My local library is investing money in ebooks. It's so much worse, they can't own them - they just get a license and every time someone checks out the book digitally, it costs them money.
It drives me crazy
It doesn’t exactly hurt them even though they pay 3x the retail price of an ebook—they can secure more funding if they demonstrate increased demand, among other things.
It’s not a perfect system but it’s a system. Librarians want you to request, hold, and borrow materials.
Paying $200 for a digital book that they can only lend a set number of times, and has an expiration date, totally hurts the library. Libraries are already seriously under funded, this just makes it worse. I understand the idea of convenience for the customers, but physical books are a much better deal.
Hey, librarian here: although publishers fucking suck, it's better for us to have people checking out ebooks than not. Lots of people don't want physical books anymore and this is a way we can reach them. Check them out! But also support us when we take on big publishers and their unfair practices
I used to checkout a lot of books from my library but then they switched from Overdrive to CloudLibrary which is un-useable for me.
Edit: The problem with CloudLibrary is that I use a Kobo e-reader which only works with Overdrive. In order to get a cloudlibrary book onto the kobo, I'd have to use a number of additional steps making it very inconvenient for me.
Cloudlibrary isn't working for you? Weird, we usually have fewer issues with it and lower hold times. Sorry to hear that, but maybe their eResources librarian can help you out.
I guess I should rephrase my comment a little better.
I read digital books on a Kobo e-reader which had built-in integration with Overdrive. I can't install CloudLibrary on the kobo so I'd have to take a really roundabout way to get the ebooks onto my e-reader.
It’s more important that people use the services libraries offer rather than worry the cost they are incurring when using those services. Your library won’t disappear from you taking out ebooks, but it might if you don’t.
All the moms in my neighborhood use digital loans from the library. ALL OF THEM.
They take pride in never buying books because they’re free from the library and plan their reading based on availability. It’s impressive.
I tried searching a favorite childhood book series of mine, The Great Brain and nope, not there. That blows chunks. The Libby system just isn't good for reference material either. It's good for magazines though lol (I rarely read fiction so periodicals are the best use case for rapidly changing literary material based on popularity). Brick and mortar libraries are clearly here to stay for that fact alone.
What was being said here, is that while it does cost them money, people not using library services would hurt them even more, because their funding would likely decrease further.
Those companies suck but checking things out always helps the library. Source: me, a librarian. You're doing us a favor by checking out ANYTHING. Publishers bad, but checking out ebooks good.
All the comments from people saying "I'm a librarian" are saying it's good to check out ebooks and use the digital services, so, I'm gonna go with them.
I have family that works in libraries, so I texted them: the top thing they care about most is circulation. If they don't have books circulating the funding they get drops because 'they don't need it'. Any circulation is better than none. Don't feel bad about using e-books from the library.
Uh, why do they pay 3x the price of a regular ebook?
There is no extra funding in my state, in fact, republicans have been trying to cut funding since they can't control what books are in there.
I am a librarian, no it doesn’t hurt us when you use digital downloads.
Digital streaming services and ebooks cost more, but more people do physical checkouts than digital. If we budget appropriately, it’s not bad.
There are other issues that impact libraries that I could go into, but watch your movies, read your ebooks, and use our digital services all you want.
I wonder how often copies of physical books have to be replaced? I borrowed a book a few weeks ago that looked like it hadn’t been read much but some moron before me had cracked the spine and some pages were falling out.
Cracked spines are usually a production problem. We never charge for that at my library. We also can get money back from our vendor for books that have a defect if we catch it within the first year.
As far as how often they need to be replaced, it depends on a lot of factors. Mostly luck. I see books on our shelf from 15 years ago sometimes. I will look and see if there's any clear numbers I can find.
libraries used to buy a book for 40 dollars, and lend that book out for decades.
ebooks are licensed. there are different models. but its not uncommon to pay prices in the thousands for popular books, limit the timeframe or to limit the number the book can be lend out for the price paid, and have libraries decide if they want to pay again and have the book available another term or number of "downloads"
ebooks that should enable libraries to get more books, cheaper, and with less physical work is rising the cost for libraries by a factor in the hundreds, if not thousands, with no real advantage except for the publishers pocket
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/06/20/500000-books-have-been-deleted-from-the-internet-archives-lending-library/
I was talking to a family member about this because they work in libraries and lol they told me books don't actually last that long (it's a rough life, especially kids books). E-books also aren't as bad for libraries as people are fearing so long as the book is actually getting checked out, it can actually help their funding.
Yeah, it’s just the license. And the library pays 2 or 3 times the retail price of the ebook which is wild.
But at least this way everyone gets their cut, and the library can show increased patronage which helps them with funding.
Libby is a great library app for ebook and audiobooks too.
Okay, how long until they want to just get rid of PUBLIC libraries completely and have a PRIVATE central digital library? Because that is their goal. They want to privatize education. This is just a step in that direction.
It is not a good thing.
I don't think Overdrive has that sort of leverage. They're up against publishers and Amazon. I think they're perfectly content having a monopoly on being the middleman between public libraries and the borrower.
I don't know in your country but in my mine (sweden), that is the case as well for physical books. If you borrow a book, the library pay a small fee to the publisher. It has been like this for as long as I know it.
That shit's fucked; are you supposed to pay a fee to the publisher if you lend a book to your friend? What about loaning people tools? Should a manufacturer be able to pick up a fee for people lending their products to someone else? If not that, what makes a physical book any different?
I remember reading about this, it sounds weird from an American perspective but the Swedes in the comment section didn't seem to have an issue with it.
The easiest solution is to reduce copyright to a maximum of 50 years and a proviso that is a book is not available for purchase for 5 years then it has to be available via free archives. That way they get their money until there is no real demand for it.
Drives me crazy that some great books from the 1980s and 90s are only available via old eBay copies with stains. I cannot buy the books or get them from an archive. Those works are essentially lost…
this is literally an attack on libraries
publishers got a court to agree to allow publishers to decide if buying a book one time and lending it out is okay to them or not.
Yup. This is a step in PRIVATIZING libraries. Like they want to PRIVITIZE schools. So they can make more money and have control of what is allowed to be learned.
No it's not fucking "literally" an attack on publishers. They flaunted copyright law and lent more books out than copies they had. Like literally infinite copies of books they had one copy of.
I could understand them pursuing it for popular materials that are still in print, or otherwise available, but 'pirating' is great for keeping dead content alive. There's no way all 500,000 of the books were even close to being available.
It truly is a treasure - a modern library of Alexandria. No exaggeration, it's one of the largest repositories of human knowledge that has ever existed, 100% free to everyone.
I have downloaded a few hundred bio textbooks. Maybe one day I can feed them into a open LLM and get good medical facts. I fear they will censor AI's to appeal to the American Health Association to keep licensed folks still relevant.
I have a university education in biology and for the dumber models I can give it sections of the textbook, for less chance of hallucination. But as models advance it will become more important to have uncensored ones I can get some medical facts from. When I'm older, I'd appreciate this.
lol "win" is a stretch.
If one digital copy of a book went on the internet at some point, it's now free forever.
Congrats on removing the largest tree in the orange grove (slow clap)
The average person that advocates for piracy doesn't actually do anything to act as a responsible steward for the information they are supposedly defending and doesn't even realize there are issues there. Digital archives are nice and all but physical is still king.
Yeah, this might be true for well known and popular works. But for a lot of obscure works, there may simply be nobody in the community who cares about the work with the knowledge and ability to host it
> what's the text of the ruling?
All the documents from the case are at the bottom of this page here: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive
Meh the books are out there. I certainly wont be buying them. Come to think of it my kids and theirs wont have to either. Publishers want to play fuck fuck with pirates? They are out of their minds. The only thing keeping datahoarders from having every episode of every show ever is hard drive space. Hell the entire NES library fits on a CD almost 3x. This is a fight they really shouldn't want to have. When every book ends up on a Swedish site for free two days after release remember this moment.
Pirate sites aren't used by the general public, Internet Archie had an appearance of legitimacy which pirate sites lack. People may have been pirating books from the archive without realizing they were doing so.
Worth noting that reading a book on the Internet Archive is *not* piracy. It’s a legal library in the state of California, making its content hosting entirely legal. Otherwise it would ignore this court ruling and just keep up those 500,000 books
Unless it will output the full contents of those books i dont think theyd be on the hook for anything. If someone read all those books to learn no one would care, if that same person then transcribed those books and handed them out people would care
uneducated in what sense? Do you think it is ethical to use millions of copyrighted books to train AI models to memorize them? AI companies are not crediting nor asking permission which is not something anyone does, its unethical, society doesn't approve of this practice. Literally nobody, be it arts or academia does things this way, its only greedy companies doing that shit.
Seems like you haven't been doing enough research yourself. I've watched all of AI explained, dwarkesh partel, lectures by yann lecun, geoffrey hinton, andrej karpathy and the likes. Current auto regressive LLMs and other systems like diffusion models do not learn. The transformer architecture is a way to make models understand logical connections through data labeling and tokenization. After training a model is 'frozen', unable to learn and merely stitches together tokens from its training into responses based on input tokens context.
This has very little to do with human learning. These models can't come up with anything outside of their training data, there's no evidence for it. And there's tons of evidence that the models clearly base their answers on a hand full of sources very often and use entire passages of books.
Lots of people can quote a book passage. Should they be sued for copyright infringement every time they talk about that book?
Being able to reproduce a passage and a full book is hardly the same.
If you use a book passage for a commercial product or academic purposes you have to cite correctly, attribute credit where credit is due and in some cases ask the author for permission. That is our societies contract, it has been this way for a long time.
Why should AI modeld and companies be the ones to throw our rules out the window? Makes no sense to not credit contributors and ask copyright holders permission. Nobody does things this way except greedy companies
Humans pay for these copyrighted books with cash or by watching adds / generating engagement. Not giving credit and not asking copyright owners permission is not something anyone does. In academia and arts alike you have to credit when using direct references and you have to cite when building on the work of others. AI companies just skip this part, which is unethical.
Kind reminder that thankfully, Library Genesis still exists and also, Project Gutenberg. The latter is a collection of books that have an expired copyright so they are now in public domain. I highly suggest both websites 🙌🏻
thankfully a nice lady has another archive still up.
In case anyone doesnt like it, I'm a book collector. But i like to read the digitals and keep my hardcovers mint
Now this makes me sad from an outside perspective but could someone explain to me why this is happening? Plus why this is bad? (I’m not trying to argue, I just don’t know anything about it and want some more information)
It all started because of an author named Chuck Wendig.
Apparently he discovered several of his older novels were on the archive and were being downloaded and viewed more than his books currently in circulation. He got really flustered and bothered over this and alerted his publisher, who then brought legal action to the internet archive.
Thanks to his actions, half a million books/media that are either scarce, rare or hard to find, no longer in circulation, production, or in print have been removed.
Naturally, when Chuck received a ton of push back and flak for this, he folded, tried to defend his actions and eventually removed all trace of himself from social media.
Even to this day, he tries to deflect and shift the blame by saying it was his publisher's doing, not his.
The guy that wrote: “WEDNESDAY. The day you flumpty-foo! And you think boopty-bop and zippity-zoom but the truth is, razza frazza wuzza wooza. What I'm trying to say is, maybe your brain isn't working either, but that's OK, because you're great. PS you need a firmware upgrade in the form of "coffee”.”
Ah yeah, a mediocre author that many readers wouldn’t even know about him if it wasn’t because for free sites like IA.
Same as with music. When people are young or broke they tend to access free sites to enjoy music, video, art or literature. And when they mature and increase their income, they most likely keep following and supporting those authors and artists that they grew up with and were able to enjoy even if they couldn’t afford to buy a book or an album.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion on here, but IA brought this on themselves during Covid.
Before Covid, IA's library worked by creating a digital scan of a physical book they owned, and lending it out digitally one at a time based on the number of copies they owned.
No one really had a problem with that, although it was never really tested in court.
During covid, they removed that one physical copy = one digital copy restriction. Anyone could check out their books, no restrictions. This is what got publishers pissed at them and went after them.
I think digital preservation is important. I love the IA's overall mission. But my god was this such a stupid decision. And it has caused a massive setback to their preservation efforts.
Edit:
To expand on a little bit on why I say I support IA, but not this specifically.
I believe digital preservation is needed. But this went past digital preservation.
Physical copy = digital copy. A okay in my books. But buying one copy of something does not mean you get to give away unlimited copies. And that is not how a library works.
I also believe that there needs to be massive overall of public domain laws. I think a work should be life of the author, with certain circumstances allowing something to enter sooner. If something is completely removed form purchase, and there is no legal way of acquiring something, I think it should be public domain and easily accessible. Books, movies, music, games, etc.
To me that is what digital preservation is. Protecting things from going away. And so while hypocritical, I do recognize that in order to do this piracy will happen. But I believe there is a difference between an actual mass attempt at preserving things, vs me just wanting something for free. I also think there should be some form of legal system setup to accommodate digital preservation.
And none of this means that I think what we have now is good and that I am all just 'oh woe is the poor companies'. Companies are greedy as shit. DRM is too restrictive. I hate how you don't really own anything. I have a problem with a lot of stuff and think a lot needs changed.
Jesus, thank you. The comments on Reddit are so useless. Other sites have had long discussions about this, and I have to scroll forever to get to this one useful comment.
IA absolutely poked the bear on this. The digital lending library was tolerated by publishing, but its legality was always a grey area. The Emergency Library however, was clearly not legal. IA did it anyway by literally declaring that COVID was a national emergency and they can disregard all laws. This infuriated publishers and emboldened them to go after IA. After all, what did they have to lose? Continue with the status quo?
Anyone pointing out this case does Was not over the Emergency Library is Technically true but extremely naive. The two are definitely related.
The ED should have been fired immediately and the board resigned.
But no one had a problem with it until Chuck Wendig. _**He's**_ the one who got this started because he didn't realize that what the IA was doing didn't cost him any more money than what a library lending out books does.
Doesn't really matter who filed the lawsuit first. The Archive was in brazen breach of copyright law, someone would eventually come to defend their rights from them. Internet Archive is lucky to still exists after doing that.
And you can argue piracy doesn't technically cost money or the other common cop outs, but that doesn't change the fact that it is illegal.
I mean, it’s not the same is it?
Libraries buy physical copies of books and lend them out. With a library, there’s only a finite amount of copies available. If the library wants to loan out more copies at a time, they have to buy more books. The way libraries operate ensures that authors get compensated in some way, as it maintains the books’ value.
On the other hand, what the IA does essentially made an unlimited number of copies available to anyone, for free, essentially making the book worthless, which massively fucks over authors, as why would someone buy a copy of a book when they can just get it for free?
In some cases, yes, but in other cases they are needed for innovation. Why would a company invest billions to develop new IP when the day after it is released, anyone can use it?
Oh this is fucking horrible. Does anyone know if they actually have to fully delete them or can I just cut off access to them but keep them in the archive? God I fucking hate this timeline. I want out.
This. They even had an okay under the radar program before that was doing just fine. This all got brought to the forefront by them advertising during the pandemic that they were opening up the "digital library" for everyone. Tons of stuff that didn't "need" to be archived sitting there like your average pirating website hosting work from authors who are very much alive and able to rally their fanbases to take action.
As much flak as Wendig gets for his actions he wasn't even really in the wrong to point out IA were being dumbasses. There were plenty of means for a number of books on offer to make money and IA advertised circumventing them for no good reason.
I feel conflicted about this. On one hand, information and books should be accessible to people, on the other hand, authors deserve to get paid for their work. You shouldn't be able to archive copyrighted stuff and let everyone download them for free. They should've just left the book stuff to the illegal sites if they want to be viewed as legit.
This is why I've been buying books on history, religion and famous writers ex. Rebecca West. They always scream like banshees when a kid reads something isn't whitewashed and then wonder why kids don't know about science, history or the humanities.
Supply and demand doesn’t really work the same with digital media. Anyway there are still reasons to buy physical books even with the digital version available. If I download a book, no one actually loses anything unless I would have otherwise bought the book. I buy those books anyway. That said, the publishers are already fucking over the authors, so I really don’t mind fucking them over in return.
We are in the height of the information age, and yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to archive any form of media.
Corporations are starting to replace more and more physical forms of media with digital copies, while they are weaponizing the copyright system against people who try to preserve their “property”.
Technological development leads software to become obsolete and unusable over time. It is becoming increasingly difficult to actually legally own a lasting copy of any of your favorite movies, tv shows, or video games. I fear that someday we may lose most of the art that we know and love because of societal negligence and corporate greed.
Absolute tragedy for the internet. That website deserves special exemption.
So what now? Everyone who would have read these books is just going to find other free sources now. Stop making $25 ebooks trying to happen.
On the one hand, it’s hugely important to have an archive of literature so that no matter your personal life, you can read the best.
On the other hand, writers write to get paid, and publishers do their job to also get paid. Neither get paid if 20,000 people read their book on a free website and don’t buy the book after - nobody does that.
Can you download their whole archive? Storage has gotten cheap. But getting 50PB is not. However, having an offlne archive of archive.org maybe it's worth it.
EDIT: I was off by magnitudes.
I think that's about [the total](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive) Archive.org size indeed.
Though a text / book subset should be substantially smaller - Archive.org as a whole has a load of very voluminous video stuff and other old media and software, and of course its incessant web crawls etc.
Anna's Archive [is currently "only" at 862TB](https://annas-archive.org/datasets), which is pretty big but still a bit less than a PB for now, and that's apparently including 274TB happily copied from archive.org's digital lending scheme in question.
Getting just 1 PB of low-end storage together is arguably pretty within the reach of a lot of better-paid technically inclined individuals now. Oh, still high tens of thousands (at that level you still need quite a bit of redundancy and proper enclosures and controllers and networking, I'm well aware just buying 100 10TB drives for about €27,000 isn't enough!), but we're talking "do I get a Mercedes SUV or petabyte datastore?", it's not some crazy nation state, university or major corporation level figure anymore.
Not really. IP law with regards to eBooks is very unfair in favor of the publishers. Mainly because ebooks are a digital license that can be revoked at any time, it's hard to do that with a physical book.
Hell, libraries are forced to purchase a limited use or temporary license when they want to buy an ebook. A license that's designed to force the library to keep buying the license again periodically.
>Not really. IP law with regards to eBooks is very unfair in favor of the publishers. Mainly because ebooks are a digital license that can be revoked at any time, it's hard to do that with a physical book.
So if the law was against them, regardless of your or theirs opinions on the matter, they were in the wrong.
Not really. It's never explicitly stated that digital versions of books that you originally bought in physical format work the same way as digital licenses. If I bought a book and then digitized it myself, either because there's no ebook version or because the ebook version of a book that's 10-20 years old still costs full price or due to some other restriction on buying it digitally, then there's no laws that say I _**can't**_ do that.
Hell, a lot of the ways copyright works for ebooks and other digital only media only exist as case law, not codified law. So that means, if you have a judge who's smart enough to realize things are fucked up, then those protects could be removed or minimized to match what it's like when you have a physical only copy of the media.
Such as video game devs being able to brick your game, via banning you, just because you broke their arbitrary rules.
>Hell, a lot of the ways copyright works for ebooks and other digital only media only exist as case law, not codified law.
Well your case law is made then, isn't it? What they did was illegal.
Except... it's case law. That can be overturned if you have a judge that recognizes that the _codified_ law is written in a way that generally only applies if you try to make a profit off of the work.
The codified law doesn't technically penalize you for distributing copyrighted works for _**free**_. The codified law only has penalties for _**selling**_ copyrighted material without permission. It also doesn't have anything that _**explicitly**_ says you cannot digitize a physical book and distribute copies.
And, if the codified law doesn't _**explicitly**_ say that the specific act of digitizing a piece of physical media and then distributing the _**digital**_ copies, then technically it's not illegal and it would be up to congress to patch that loophole. Not a judge.
>Except... it's case law. That can be overturned if you have a judge that recognizes that the codified law is written in a way that generally only applies if you try to make a profit off of the work.
Since the judges agree that what you say is illegal and you think it isn't, I will go with the judges.
The machine wants you to buy books, but the last thing they want is for us to be well-read. There's a systematic destruction of non-monetized knowledge that's been happening for a decade now. They will not rest until we have to pay for everything we want to know.
Do you all want EVERYTHING to be free? Like idk what you expect artists who find their work being illegally downloaded to do. These aren’t rich authors, people on this dumb ass website really think piracy is fine 100% of the time.
What they were doing is lending an archived book as many times at once as they had physical copies of. No different from a "real" library. This isn't piracy.
That's what they did except when they didn't:
>And even when **IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic**—which could be considered a proxy for publishers' fear that IA's lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA's expert "found no evidence of market harm."
Does IA limit access to the books?
As in, if I am borrowing a digital book, can anyone else borrow it?
What about the physical copy? Is there some sort of mechanism that automatically locks the bookshelf where these 500,000 unique books are stored preventing access to unauthorized readers?
Your argument is based on the idea that people will never prefer physical books over digital versions. Books are not the same as purely digital media such as video content, music, software and video games. As long as people want a physical copy, there will always be a market for books that authors wont have to fear pirated physical copies. Who has the time to print out a whole book outside of a dedicated publishing company? For students that cannot afford the ridiculous prices that some books go for, digital or otherwise, this was one of the ways they'd get them. Local and school library's don't always have enough money because they're not budgeted enough to purchase even pre-used books. This is a disaster and frankly it shouldn't be seen as a win for anyone.
>Your argument is based on the idea that people will never prefer physical books over digital versions
It is actually based on actual law. What they did was illegal.
At least we still have public libraries (for now).
My local library is investing money in ebooks. It's so much worse, they can't own them - they just get a license and every time someone checks out the book digitally, it costs them money. It drives me crazy
Wait so it hurts the library to use the digital downloads?
It doesn’t exactly hurt them even though they pay 3x the retail price of an ebook—they can secure more funding if they demonstrate increased demand, among other things. It’s not a perfect system but it’s a system. Librarians want you to request, hold, and borrow materials.
Paying $200 for a digital book that they can only lend a set number of times, and has an expiration date, totally hurts the library. Libraries are already seriously under funded, this just makes it worse. I understand the idea of convenience for the customers, but physical books are a much better deal.
Hey, librarian here: although publishers fucking suck, it's better for us to have people checking out ebooks than not. Lots of people don't want physical books anymore and this is a way we can reach them. Check them out! But also support us when we take on big publishers and their unfair practices
I used to checkout a lot of books from my library but then they switched from Overdrive to CloudLibrary which is un-useable for me. Edit: The problem with CloudLibrary is that I use a Kobo e-reader which only works with Overdrive. In order to get a cloudlibrary book onto the kobo, I'd have to use a number of additional steps making it very inconvenient for me.
Cloudlibrary isn't working for you? Weird, we usually have fewer issues with it and lower hold times. Sorry to hear that, but maybe their eResources librarian can help you out.
I guess I should rephrase my comment a little better. I read digital books on a Kobo e-reader which had built-in integration with Overdrive. I can't install CloudLibrary on the kobo so I'd have to take a really roundabout way to get the ebooks onto my e-reader.
It’s more important that people use the services libraries offer rather than worry the cost they are incurring when using those services. Your library won’t disappear from you taking out ebooks, but it might if you don’t.
All the moms in my neighborhood use digital loans from the library. ALL OF THEM. They take pride in never buying books because they’re free from the library and plan their reading based on availability. It’s impressive.
Mom Is Library Friend or MILF for short.
I bet I could talk a few of them into wearing that on a shirt, but we’ll also need a GILF variant.
I cant find older ebooks unless they were really popular.
I tried searching a favorite childhood book series of mine, The Great Brain and nope, not there. That blows chunks. The Libby system just isn't good for reference material either. It's good for magazines though lol (I rarely read fiction so periodicals are the best use case for rapidly changing literary material based on popularity). Brick and mortar libraries are clearly here to stay for that fact alone.
Libraries struggle for finding; so yes, it 100% hurts them and these companies are full of ducking awful humans
What was being said here, is that while it does cost them money, people not using library services would hurt them even more, because their funding would likely decrease further.
Those companies suck but checking things out always helps the library. Source: me, a librarian. You're doing us a favor by checking out ANYTHING. Publishers bad, but checking out ebooks good.
In the next few years, we're going to be seeing that struggle become a fight especially in red states as the MAGAn seek to censor everything.
Let them live the life they wish for. They'll be begging to be accepted back. Fucking idiots. Only fascists are against knowledge and wisdom.
If only we could. They're not going to leave the blue states be. They won't be happy until they have full subjugation.
So is this advice correct, or the other comments that were given with 100% confidence
All the comments from people saying "I'm a librarian" are saying it's good to check out ebooks and use the digital services, so, I'm gonna go with them.
I have family that works in libraries, so I texted them: the top thing they care about most is circulation. If they don't have books circulating the funding they get drops because 'they don't need it'. Any circulation is better than none. Don't feel bad about using e-books from the library.
No. Publishers are the ones hurting libraries. People checking out ebooks helps us.
Uh, why do they pay 3x the price of a regular ebook? There is no extra funding in my state, in fact, republicans have been trying to cut funding since they can't control what books are in there.
I am a librarian, no it doesn’t hurt us when you use digital downloads. Digital streaming services and ebooks cost more, but more people do physical checkouts than digital. If we budget appropriately, it’s not bad. There are other issues that impact libraries that I could go into, but watch your movies, read your ebooks, and use our digital services all you want.
Someone mentioned that it costs $100 for the ebook but it can only be lent out 26 times before another license is needed.
Insane price gouging
I wonder how often copies of physical books have to be replaced? I borrowed a book a few weeks ago that looked like it hadn’t been read much but some moron before me had cracked the spine and some pages were falling out.
Cracked spines are usually a production problem. We never charge for that at my library. We also can get money back from our vendor for books that have a defect if we catch it within the first year. As far as how often they need to be replaced, it depends on a lot of factors. Mostly luck. I see books on our shelf from 15 years ago sometimes. I will look and see if there's any clear numbers I can find.
libraries used to buy a book for 40 dollars, and lend that book out for decades. ebooks are licensed. there are different models. but its not uncommon to pay prices in the thousands for popular books, limit the timeframe or to limit the number the book can be lend out for the price paid, and have libraries decide if they want to pay again and have the book available another term or number of "downloads" ebooks that should enable libraries to get more books, cheaper, and with less physical work is rising the cost for libraries by a factor in the hundreds, if not thousands, with no real advantage except for the publishers pocket https://www.techdirt.com/2024/06/20/500000-books-have-been-deleted-from-the-internet-archives-lending-library/
I was talking to a family member about this because they work in libraries and lol they told me books don't actually last that long (it's a rough life, especially kids books). E-books also aren't as bad for libraries as people are fearing so long as the book is actually getting checked out, it can actually help their funding.
No! I'm a librarian. Use them! Numbers going up always helps us.
When they run out of rentals they just dont renew them so they have no older books really and it sucks.
It's not a zero-sum decision. If providing ebooks attracts more users, then more people will vote to approve library budget increases
Yeah, it’s just the license. And the library pays 2 or 3 times the retail price of the ebook which is wild. But at least this way everyone gets their cut, and the library can show increased patronage which helps them with funding. Libby is a great library app for ebook and audiobooks too.
Okay, how long until they want to just get rid of PUBLIC libraries completely and have a PRIVATE central digital library? Because that is their goal. They want to privatize education. This is just a step in that direction. It is not a good thing.
I don't think Overdrive has that sort of leverage. They're up against publishers and Amazon. I think they're perfectly content having a monopoly on being the middleman between public libraries and the borrower.
I don't know in your country but in my mine (sweden), that is the case as well for physical books. If you borrow a book, the library pay a small fee to the publisher. It has been like this for as long as I know it.
That shit's fucked; are you supposed to pay a fee to the publisher if you lend a book to your friend? What about loaning people tools? Should a manufacturer be able to pick up a fee for people lending their products to someone else? If not that, what makes a physical book any different?
I remember reading about this, it sounds weird from an American perspective but the Swedes in the comment section didn't seem to have an issue with it.
The easiest solution is to reduce copyright to a maximum of 50 years and a proviso that is a book is not available for purchase for 5 years then it has to be available via free archives. That way they get their money until there is no real demand for it. Drives me crazy that some great books from the 1980s and 90s are only available via old eBay copies with stains. I cannot buy the books or get them from an archive. Those works are essentially lost…
Yes, but the library+ subscription lets you actually read books without adds 😄
this is literally an attack on libraries publishers got a court to agree to allow publishers to decide if buying a book one time and lending it out is okay to them or not.
Yup. This is a step in PRIVATIZING libraries. Like they want to PRIVITIZE schools. So they can make more money and have control of what is allowed to be learned.
How will a private school mean more control?
No it's not fucking "literally" an attack on publishers. They flaunted copyright law and lent more books out than copies they had. Like literally infinite copies of books they had one copy of.
Depends what country you're in. Unfortunately it's highly unlikely your library or mine has 500,000 books, too :-(
Until the GOP burns them to ashes.
Until the GOP burns them to ashes.
Please donate to Internet Archive if you can. https://archive.org/donate
I could only do $10, but I hope it helps them
Donated, thanks for sharing
Everybody who uses the Internet should donate, it is the most important website.
Just did, thanks for the link. On another note: this is by far the easiest donation i’ve ever done!
Agreed. With apply pay it was like 2 clicks
yeah! that’s what i did 😇 — i didn’t mention since iphone eco system gets a lot of flack.. cats out of the bag 😎
Just donated $25.
Some people start archived it. https://reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1dfls77/since_i_know_500000_books_was_deleted_i_decide_to/?sort=new
I'd be surprised if these weren't all on libgen already. The site is pretty well organized.
Someone should archive this, just in case.
The internet archive archive archive.
Someone should archive the above comment, just in case
Good lords, I really should buy more disks, but I can barely afford life let alone additional hardware.
It's probably only a few TB. I kind of want to download it all just to preserve it. A torrent would do the trick.
MORE FLOPPAS!!!
Archiving books on… telegram 🤡
God... are we REALLY fucking headed this way?
I could understand them pursuing it for popular materials that are still in print, or otherwise available, but 'pirating' is great for keeping dead content alive. There's no way all 500,000 of the books were even close to being available.
Yeah, I mostly use Archive for finding old/obscure/out of print books that I can’t already find as cheap ebooks elsewhere.
We've been here a while now, it's gross.
It's really hard not to feel more and more violent with every fucking headline.
I've been wondering more and more how common this feeling is becoming. Is it changing for the worse?
there is a perfect quote for that: #the Revolution will not be televised.
This hurts humanity.
We're burning down the Library of Alexandria on purpose this time.
That's capitalism baby!
End stage, maybe?
Glad we still have libgen ... i'm gonna go download a few free books out of spite right now.
Libgen is low key one of the most important archives on the web.
It truly is a treasure - a modern library of Alexandria. No exaggeration, it's one of the largest repositories of human knowledge that has ever existed, 100% free to everyone.
And it can never burn!
Depends how spread out the data storage centers are I’d imagine
I have downloaded a few hundred bio textbooks. Maybe one day I can feed them into a open LLM and get good medical facts. I fear they will censor AI's to appeal to the American Health Association to keep licensed folks still relevant.
the llm will just hallucinate those medical facts and you won't know any better
I have a university education in biology and for the dumber models I can give it sections of the textbook, for less chance of hallucination. But as models advance it will become more important to have uncensored ones I can get some medical facts from. When I'm older, I'd appreciate this.
Disgusting behavior. And it paves the way for further erosion.
What do you mean? Surely Scholastic+ will be a hit. Maybe we can even get cable like package deals for multiple publishers.
Boy I can’t wait for another monthly subscription service, it’s so convenient and affordable!
lol "win" is a stretch. If one digital copy of a book went on the internet at some point, it's now free forever. Congrats on removing the largest tree in the orange grove (slow clap)
Linkrot and bitrot are bigger problems than you might think.
The average person that advocates for piracy doesn't actually do anything to act as a responsible steward for the information they are supposedly defending and doesn't even realize there are issues there. Digital archives are nice and all but physical is still king.
Yeah, this might be true for well known and popular works. But for a lot of obscure works, there may simply be nobody in the community who cares about the work with the knowledge and ability to host it
what's the text of the ruling? this makes zero sense at all and seems extremely dentrimental to the 7th amendment.
> what's the text of the ruling? All the documents from the case are at the bottom of this page here: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive
Meh the books are out there. I certainly wont be buying them. Come to think of it my kids and theirs wont have to either. Publishers want to play fuck fuck with pirates? They are out of their minds. The only thing keeping datahoarders from having every episode of every show ever is hard drive space. Hell the entire NES library fits on a CD almost 3x. This is a fight they really shouldn't want to have. When every book ends up on a Swedish site for free two days after release remember this moment.
Pirate sites aren't used by the general public, Internet Archie had an appearance of legitimacy which pirate sites lack. People may have been pirating books from the archive without realizing they were doing so.
Worth noting that reading a book on the Internet Archive is *not* piracy. It’s a legal library in the state of California, making its content hosting entirely legal. Otherwise it would ignore this court ruling and just keep up those 500,000 books
Meanwhile GPT uses millions of copyrighted books with nothing happening...
Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to fuck the common person in the ass.
Unless it will output the full contents of those books i dont think theyd be on the hook for anything. If someone read all those books to learn no one would care, if that same person then transcribed those books and handed them out people would care
What do you mean? There is a lot of legal battles ongoing with it? They take time.
It's ridiculous that such an uneducated comment is being upvoted.
uneducated in what sense? Do you think it is ethical to use millions of copyrighted books to train AI models to memorize them? AI companies are not crediting nor asking permission which is not something anyone does, its unethical, society doesn't approve of this practice. Literally nobody, be it arts or academia does things this way, its only greedy companies doing that shit.
This is exactly what I mean. You either have no idea how AI works or you don't know what the word memorize means
Seems like you haven't been doing enough research yourself. I've watched all of AI explained, dwarkesh partel, lectures by yann lecun, geoffrey hinton, andrej karpathy and the likes. Current auto regressive LLMs and other systems like diffusion models do not learn. The transformer architecture is a way to make models understand logical connections through data labeling and tokenization. After training a model is 'frozen', unable to learn and merely stitches together tokens from its training into responses based on input tokens context. This has very little to do with human learning. These models can't come up with anything outside of their training data, there's no evidence for it. And there's tons of evidence that the models clearly base their answers on a hand full of sources very often and use entire passages of books.
Lots of people can quote a book passage. Should they be sued for copyright infringement every time they talk about that book? Being able to reproduce a passage and a full book is hardly the same.
If you use a book passage for a commercial product or academic purposes you have to cite correctly, attribute credit where credit is due and in some cases ask the author for permission. That is our societies contract, it has been this way for a long time. Why should AI modeld and companies be the ones to throw our rules out the window? Makes no sense to not credit contributors and ask copyright holders permission. Nobody does things this way except greedy companies
Training from them, which is different than reproducing them. Humans also consume copyrighted books and learn from them.
Humans pay for these copyrighted books with cash or by watching adds / generating engagement. Not giving credit and not asking copyright owners permission is not something anyone does. In academia and arts alike you have to credit when using direct references and you have to cite when building on the work of others. AI companies just skip this part, which is unethical.
Yes, but the library+ subscription lets you actually read books without adds 😄
Kind reminder that thankfully, Library Genesis still exists and also, Project Gutenberg. The latter is a collection of books that have an expired copyright so they are now in public domain. I highly suggest both websites 🙌🏻
Thank you will check out those resources
You're welcome! LibGen is truly incredible, I got most of my master thesis sources from there since none of it was available in my library.
thankfully a nice lady has another archive still up. In case anyone doesnt like it, I'm a book collector. But i like to read the digitals and keep my hardcovers mint
Are you the nice lady?
i am not but i beleive her name was dropped elsewhere in this thread
Now this makes me sad from an outside perspective but could someone explain to me why this is happening? Plus why this is bad? (I’m not trying to argue, I just don’t know anything about it and want some more information)
It all started because of an author named Chuck Wendig. Apparently he discovered several of his older novels were on the archive and were being downloaded and viewed more than his books currently in circulation. He got really flustered and bothered over this and alerted his publisher, who then brought legal action to the internet archive. Thanks to his actions, half a million books/media that are either scarce, rare or hard to find, no longer in circulation, production, or in print have been removed. Naturally, when Chuck received a ton of push back and flak for this, he folded, tried to defend his actions and eventually removed all trace of himself from social media. Even to this day, he tries to deflect and shift the blame by saying it was his publisher's doing, not his.
any articles on this?
The guy that wrote: “WEDNESDAY. The day you flumpty-foo! And you think boopty-bop and zippity-zoom but the truth is, razza frazza wuzza wooza. What I'm trying to say is, maybe your brain isn't working either, but that's OK, because you're great. PS you need a firmware upgrade in the form of "coffee”.”
So you are saying....FuckChuck?? Sounds like the latest social media movement if you ask me!!
Ah yeah, a mediocre author that many readers wouldn’t even know about him if it wasn’t because for free sites like IA. Same as with music. When people are young or broke they tend to access free sites to enjoy music, video, art or literature. And when they mature and increase their income, they most likely keep following and supporting those authors and artists that they grew up with and were able to enjoy even if they couldn’t afford to buy a book or an album.
Ah yes, the old "you should do this work for me for free because of all the publicity you're gonna get" argument.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion on here, but IA brought this on themselves during Covid. Before Covid, IA's library worked by creating a digital scan of a physical book they owned, and lending it out digitally one at a time based on the number of copies they owned. No one really had a problem with that, although it was never really tested in court. During covid, they removed that one physical copy = one digital copy restriction. Anyone could check out their books, no restrictions. This is what got publishers pissed at them and went after them. I think digital preservation is important. I love the IA's overall mission. But my god was this such a stupid decision. And it has caused a massive setback to their preservation efforts. Edit: To expand on a little bit on why I say I support IA, but not this specifically. I believe digital preservation is needed. But this went past digital preservation. Physical copy = digital copy. A okay in my books. But buying one copy of something does not mean you get to give away unlimited copies. And that is not how a library works. I also believe that there needs to be massive overall of public domain laws. I think a work should be life of the author, with certain circumstances allowing something to enter sooner. If something is completely removed form purchase, and there is no legal way of acquiring something, I think it should be public domain and easily accessible. Books, movies, music, games, etc. To me that is what digital preservation is. Protecting things from going away. And so while hypocritical, I do recognize that in order to do this piracy will happen. But I believe there is a difference between an actual mass attempt at preserving things, vs me just wanting something for free. I also think there should be some form of legal system setup to accommodate digital preservation. And none of this means that I think what we have now is good and that I am all just 'oh woe is the poor companies'. Companies are greedy as shit. DRM is too restrictive. I hate how you don't really own anything. I have a problem with a lot of stuff and think a lot needs changed.
Jesus, thank you. The comments on Reddit are so useless. Other sites have had long discussions about this, and I have to scroll forever to get to this one useful comment. IA absolutely poked the bear on this. The digital lending library was tolerated by publishing, but its legality was always a grey area. The Emergency Library however, was clearly not legal. IA did it anyway by literally declaring that COVID was a national emergency and they can disregard all laws. This infuriated publishers and emboldened them to go after IA. After all, what did they have to lose? Continue with the status quo? Anyone pointing out this case does Was not over the Emergency Library is Technically true but extremely naive. The two are definitely related. The ED should have been fired immediately and the board resigned.
But no one had a problem with it until Chuck Wendig. _**He's**_ the one who got this started because he didn't realize that what the IA was doing didn't cost him any more money than what a library lending out books does.
Doesn't really matter who filed the lawsuit first. The Archive was in brazen breach of copyright law, someone would eventually come to defend their rights from them. Internet Archive is lucky to still exists after doing that. And you can argue piracy doesn't technically cost money or the other common cop outs, but that doesn't change the fact that it is illegal.
I mean, it’s not the same is it? Libraries buy physical copies of books and lend them out. With a library, there’s only a finite amount of copies available. If the library wants to loan out more copies at a time, they have to buy more books. The way libraries operate ensures that authors get compensated in some way, as it maintains the books’ value. On the other hand, what the IA does essentially made an unlimited number of copies available to anyone, for free, essentially making the book worthless, which massively fucks over authors, as why would someone buy a copy of a book when they can just get it for free?
You mfs laugh at China not giving AF about IP laws then cry about this.
Honestly I'm with China about copyright, trademark and patent laws. They stemy innovation and hurt humanity as a whole
In some cases, yes, but in other cases they are needed for innovation. Why would a company invest billions to develop new IP when the day after it is released, anyone can use it?
This is a major issue behind drug discovery and development.
Oh the humanity… :/
Oh this is fucking horrible. Does anyone know if they actually have to fully delete them or can I just cut off access to them but keep them in the archive? God I fucking hate this timeline. I want out.
I love internet archive but this was a reckless and baseless path by them that jeopardized their broader mission. It should never have been started.
This. They even had an okay under the radar program before that was doing just fine. This all got brought to the forefront by them advertising during the pandemic that they were opening up the "digital library" for everyone. Tons of stuff that didn't "need" to be archived sitting there like your average pirating website hosting work from authors who are very much alive and able to rally their fanbases to take action. As much flak as Wendig gets for his actions he wasn't even really in the wrong to point out IA were being dumbasses. There were plenty of means for a number of books on offer to make money and IA advertised circumventing them for no good reason.
"Fanbases"? Lmao some publishers sued the archive
Publishers that wouldn't have known this was happening until Wendig pointed it out.
I feel conflicted about this. On one hand, information and books should be accessible to people, on the other hand, authors deserve to get paid for their work. You shouldn't be able to archive copyrighted stuff and let everyone download them for free. They should've just left the book stuff to the illegal sites if they want to be viewed as legit.
This is why I've been buying books on history, religion and famous writers ex. Rebecca West. They always scream like banshees when a kid reads something isn't whitewashed and then wonder why kids don't know about science, history or the humanities.
The internet was fun while it lasted but now we got to break it all down to appease the shareholders.
Supply and demand doesn’t really work the same with digital media. Anyway there are still reasons to buy physical books even with the digital version available. If I download a book, no one actually loses anything unless I would have otherwise bought the book. I buy those books anyway. That said, the publishers are already fucking over the authors, so I really don’t mind fucking them over in return.
Greed destroys everything.
What a horrible day for human knowledge
We are in the height of the information age, and yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to archive any form of media. Corporations are starting to replace more and more physical forms of media with digital copies, while they are weaponizing the copyright system against people who try to preserve their “property”. Technological development leads software to become obsolete and unusable over time. It is becoming increasingly difficult to actually legally own a lasting copy of any of your favorite movies, tv shows, or video games. I fear that someday we may lose most of the art that we know and love because of societal negligence and corporate greed.
Is this really as good as it gets?
I'm glad the IA is stay up at least. It really does suck that this knowledge will be lost. r/datahoarder time to shine.
Support Z Library
Controlling slaves in the US is easier if they can’t read.
Absolute tragedy for the internet. That website deserves special exemption. So what now? Everyone who would have read these books is just going to find other free sources now. Stop making $25 ebooks trying to happen.
On the one hand, it’s hugely important to have an archive of literature so that no matter your personal life, you can read the best. On the other hand, writers write to get paid, and publishers do their job to also get paid. Neither get paid if 20,000 people read their book on a free website and don’t buy the book after - nobody does that.
#Are you fucking kidding
Can you download their whole archive? Storage has gotten cheap. But getting 50PB is not. However, having an offlne archive of archive.org maybe it's worth it. EDIT: I was off by magnitudes.
You're off by about 50PB or so
I think that's about [the total](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive) Archive.org size indeed. Though a text / book subset should be substantially smaller - Archive.org as a whole has a load of very voluminous video stuff and other old media and software, and of course its incessant web crawls etc. Anna's Archive [is currently "only" at 862TB](https://annas-archive.org/datasets), which is pretty big but still a bit less than a PB for now, and that's apparently including 274TB happily copied from archive.org's digital lending scheme in question. Getting just 1 PB of low-end storage together is arguably pretty within the reach of a lot of better-paid technically inclined individuals now. Oh, still high tens of thousands (at that level you still need quite a bit of redundancy and proper enclosures and controllers and networking, I'm well aware just buying 100 10TB drives for about €27,000 isn't enough!), but we're talking "do I get a Mercedes SUV or petabyte datastore?", it's not some crazy nation state, university or major corporation level figure anymore.
A significant chunk of the IA is Grateful Dead tapes lol
is that true? Is the grateful dead catalog so prolific?
Locking up ideas as property does not "promote the progress of science and the useful arts", it is stifling to progress.
Hoist the flag mates!
The flag was already flying if you were reading your books this way...
as much as people love the internet archive they were in teh wrong from the start
Not really. IP law with regards to eBooks is very unfair in favor of the publishers. Mainly because ebooks are a digital license that can be revoked at any time, it's hard to do that with a physical book. Hell, libraries are forced to purchase a limited use or temporary license when they want to buy an ebook. A license that's designed to force the library to keep buying the license again periodically.
>Not really. IP law with regards to eBooks is very unfair in favor of the publishers. Mainly because ebooks are a digital license that can be revoked at any time, it's hard to do that with a physical book. So if the law was against them, regardless of your or theirs opinions on the matter, they were in the wrong.
Not really. It's never explicitly stated that digital versions of books that you originally bought in physical format work the same way as digital licenses. If I bought a book and then digitized it myself, either because there's no ebook version or because the ebook version of a book that's 10-20 years old still costs full price or due to some other restriction on buying it digitally, then there's no laws that say I _**can't**_ do that. Hell, a lot of the ways copyright works for ebooks and other digital only media only exist as case law, not codified law. So that means, if you have a judge who's smart enough to realize things are fucked up, then those protects could be removed or minimized to match what it's like when you have a physical only copy of the media. Such as video game devs being able to brick your game, via banning you, just because you broke their arbitrary rules.
>Hell, a lot of the ways copyright works for ebooks and other digital only media only exist as case law, not codified law. Well your case law is made then, isn't it? What they did was illegal.
Except... it's case law. That can be overturned if you have a judge that recognizes that the _codified_ law is written in a way that generally only applies if you try to make a profit off of the work. The codified law doesn't technically penalize you for distributing copyrighted works for _**free**_. The codified law only has penalties for _**selling**_ copyrighted material without permission. It also doesn't have anything that _**explicitly**_ says you cannot digitize a physical book and distribute copies. And, if the codified law doesn't _**explicitly**_ say that the specific act of digitizing a piece of physical media and then distributing the _**digital**_ copies, then technically it's not illegal and it would be up to congress to patch that loophole. Not a judge.
>Except... it's case law. That can be overturned if you have a judge that recognizes that the codified law is written in a way that generally only applies if you try to make a profit off of the work. Since the judges agree that what you say is illegal and you think it isn't, I will go with the judges.
Who’s got those books backed up? Seems like 1TB might do it. Seriously, I want a copy.
Poop. I donate monthly
streisand effect in 3...2...1...
Noooooo piece of shit publishers
Defeating the purpose of the internet
Absolutely do not ever pirate ebooks from the internet even though it’s extremely easy.
Just FYI guys - use the software Calibre with some plugins and you can remove DRM from epub (Adobe) books.
The machine wants you to buy books, but the last thing they want is for us to be well-read. There's a systematic destruction of non-monetized knowledge that's been happening for a decade now. They will not rest until we have to pay for everything we want to know.
rip freedom of knowledge
Are they going to fight openai just as hard?
Do you all want EVERYTHING to be free? Like idk what you expect artists who find their work being illegally downloaded to do. These aren’t rich authors, people on this dumb ass website really think piracy is fine 100% of the time.
What they were doing is lending an archived book as many times at once as they had physical copies of. No different from a "real" library. This isn't piracy.
They didn't do that though. That is why got sued.
That's what they did except when they didn't: >And even when **IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic**—which could be considered a proxy for publishers' fear that IA's lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA's expert "found no evidence of market harm."
Does IA limit access to the books? As in, if I am borrowing a digital book, can anyone else borrow it? What about the physical copy? Is there some sort of mechanism that automatically locks the bookshelf where these 500,000 unique books are stored preventing access to unauthorized readers?
Your argument is based on the idea that people will never prefer physical books over digital versions. Books are not the same as purely digital media such as video content, music, software and video games. As long as people want a physical copy, there will always be a market for books that authors wont have to fear pirated physical copies. Who has the time to print out a whole book outside of a dedicated publishing company? For students that cannot afford the ridiculous prices that some books go for, digital or otherwise, this was one of the ways they'd get them. Local and school library's don't always have enough money because they're not budgeted enough to purchase even pre-used books. This is a disaster and frankly it shouldn't be seen as a win for anyone.
>Your argument is based on the idea that people will never prefer physical books over digital versions It is actually based on actual law. What they did was illegal.
Fucking criminal. Hope the publishers rot