Comment by jonhohle
2 hours ago
Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sale was great while we had it, but digital makes it obsolete? When you die, screw donating your collection of “licenses” to somewhere productive; those contracts died with you? Everything is streaming, so you never purchased anything anyway?
It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.
I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them too. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.
> They don't share much
Why not?
As society's repositories of knowledge, I feel like AI should fall under libraries. Especially considering how AI utilizes others knowledge/text they don't legally have rights to. The carveout we made slightly similar (in that they have special rules for their use) is for libraries.
Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.
Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.
The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is.
A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?
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Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...
But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.
can I donate my ebook to them?
> It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.
You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.
That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-
This right here is why I either (1) still buy physical media [my preference], or (2) make sure all digital media I purchased is DRM free. With my physical media, I digitize it, then store the media for any future use.
I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.
We need to create libraries like Anna's Archive that are impossible to take down.
Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.