both Iran and the US are picking from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
---
So, govt bad therefore people shouldn't be able to access research material?
> The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime.
Research is going to mostly be happening in universities, which are usually regulated by the government. Education is also connected to the government. The answer is you don't.
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
edit: FWIW I didn't flag you or downvote you. I upvote you for taking me seriously enough to contest.
> I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
That's valid! The US is predominantly bought and paid for by an oligarchy of monopolists who set restrictions on research. Political donations and lobbying efforts significantly influence grant eligibility by shaping the priorities and policies of funding agencies, and that imposes a chilling effect on academic attention.
If you, a cosmopolitan, say that the US' system is less free than Iran's, then I concede. The sanctions are cruel and unjust. I didn't realize that US academic institutions were more stringently curtailed than Iranian ones. I assumed that the Revolutionary Guard would penalize/harass individual researchers or labs for producing subversive research—above and beyond a preferential allocation of funds.
> Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic
This is undemocratic, but not in the way that you mean. Our first-past-the-post primaries ignore second picks, so it's unimaginable that she'd have gathered no votes in a runoff. That being said, you are again correct: the United States' two party system is undemocratic in that these private institutions share total authority over the docket. But, again, I don't think that it's worse than the influence of Iran's clerical councils. Is it?
> Thanks?
I don't know what to tell you. I don't hate you. You tell me what you need, and I'll do it.
The thing that’s allowed the Iranian government to keep going, at least in my opinion, has been economic destitution of the people of Iran. Largely caused by the sanctions, and primarily the secondary sanctions set by the US.
Right wing governments love economic hardship because it allows for them to unify a portion of the people under that messaging.
There’s even evidence that with apartheid South Africa, sanctions were actually solidifying their hold on the country there. The fall of that government isn’t really attributed to sanctions.
Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.
Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.
Just randomly checked the financials of one publisher of textbooks (Pearson) profits up 30%. So how did the judge assess the $30mil damages and who are the publishers that they would share it with? Assuming of course that they can get dollars from ether.
The spirit is commendable, and the idea is arguably nice. But the free (as in speech) internet is over. I don't like it, but the days of these libraries are counted. Just like the other pirate sites. (Don't visit torrentfreak.com, if you don't want to get depressed. It reports bad news every day, and it only gets worse lately.)
I'm not saying that they don't exist anymore. I'm saying that you should do a yandex search now, and repeat the same search in January. If you compare the number of results, most probably you will see what I'm talking about.
Arguably, you are right. There are a few things that shouldn't be ignored:
- It used to operate very publicly, but now it is just as opaque black box - no one know who is behind it, operators barely communicate with the community.
- It used to be public enemy #1 of the (copyright-) world. Today it is barely a sidenote of the yearly notorious market report. Though the fight against pirate sites is stronger than ever, TPB seems to be silently tolerated.
People with certain mindset might wonder why that is.
Yeah, after libgen didn't work properly anymore since last month or so, I donate to AA each month for speedy downloads. Has the advantage that it also works for papers, so no more libgen/scihub split.
I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.
The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.
I imagine your self published works are available for a reasonable price. In this event, piracy is less tempting. Papers and academic books often cost upwards of $75.
Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
All of my college text books were leaps and bounds more than this, my lowest costing book might have been $75. Most of the books cost well over $150 and many of them couldn’t be purchased online. Most came with some online class learning aid which if you bought the book second hand you’d have to pay the full book price to get the access code anyway. These publishers are out of their minds.
But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
No, I don't. I've watched people pirate things, certainly, but never have I watched them while thinking "if piracy wasn't an option, they would have paid". Indeed, for many people piracy is a long and difficult process as they kludge through ad-laden pages and dead links. That's why services like Spotify are so successful. On paper, you could have pirated the music, but in practice piracy is much harder. There is nothing analogous for the publishing industry, but I would gladly pay upwards of $20 a month for access to all books.
> “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
1. In very few circumstances are the authors setting the price of their work. The publishers do, and the authors receive a small cut.
2. Here, you are contending that knowledge should only be available to those who can pay. That's a completely valid opinion, but let's just be clear about what it is insinuating.
You need to look beyond yourself and the fruits of the labour you feel entitled to.
Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.
You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.
You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.
The flaw in your argument is that in most cases, the audience can afford it, they just choose not to pay when it is available freely with little effort.
My argument doesn’t speak about the affordability. It speaks about an exchange of money for value. Not if one can spend the money, but if that money would be well-spent. :)
Piracy is often significant effort and risk. Not high but significant. First, one must learn the means to pirate content. Second, they must keep strong privacy and security habits while doing so. Third, pirated content may have malware, even pdfs. Finally, the quality is often a bit lower. There are very real downsides to privacy — effort and others. Then there are also benefits that I spoke of.
Steam has largely validated what I’m saying. So no need for extra arguing. Look into how it cleaned up video game piracy. Many people used to, especially in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, pirate as main means of video game consumption. Now, it’s mostly Valve’s Steam.
Value is directly affected by ease of piracy, or alternative distribution. People paid $12-16 per CD for decades, yes it felt a tad expensive but that was the deal and people were generally happy. Napster then torrents lowered sales, Spotify has pretty much killed it. The value of a CD hasn't changed, nor has affordability (in fact many more people can afford than in the 80s-90s) - but nobody's buying because other distribution exists. You can argue Spotify doesn't pay artists fairly and all that but they do have deals and contracts in place. The pirates don't, didn't, never will.
And the "significant effort and risk" argument is garbage when multiple methods of transmitting pirated content (and checksumming it) is easy as cake.
I see you are taking the conversation in two different directions, so I will respond to both.
People used to pay more for music due to scarcity. Piracy makes music more easily available — you are right, so it does decrease scarcity by competition. But so do many other things like the streaming platforms you mention.
The same can be said for average quality published works — very many are available, much too many to charge scarcity pricing. With AI texts flooding the market, the value is further lowered.
I am merely bringing attention to the reality that the works we author compete with market forces, and that through this competition, piracy can and has demonstrably been out-competed in some cases. If the author can’t compete but they want the sales, then it’s a good idea to rethink putting the work out there.
The second point about effort and risk, I don’t think can be dismissed so easily. Checksuming is all well and good, and other protections. But go out into the real world and ask people in the street how many checksum their downloads. :)
If an artist can't sell music anymore because of Spotify, well, it's likely they signed a sub-optimal contract, but at least they had the opportunity to negotiate better terms, and likely can do so at renewal time. Or choose not to offer their music on Spotify at all. No such option exists when dealing with pirates.
You really just have to offer a better deal, and it doesn’t have to be a perfect one. Don’t hyper-focus on preventing IP from being shared by people. So long as there are mass storage devices and paper copy machines, there will be piracy. People used to even transmit computer programs over radio at night in Eastern Europe shortly before the collapse of USSR. You can’t outlaw all means of piracy even if you take down all the sites, but there is a different way to combat it with your own creative products — offering a better legal deal to pirates. And there is evidence that it works. :)
And if it doesn’t work for you, then the market doesn’t work for you. That’s the practical reality. We can daydream about piracy not existing but it will remain a daydream — maybe a nice daydream, I don’t know. But I do know it is not the market we have in reality.
So you want to multiply your benefits but not accept such with your deficits? That's the advantage of digital distribution vs typical labor distribution. When I did laborer work I had no way to easily multiply my work output as it's not intellectual work, for the most part. If you make a moderate income, you should feel very entitled and lucky if you complain when you can easily distribute and multiply your labor as opposed to those who work in more physical fields. But someone might say 'yeah, well get a better job' but the point is when someone's working a very laborious and dangerous job out in the elements, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone making good on the amplification of intellectual labor.
As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.
People pirating your work were less likely to purchase it anyway, likely because it was economically not feasible to do so in the first place, but with the new readers you have, its likely that some of them do end up purchasing it at a later date. Getting robbed by piracy is mostly a fiction and nothing more.
This may be the case in the short-term. If piracy is left unchecked, the norm eventually becomes 'free', for the work being pirated and a very low percentage of people will pay for it.
A good example of this is larger projects in the OSS community. Large companies don't pay for it, because it's just expected to be free.
As a counterpoint just take a look at web serials, they usually have hundreds of chapters available for free and the more popular ones are still making 6-7 figures a year through patreon memberships. People are more than willing to pay for something they enjoy even if it's freely available.
Software is used by enterprises and by individuals. Books are mostly used by indivuals (yeah, I know your Friendly Corp might have an educational budget for you).
Enterprises are less likely to pay for books (as the whole cost of running the procurement process is prohibitive). But people (like individuals) don't have this limitation.
Your businesses model is wrong. Don't make your businesses/profit model be one of artificial scarcity, as it was in the previous millennium.
Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.
If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.
Maybe it's time to "publish" a revised version of your work to include a preamble to the pirate readers with your crypto wallet address. You might be surprised when you find that many pirates are very generous individuals if you provided them the motivation and means.
Are there any numbers on how the availability of books in this way negatively impacts sales? Bear in mind that often people resort to such libraries because they are unable to buy a copy (out of print, not available in their country), can’t afford to buy (so they wouldn’t be paying anyway) or just want to look something up (wouldn’t bother buying the book just for that).
>I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour?
Do you put shareware/donationware messages in your book? Hey I need to eat if you do download this send me what you believe this book is worth to this website?
>And yes, I have come across free copies of my work.
I really do feel sorry for you. There would be nothing worse than something that you have poured your heart and soul into and just gets stolen. I'm not a fan of thieves, nothing worse than spending hours doing a job you hate, buying something and to get it stolen AND you must get even more annoyed if the people are making money if your work.
As some one who struggles writing lab reports and doing case studies in Engineering I find it difficult to write compared to doing the calculations. All the time doing the research I can not imagine how it must feet for you.
You got off lucky. Imagine if one of those government Mecca's of sanctioned piracy called a library had bought your book and put it on public exhibition for free? The estimated losses to the publishing industry are in the billions of dollars in the last decade alone. They are freely given physical copies of your copyrighted work with the mere promise that they will be returned. Many are stolen, and when they are the thief is rarely charged, and the copyrighted material is simply replaced so that it may be made public again. Meanwhile you get a payment equivalent to maybe a fast food meal.
Show us 1 author available in shadow libraries who would literally starve. It's ridiculous. If you can pay, you'll pay. And if you can't you were never part of the market
Obviously "starving" was hyperbole, but that doesn't change the fact that they wrote it and you just want it for free. I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
IP - unlike actual real property - is not really defensible by property owners, other than using state monopoly forces. IP is also very hard to globally enforce. Why should society - all societies - pay for such enforcement? IP can only be protected when it's least valuable to all - including the owner: when it's not disclosed/distributed. So, it's a give and take: accept distribution and accept that some people will not care about your "rights" OR don't distribute (and don't benefit from non-distribution)
> I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
And I have never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "intellectual rights" crowd about why this justifies the usage of violence against the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
> you're also part of the "I'm going to call anything I don't like 'violence'" crowd.
Every law is a control program for violence - this is what laws are for. While I agree that "no laws" don't work, I am part of the "violence should be used with utter care" and "violence is the utter last resort" crowds. :-)
It is good that authors should be remunerated;
and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them
is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil.
For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is
necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers
for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is
an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most
innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never
let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a
premium on vicious pleasures.
I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty
to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty,
I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax.
Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown
that by so doing I should proportionally increase the
bounty.
My complaint is, that my honorable and learned friend
doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely
any perceptible addition to the bounty.
Just as the absurd Acts which prohibited the sale of game
were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd
revenue Acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler,
so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out
of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them
restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains.
No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful
transactions.
Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers
will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital
will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art
will be employed to evade legal pursuit;
and the whole nation will be in the plot.
Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong
and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say
where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace
and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints
on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent,
annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding
the living.
"This law" would extend copyright beyond the lifetime of the author. It's now life plus 70 years. Possibly more, who even knows or cares. We're all gonna be long dead before our culture enters the public domain.
Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. The time for compromise has long since passed. These monopolies have become intolerable. Only thing we care about is their end.
I literally said right in my comment that you replied to that I thought copyright terms were too long. But if you're going to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and insist copyright shouldn't exist, you should at least be honest about what the consequences of that would be, and again I never see that sort of honest assessment from the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
Heck, even arguing about overly-long copyrights seems disingenuous in this case. This wasn't an article about Mickey Mouse. I wasn't previously familiar with Libgen, but given its focus, I would assume most of the pirated material has living authors.
It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books;
we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated:
and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright.
You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men
occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce
compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works
which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can
expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives.
Men who make authorship the business of their lives. We shall have less of them. I accept these consequences. Let it be. It's the future they chose.
I do have one hope though. Later in the text, he expresses a rather low opinion of patronage. And he isn't wrong: patronage by governments, churches and moneyed elites obviously distorted the creativity of authors and that is not at all desirable. That's why copyright is advanced as the least bad solution.
However, modern technology has changed patronage. It's now possible for wide audiences to subsidize the work of their favorite creators. It does not require artificial scarcity. They are rewarded for the act of creating, not the final product.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way forward. Because enforcing copyright in the 21st century will require tyranny the likes of which should give pause to everyone who posts on Hacker News. It will literally destroy computing freedom as we know it today. And that's a consequence I don't accept. I'd sooner see creators find another job.
Well, since you don’t know anything, let me tell you we’ve been able to get any book we’ve wanted for the last 15 years and the sky hasn’t fallen
when I want to support an author, I buy their book, this as a sort of patronage
Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, — what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come — 'As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them.'
Which side are you supporting here? The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work, or the ones claiming that everyone should work "for the progress of the whole human race" rather than for money?
> The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work,
It would be much easier if one side was the authors. The problem is it's "rights holders".
As a frequent reader on RoyalRoad and occasional Patreon supporter of one or the other author I am well aware that many authors indeed to have a problem of theft of their stories.
I doubt though that any of those law suits are meant to protect those little guys.
In addition, I think we need something else. Digital copying is so very different from theft of tangible objects that I think society as a whole would be much better off if we manage to come up with a different method to pay authors, without the huge amount of effort and infrastructure to artificially limit distribution.
I mean, it kind of works for music? Far from ideal, but at least it's something. Okay, it works a tiny bit better. On second thought, maybe it "works" when I use a radio Yerevan kind of definition...
Even if they get the whole site taken down, I'm pretty sure whoever operates it can just deploy the same thing to any number of other domains. The actual server infrastructure would need to be taken offline, which it sounds like they don't have enough information to do.
Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.
In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.
I mean it's not literally about the piratebay or libgen, or napster or whatever. I think historically it's true to say that it never really mattered how much effort they invest in destroying piracy. The fact that storage gets cheaper, yet text won't grow in size over time also makes me rather optimistic. Piracy was also always a decentralized effort by like-minded individuals, it's about the idea, you can arrest people, seize a name and people die, but an idea will never die.
Piracy of books in particular has been around since the 17th century btw, if that helps to convey why I'm not worried.
What happens when the key leadership retires/dies? No one has ever found a solution to this problem. It is not novel nor simple, and certainly not exclusive to any group, project, or institution.
Gradually scale back your [great] leadership and find people to do well defined small parts of it. The dynamic flexible structure becomes rigid and decays much more slowly.
Eventually even the top tasks can be strictly defined and frozen in time.
With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid
I'm sure it's less popular, but I heard you can google pirate bay proxies and get on there in 2 minutes. Not that I would ever do such an immoral and illegal thing, depriving publishers of their hard-earned dollars! But from what I've heard you can still get any recent media and a lot of older stuff.
Even when you're in a major international market like the United States it's frequently the case that books are nearly unobtainable, especially if they're older or limited printings of specialist material. Sometimes I'll get recommended an old SF book or a particular reference manual and it turns out that it had one run in 1985 and there are four copies available on the used market at prices between three hundred and three thousand dollars. Tons of works are one minor complication, like living in the southern hemisphere or not being rich, away from being effectively non-existent.
Right?! I have a PocketBook, their store is absolutely useless, I can’t read anything with DRM, even had to return paid for books because I couldn’t get that adobe crap working on Linux. It’s drm-free or libgen for me.
I was considering getting one but your comment worries me. Do you have an older device? I thought the device itself could do the DRM if you threw an acsm file at it?
You can borrow e-books from libraries, but they come with DRM which means that they can manage “loans” and “returns” so they have a nominal number of books to lend out.
Quite a good service actually, called Libby. There are obviously ways to remove the DRM and make just a normal ePub but I’d quite like not to have to do that if I don’t have to.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.
How are they even able to stay anonymous if they're using google ads? I assume they have to provide a bank account to get paid, and with all the KYC laws it's not exactly trivial to hide your identity.
Sure, but how do you even keep it sustainable? All most useful things in the world are kinda fundamentally non-monetizable, illegal, or both. Wikipedia is the only thing that succeeded, and even that I'm starting to have some doubts about, because of how heavily politically influenced it is.
The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.
Really depends. Worst thing you can do as a hacker is have a brand. Anything more than "that guy who did X" is putting you as a flight risk for corporate.
You can't put a face or even handle on yourself, ideally. But that's all social media is these days.
While I see googletagmanager embedded on the .li site I don't think they can tell if you click the download link or just viewed the page for a book, at least.
The people running Tor for intel don’t give a damn about you downloading “C Structures for the Down and Out” or “Horus Lupercal, Saint or Savior—Another Take”, they have bigger fish to fry and don’t need that distraction
I mean, the latter seems to be a bit heretical. In fact, inquisitors have been dispatched to get rid of that. The Emperor Protects!
---
But that is a good point. It's doubtful that the intelligence community would care too much about people downloading books in the TOR Network. Or if they did get an interest in that, it works have to be a very special book, indeed.
TOR doesn't man in the middle your traffic. An exit node could snoop your traffic if it's unencrypted, but no TOR nodes can see into a encrypted TLS stream, for example.
So the distinction is, using bittorrent is not illegal (yet). It's just a protocol for sharing files. But using it as a tool for illegal activity is illegal, because youre doing something illegal.
It would seem they would be an even bigger target given they accept funds for "fast" downloads.
EDIT: btw, I tried to use anna's archive a few times and couldn't download the files. Something always broke before it finished. Definitely a way less good experience compared to libgen.
Anna's Archive is being sued, the court case has been going on for months [1].
Unlike this Libgen court case, they likely identified the owner, Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo. It's not just another court case against anonymous unidentified persons. They found her due to her poor opsec (nickname was anarchivist), so it may shut down soon.
This is a civil suit, so only a >50% likelihood of guilt is required. The circumstantial evidence is pretty convincing IMO unfortunately.
1. The name, Anna's - Anasztasia.
2. That Anasztasia has the nickname Anarchivist and is a self-described archivist.
3. That Anasztasia had a GitHub WorldCat scraping project.
Perhaps there were more things I forgot. Her personal blog writing reads very similar to the AA blog to me too. I unfortunately think they've found the AA owner.
Thankfully Anna's Archive is fully open-source, so it'll likely live past this civil case in some way.
I don't understand how this kind of judgement is possible, I understand that if you don't show up for a trial you can have a default judgement against you, but don't you have to be served? I know you can include John Does on the defendant list, but doesn't somebody have to be served?
I am not a lawyer, but I was intrigued by the question so I did My Own Research (tm).
Apparently the answer is that you can sue a web site and serve the Internet service provider and whoever registered the domain name.
I would imagine that if there's an anonymizer for the domain they are accepting responsibility for delivering such subpoenas. (I didn't see that started as fact.)
But while ISP's are being ordered to block the site, the $30 million judgment is directed at Libgen itself. Not an ISP or registrar. So I don't think that can be the full answer here.
I was just looking at the question of serving the lawsuit. Winning a default judgment kind of assumes that the defendant at least heard about it, which is hard when you don't know who it is.
Googling turned up that this happens a lot in hit and run cases. I didn't go down that rabbit hole.
> n the order, McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer domains to publishers' control or "otherwise implement technical measures, such as holding, suspending, or canceling the domain name to ensure the domain names cannot be used" for further copyright infringement.
> “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to continue operating the Libgen Sites”, the order reads.
There is no evidence. Because the defendants have remained anonymous, the court issues what’s called a “default judgment.” Essentially this means that since the defendants’ did not present their case, the court is obliged to accept the plaintiffs’ case as-is.
> The lawsuit was stalled for months because LibGen’s anonymous operators didn’t respond. With no other viable options left, the publishers filed a motion for a default judgment in their favor.
Narrator: and LibGen’s anonymous operators still didn’t respond
The domain name injunction is interesting, but they want IPFS gateways to comply too, thats odd
but a direct IPFS hash would work, are there any browser extensions that resolve ipfs:// URIs?
In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.
Is there any way for us individuals to help libgen? Some sort of ipfs distributed storage? It would be a tragedy if it was lost. It's an essential resource for scientists and for bibliophiles!
I've recently stopped buying books from publishers that engage in this shitfuckery (Elsevier, Springer, etc). This frees almost 1000 EUR/year that I'd love to steer towards libgen, sci-hub and similar initiatives. But not for paying these stupid fines, of course.
Libgen was ultimately a workaround to an endemic industry issue. Ideally all of the US folk here get a bill running to get better consumer rights for the media we consume, so we wouldn't have to run into such invasive DRM that can render your purchase unusable.
Not much to do about the cost though. Textbooks specifically can charge this much because the target is education, not the layman.
So.. if I want to help and seed the torrents, do I have to download the whole 80-120 TB for this? can I somehow help when I don't have a space for hundred TB on my machine? went to the website but didn't find a guide or anything else on how to do it
Thanks, was looking for something like this. With all the hardware I'm sure is sitting idle under HN users, we could make a big contribution for ~free.
I am connecting from India and I already can't access the original libgen sites (libgen.rs, libgen.st). Indian ISPs waste no time in blocking websites at the first indication, even when the people requesting have no jurisdiction on them.
Two decades ago, a full-tuition scholarship allowed me to attend a wealthy private US university. After my first semester of expensive book purchases, I was on broke and on academic probation (partially from working so much to afford living expenses!).
Fortunately, a friend showed me how to purchase identical-edition textbooks from Indian/SriLankan publishers — written in English and with valid online access codes. Including shipping, textbooks from this source were identical material (on cheaper paper) but only cost 20% of US publisher prices.
On recollection, I'm sure this was somehow illegal/contraband; but looking at it it decades later it still feels like academia/publishers are robbing the majority of students with their prices (just like healthcare... taxes... etc.).
> McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer...
Hilarious and sad typo. What a clown world we're living in, where the worthless AI-generated virtue-signaling drivel from LinkedIn is allowed to continue existing, but this vast trove of knowledge that's broadly useful for humanity is forced into the shadows.
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
An obvious candidate in this case would be the pro-rata share of the cost of creation. Possibly offset by ability to pay, e.g. if you can afford to pay a little more then do so because some people can't afford to pay as much and you still want the overall total to cover the cost.
It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
"Price" is not being used in a completely literal sense here. The core of the comment is how to calculate "value they received", and neither person involved would say it's $0.
I fully understand what they are saying. I'm saying it doesn't matter. There is a group of people that believe anything above free is too much. For both software and books.
If you're talking about people that think nothing should be paid, then kundi is not one of those people, and you're responding in the wrong place.
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
Encouraging people to donate does nothing. People are encouraged to donate to open source and you see how many open source projects the internet depends on that are wildly underfunded. Maybe you believe people are more charitable than I do.
There is a group of people that believe getting less money than the maximum they can is too little. Let's not base business models on extremes. For example, Humble Bundle has shown there are other ways.
You haven't used Humble Bundle lately have you? They increased their minimums on the bundle and increased their required cut. Now, did they do this because they are hurting for money or for greed? I don't know.
...And they aren't unreasonable when these things have been rendered non-rivalrous goods.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
Most books that are in the public domain today (hence with no legal hindrances whatsoever) are still not meaningfully free or available to all. Copyright turns out to be simply a minor issue when viewed in a larger perspective; actually making works meaningfully available whenever this can be done free of legal issues is actually a lot more important. Note that this encompasses discovery and findability (e.g. through detailed cataloging) as well as practical access (e.g. through availability in a variety of open formats). It's a hard problem and one that's far from being comprehensively addressed.
Do the same people who think that every line of code ever written should be free; also think that every book, article, or painting should also be free?
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?
All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.
So if authors refuse to spend the time and resources needed to get a work ready for publication because they will be denied any compensation for doing so; should they be forced to write them anyway so that you can have your free books?
I think the creator of a book should be able to charge for their work if they desire to do so for a reasonable amount of time, actually, especially considering most authors don't make a lot of money form their works.
Authors and editors should be able to live from their work and libgen et al should exist as well. I don't think it's so incomprehensible to imagine that reality because we are living that reality right now. We can also save a lot of money if we get rid of publishers. People will always buy physical books that will be enough to sustain authors, on top of that we can subsidize from taxes. You have to remember that not everyone is a liberal.
The vast majority of authors are not popular enough to live on their works. Publishers actually loose money publishing vast majority of their books, meaning most authors gain value from the publisher since the publisher clearly is loosing money to the author.
Unconditional basic income. Grants for the arts. Stipends. Unconditional basic income. Sponsorships. Unconditional basic income. Donations. Maybe even unconditional basic income.
Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.
If the UBI is high enough for people to live on with no other income, then I think it will be too expensive for the state to avoid going bankrupt as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives.
If it is not enough to live on, then only the independently wealthy can do art, which goes against the exact goal you stated.
> as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives
Or alternately, millions of people will cease busy work which adds no value - and engage in genuinely productive tasks instead. Caring for their families, locally growing food, building collaboratively, teaching and learning form one another. We only reach for succour and addiction when dispirited and alienated. Graeber was far too conservative in his definition of bullshit jobs. The vast mass of us now work in the production of bureaucratic services so far removed from an actual good as to be incalculable. Our work is bullshit, or worse - actively destructive, and we know it.
The amount of money you actually need to live if you're willing to live a spartan lifestyle is quite modest, e.g. sleep four to a room, eat a lot of rice and beans, exist in the absence of luxury.
Most people want more than this and will work for it. But accepting it as a form of sacrifice to achieve your other goals is hardly a problem -- and then people can create their art or start their own business with sweat equity before it generates any revenue etc.
Artists would then get the UBI and whatever they get in terms of patronage, donations, art sales, etc. Neither of which might be enough to live a middle class life on its own, but both together makes it happen. And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
> And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
And importantly, they continue to have their basics covered while they do that. Part of the reason most people end up stuck in bullshit jobs is trying for something better is too risky.
That's clearly a false dichotomy, even the post you are replying to outlined a number of ways which an artist might supplement their income.
Also the idea that a significant UBI would lead to people just coasting seems patently false. Every bit of evidence shows that when given the opportunity the majority of individuals are driven to improve the quality of their lives; and also, that quality is measured in relative and not absolute terms.
So, that creates a world (not too dissimilar to our own, but notably so) where only the independently wealthy can ever afford to produce art full time. Can you see any downsides to that world?
It's the same issue. If writers could meaningfully get an audience who buys their work independently, they wouldn't need a publisher.
Publishers offer support and printing, but ultimately an author needs a publisher to spread reach (i won't say "make money", because authors sure won't make much). Becsuse it's all about being loud and publishers have resources to be loud. Much better odds compared to a grassroots community paying a fair price when the author is ready to release.
The problem is that publishers, being the middleman, take over authors the same way the supermarket network takes over the food producers. Publishers own the shelf and a price label, and being less numerous and more organized, they can effectively own the audience's attention. They can help, they can also shut author down. They're not ultimately interested in maximizing availability, because they profit directly from the gap.
That's why they need restrictions and ways around them.
Maybe a billion-dollar company has more money to spend on lawsuits than artists do? Doesn't make them the good guys, but I'm not surprised that it's them doing it.
This is survivorship bias: art owned and protected by wealthy sponsors has a much higher chance of making it through the years. Most art is folk art, and has been lost to the centuries.
The did say "longest lasting art". It feels more survivor bias to mention the Picasso's of history over the many more wealthy who spent their time in the craft.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
Being paid and knowing they can spend their livelihood writing while paying rent is about the best persuasion you can have. Aside from the wealthy who don't need to worry about that.
Yes: we can pay authors nothing. It works. In fact we can make them grovel to get something published, and even get them to pay for the privilege of being considered for the publishing we're offering zero compensation for.
We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.
I've bought multiple physics textbooks which I've first downloaded from libgen. I'm not going to spend 50-100€ of my money on a book before skimming through the contents first. Also some textbooks on niche topics can cost more than 200€ or cannot be found at all.
The alternative would be to make a request for my university library to get the book, but I don't know how long that would take if it would happen at all.
Would the world be a better place if I stuck to studying only the books in local libraries and what I can personally afford? I personally don't think so.
Sounds like a good opportunity to start lobbying to raise library funding, maybe even overhaul it into the 21st century so we can reasonably have a government funded "Netflix of books" of sorts.
Also long term, but it'd kill like, 5 birds with one stone.
> The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway
Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
The only med books I bought were atlases (histology, anatomy, etc)
Everything else I borrowed, photocopied or bought second hand. Many of my classmates did the same. In our group, very few rich students ever photocopied or bought second hand
If books weren't sold for profit, we would have better books, only released less often. Back then, we didn't have so many yearly releases, and I honestly think that isn't needed.
Why would we have better books you say? Similar to how open source projects draw very good programmers. Some do it for prestige, and some weird ones do it for the joy o f doing true quality work. IMHO
> Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
you take a few interesting leaps in a failed attempt of.... trying to turn opinion into fact?
> the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate.
Uhhh, wot??
Please provide ANY source for this. Really. Like even if it's a blog you wrote and was a creative writing experiment for you, publish it. Just so I can mock you.
> (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
So at this point, I hope it's clear that you are a bit silly. But...
> For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience
This level of intellectual dishonest is horrible, especially if it's legitimate.
And how can you expect to have any level of honest discussion if you are going to make insane assertions, with zero backup of anything resembling facts, and then get bent out of shape when called out about it.
I'm sorry that I called you intellectually dishonest and you got mad, but it's the truth.
I don't think we should make it even worse for them. They are at least going to make some money for their long months or years of work with a chance to make it big.
I think the chance of financial success can incentivize the author to make a better work. Let the authors who are willing to write for free release their work for free.
Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers. Or that most book authors get ridiculous royalties in their publishing contract (a few percent of the price, including for ebooks that are being sold at the price of paper copies) unless they are already famous.
ACM charged me to publish. After I'd written the paper and after their peer review process which was not convincingly value adding, but it was something like $100 so I paid it. Overall experience makes it likely I'll just post to arxiv instead next time.
(In fairness that fee did nominally grant access to read other papers by them as well, but the credentials they sent out didn't let me log in and I didn't bother contacting them to resolve it)
> Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers.
Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.
The secondhand market helps the firsthand market: people are more likely to buy something at the offered price if they know they can resell it on the secondhand market later.
Can you imagine what the automobile market would look like if you couldn't trade-in or sell your car and just had to trash it? New cars sales would plummet.
I don't even mind paying up front anymore. I'm in a position where I can afford it now, though for most of my adult life I've relied on sites like this to make ends meet.
However the only thing I want from publishers is DRM-free e-books (same for music). If you offer a way for me to actually own the digital property I'm buying, I'm going to buy it. If you make it hard or impossible to transfer between my devices, or share with my wife and kids (i.e. how physical media works), you're not getting my money and I'll find another way to get the book.
yes certainly, thank your local library.. your country has them?
> we should encourage and educate people
yes certainly, but many people have had income from a book economy. Some certain books of great quality might increase in price. How can people wish for no-book economy so quickly?
My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.
Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.
As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.
I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1].
Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..
I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .
LibGen is the library concept adapted to the digital age where copying is zero cost. It's what official government sponsored libraries should be providing today. Instead we have publishers controlling how libraries can distribute works digitally and on what devices the users can view them.
> LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
The only reason for copyright to exist in the first place is to further the progress of humanity. If it doesn't do that or even hinders it (and I tend to agree that it does) we should get rid of it.
I think this should apply to most essential services (and libgen absolutely is an essential service; others are E2EE messaging and E2EE cloud-hosting). After all, people like to imagine (and are often told) that taxes are not a ransom you pay to the ruling oligarchy, but almost a donation you almost willingly give away for the sake of maintaining public infrastructure.
But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".
To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.
I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.
If they can't collect from a specific person, "judgements" are just some pencil neck running around with a clipboard shouting randomly and freaking out.
That's because most of them are basically images. I wish they could be gone through and converted to a better format but that's one hell of an undertaking.
So making libgen is illegal, but using it to train LLMs is legal? I know there's a whole issue of transitive liability (maybe you couldn't know you were getting an illegal thing from the thief, so it doesn't always make sense for you to to be liable too), but this kind of thing seems to power way too much of my industry for me to be comfortable.
There's the concept of inducing copyright infringement (a la MGM v. Grokster), so much depends on whether those who train LLMs were inducing libgen's operations in some way, for example if payment or resources were being contributed to libgen.
Welcome to the future! Companies will make illegal or very expensive to access original information, like scientific papers. However, guess what, your friendly AI LLM, trained by your friendly tech monopoly on stollen data, will allow you to access all this research that was paid with your taxes, through monthly payments. But don't ask the AI where it got this information from, because it can get really upset with you...
It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".
Rule of Capitalism #1: If it is found to be good, but one can't make money off it, it must be made illegal to produce run, then replaced with something that sucks horribly, but can potentially be profitted off of.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, because historically speaking would include the time we had nobility. And in that time period, having money would not provide you with power, as nobles were beyond the law and could simply cease it for themselves.
> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.
Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.
> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations
Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.
Meanwhile they still have flibusta.is where almost any book ever published in Russian can be downloaded one-click as structured XML (FB2) and the maintainer is dying of brain cancer right now after having paid for the server to run for some more weeks. Russian is among the top languages in terms of the amount of books published in it. Apparently we are witnessing two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time.
Hurry up with downloading these from the website because the Flibusta author has reported on having glioblastoma few days ago, and there is no new leader for the project. The servers are going to be shut down and the good name is going to be spotless because of not reused. Probably this is why you told about "two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time". BTW all 450Gb of Flibusta can be downloaded via torrents but I don't know how to download all of Libgen.
I just hope enough capable people will download everything to be able to create mirrors again someday. Perhaps the darknet can turn out a better place.
Psy* (psychology, psychiatry etc) is neither a science nor a medicine. If your only issue with Soviet regiment is intential usage of psy* pseudoscience then try to search about the Rosenhan experiment.
There is neuroscience though which is a science and can prove things like depression and schizophrenia exist (many distinct kinds of both, possible to distinguish using MRI). Sadly there aren't many neuroscientists and MRI machines available to general public so we still have to rely on psychiatrists for help when our neural system goes awry. In many cases they actually help.
Because it offers the content to everyone anywhere for free without authentication or a limit on the number of concurrent copies available.
Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.
> Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know
The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.
I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
In my opinion, this seems like a particularly stupid risk to take as a pirate site. Ad networks would be in a prime position to dox all your users and, were the publishers so inclined, they could easily get that data and target your individual users for legal harassment.
Are the costs of running Libgen seriously that high that they have to defray them with advertising specifically?
First, while Google aggregates lots of data for analytics and advertising, and if subpoenaed may be able to say that a given user visited a given pirate site, they only know the user opened pages -- not that they clicked a download link or successfully downloaded an ebook, because the ebook file itself contains no Google advertising.
It's not illegal to do a search on a pirate site. The only illegal part is the downloading, and ad networks don't have any record of that part.
It depends whether your goal is "to make information free" or "give away stolen goods to trick users into giving you their PII so you can monetize with internet ad bucks".
Just because you like what someone is doing in principle doesn't mean they're good people doing it for good reasons.
Armchair anarchists aside, it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
>it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators and translators poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Given that, I don't feel too much guilt 'borrowing' from alternate sources.
> I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.
> it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Why? You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
> it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
There are better ways of supporting work you find important than the parasitic publishing industry and copyright.
> maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't really care, but many different people, for many different reasons.
You may think this specific example, which you seem to think resembles the current publishing industry, negates my overall point, but... not even close.
> The authors of antiquity had no rights concerning their published works; there were neither authors' nor publishing rights. Anyone could have a text recopied, and even alter its contents. Scribes earned money and authors earned mostly glory unless a patron provided cash; a book made its author famous. This followed the traditional concept of the culture: an author stuck to several models, which he imitated and attempted to improve. The status of the author was not regarded as absolutely personal.
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.
That point was specifically in response to the suggestion that we need publishers and copyright for books to exist - which is obviously false. Not sure how the size of the current industry relates to that point.
I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive. Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
> Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
> Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing. Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
> Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free. They might not have an editor or translator, but those things cost money. But most authors like money and since most books loose publishers money its not like the author is loosing out.
> That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
I'm glad you liked them. The best fiction works I read I paid for, and trust me I've read a lot of free fiction works.
> Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing.
It's not obvious at all when all you mentioned was quantity (two times in a row). And I think the reason that was all you mentioned is because that's the only 'obvious' increased metric you have. Not to mention, there are many other things that are different now, so chalking it all up to copyright and publishers is illogical.
> Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
Again, you're making claims about 'peak' and 'book health', etc. without actually defining what that means... is it supposed to be 'obvious'?
> Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Does it though? The current deluge of books is mainly due to the easy of creating them and getting them to readers. That is, thank computers not copyright.
> You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:
> Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then?
I personally won't, because I've never used it. I am 100% against it being shut down though.
> I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
Read my comment again and find the spot where I said 'nothing'.
> I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing
You can start by defining what 'health of books' even means, but your conclusion here seems seriously perverse.
> how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
What is belittling about acknowledging the fact that current works (especially technical/non-fiction) heavily draw from previous works? The last few technical books I read literally had zero original/unique information - they were just re-organization/re-phrasing/compilation of other works. That's not a bad thing - I think it's great, and the books are great, but is that justification for restricting access to this information - when it is literally 100% based on other works?
If there was a way I could give the authors a few dollars for their work, I totally would. Instead in the system we have, I have to give a publisher $100 so they can give the author $0.50. The publisher uses the money to make rich people richer, and scaring people by suing for violating laws that they themselves wrote.
Whenever possible, I try to but stuff from the authors & creators directly. I haven't been in the market for textbooks in a long time, but even 20 years ago it was a ripoff, and it seems to have only gotten worse.
I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.
Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.
The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.
I certainly appreciate your efforts, and the efforts of everyone involved. I know a few authors and copy editors, and it seems like an incredible amount of work to deliver the finished product.
I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.
When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.
I've written numerous technical articles and had to publish them in particular journals for academic promotion/retention reasons, and almost universally the (paid) editors (not the working for free other academic reviewers) added negative value: they introduced errors and I had to spend hours of unnecessary time trying to catch these newly introduced errors, and even then tonnes remained. I distribute the preprints (that paid editors didn't get their hands on) because they're much less error- and typo-ridden then the official published versions.
Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.
Ebook pricing is broken. Sell it for $0.99 and you'll get buyers. You can't sell ebooks when it costs only 5-10% less than a dead-tree hardcover variant. People don't like being ripped off.
Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.
Before ebooks came abundant the publishers said some 10% of book price is their money, another 10-15% is for author and editors, and the rest is eaten up by print and distribution+shop. I guess the distribution through publishers' site can be done at 20% of sales price.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.
Sell them at reasonable prices and people will buy them.
Ever seen someone photocopying an entire newspaper? Guess what would happen if newspapers prices suddenly were inflated to like 50 bucks.
The reality is that without the existence of publishers the price of almost all texts would drift toward a minimum far below the worthwhileness of any author.
So maybe, like art, texts will become sheer passion projects - even technical texts. Otherwise, I'm sure LLMs will be able to replace their usefulness soon.
The fact that artists/writers pearl clutch over their already non lucrative jobs while software folks are gleeful to sell their own earning potential out from under themselves shows you that artists/writers are wannabe Bolshevik’s and that software folks are the only honest “egalitarians” out there.
Is there a legal alternative to illegal projects like Libgen? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Easily is the operative word. Blockbuster was easy but you had to drive there -- netflix is easier. Libraries similarly require driving (unless you use overdrive / similar) but piracy is easier for many as well. Books just haven't found their spotify/netflix; the kindle store is basically 2009 itunes.
I don't think many realize how much libraries have via internet ("overdrive / similar") these days. You don't even have to show up in person to sign up at my local library.
Libgen and the like tend to just have more on hand though, and that's the big differentiator in usability IMO. There are things your local library just isn't going to have a copy of but libgen will. After that happens once, why bother with the library again? Outside of "it's legal" or "I find more moral" type concepts there tends not to be a strong reason.
> Is there a legal alternative? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Plenty of books (and other written works, such as serial publications) are in the public domain, hence fully legal from a copyright POV. However discovery is still a major problem: many works in the public domain are still far from being easily findable or accessible online. (Even then, it's worth keeping in mind that the books people generally think of as the 'Greatest Books of the Western Canon' are, by and large, in the public domain, and that already is more books than you could feasibly read in a lifetime.)
Many but not remotely enough books are in the public domain. Copyright terms are now ridiculously long—the last Sherlock Holmes stories only just entered public domain.
It would be very hard to profit from that? Because at most people would read few books a month. How much would they pay for it? Competition is literally libraries for free. Music or Movies dont't have free competitors. There would be long term tech cost, 100s of employees and all. The math is very hard even for long term.
The Internet Archive's 'Lending Library' does this, but suffered a major blow in the recent copyright case. It's really a big advance in human knowledge, and works as simply as you say (you need to use their online viewer or an Adobe DRM client).
That are not for technical books, and Amazon used to be famous for deleting a book from used's devices. It is not exactly fare to compale an honest source of technical books which allows anyone to download some rare tech books with a source of DRM which requires me to deal with something not exactly reading. Just look at those websites - who is that visitor of libgen website who needs those animations?
> like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Libgen is not Netflix for books, it is thepiratebay for books. Libgen is not helpful in discovering more books because if to judge about those literature which is abundant on Libgen, the technical one, what allows user to discover some books on Libgen is only another books or your interest to specific scientist or field.
(I know there are a lot of fiction materials on Libgen such as comicses but all I use to read is science books or at least some non-fiction, so my opinion may be biased).
Now, can someone help explain to me how I can ask LibGen (or Google, or my ISP) to refund me the thousands of dollars I’ve lost in royalties on the 7 books of mine they have up there?
It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.
There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.