Book commerce
Author: lamescholar - 2023-09-22
Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.”
And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciplesa went out of the city.
Recent lawsuit against Internet Archive endangers digital book lending.
What is the Internet Archive? It’s one of the biggest foundations dedicated to industrial-scale digitization of books, music and films. Unlike many other foundations this digitization undertaking doesn’t lock up the digitized materials “for the future”, practically eradicating recent cultural heritage for modern generation. Internet Archive found a loophole in modern copyright law to lend an ebook to one person at a time, as public library do with paper books.
Why it’s important to give access to digitized materials? Why “preservation for the future” isn’t enough? There are two moments of cultural preservation. To physically preserve cultural materials is half of the problem. Another, essential half is granting access to these cultural materials. If we let this lag of 70 years to exist, we will never live up to the future, when we will be able to explore, acquire most recent cultural developments. Think about it. Librarians, researchers, archivists - small group of people who have access to it write endless amounts of descriptions, catalogues, reviews… for no one, but each other and future enthusiasts. It’s a stolen culture enrichment. Why? Why it is stolen?
“As physical libraries closed their doors in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet Archive launched what it called the National Emergency Library, removing the “own-to-loan” restriction and letting unlimited numbers of people access each ebook with a two-week lending period. Publishers and some authors complained about the move. Legal action from Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House - a list that includes three of the print industry’s “Big Five” publishers - followed soon after.
Publishers took aim not just at the National Emergency Library, however, but also at the Open Library and the theory of CDL (controlled digital lending, loan to one person at a time. - lamescholar) in general. The service constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale,” the complaint alleged. “Without any license or any payment to authors or publishers, IA scans print books, uploads these illegally scanned books to its servers, and distributes verbatim digital copies of the books in whole via public-facing websites. With just a few clicks, any Internet-connected user can download complete digital copies of in-copyright books.” More generally, “CDL is an invented paradigm that is well outside copyright law … based on the false premise that a print book and a digital book share the same qualities.”
Because bunch of publishers would lose their profits. Even if they don’t reprint the books, they won’t allow the print to others, because they keep the rights on them as an asset. This whole situation shows hopelessness of using the legal loopholes to try, at least one reader at a time, grant access to books for everybody. The solution is direct exchange ran by people for the people without regard for copyright law. Only this will allow unconditional access to books for everybody.
What can you do? Spread the means of piracy. Digitize materials you got and spread them.