3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror (opens in new tab)

Libraries and books existed long before copyright.

What you are describing is a wonderful result that happens to fail due to our economic system which requires everyone to constantly seek profitable activities to survive. If seeking profitable activity was optional, authors could write books as their passion drives them, and then share them with everyone for free on a global library. Most creators create because they want to do so, and the profit is incidental as they require some profit to survive.

But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.

The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to the premise of libraries.

Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing books for the interested to read them. Any function they provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the mission of most libraries is to support the publishing industry. The history of libraries has been to defend themselves from the publishing industry, which historically has always fought to have them shut down.

The average reader wants a centralized repository of knowledge with a smart search engine. They may not always want to buy the whole book. But hundreds may want to read something relevant and even pay for it. The publishers should notice all this and collaborate with one another to provide what people want.

Instead, they lock up their books in silos, expect separate registrations and logins, demand annual subscriptions upfront, or require university accounts to access. It seems short-sighted to me. Spreading knowledge doesn't appear to be part of their balancing act at all half the time.

The society that used it will grow with the value of the information. That value can then be captured through increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual process.

Since all information released in this process is free-to-use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.

Libraries as in the Library of Congress or the British Library are offered a copy of every book that is published in those countries. And you can go there and read them.

If you’re lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and have the right passport. But if you weren’t, if you have a citizenship that does not come with the right to knowledge, then Library Genesis is there for you.

Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do it.

If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over destroying long term incentive structures that led us here with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned exceptions).

Purchase books. Please.

Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things other than books.

They certainly don't have to operate that way. You could have nearly the same incentive structure (minus the cost of actually commuting to a library) if they purchased their goods and only offered time-limited checkouts up to the number of copies they've purchased.

Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out of financial motivation.

It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks for the craft of writing.

Which is awesome if we are striving to optimize the social benefits of media.

We want to optimally benefit society, right?

Not convinced.

The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.

You aren't losing sales. You are missing them. They aren't being taken away from you, they are passing you by. The result may be the same for you personally, but it's still a critical difference.

You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist. I do know, however, that pretending the old system can still work in the digital age isn't fixing anything for anyone.

My answer to this is that authors (and other creatives) should have a right to recoup the costs (including time) of their efforts, but currently the time period for doing so is ridiculously (too) long.

We're talking decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

In the US, the original copyright term was 14 years, and if the author was alive after the end of that there was another (optional?) 14 year extension:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...

Later, the initial period was set to 28 years, with an optional 14 year extension.

IMHO, if one couldn't make a go of one's work after 2+ decades, then other people really should be allowed to have a kick at the can.

The internet allows us to give everybody on the planet access to world-class educational materials at practically no cost. This is so obviously a good thing for society as a whole that we should strive to see this future materialize. Yes, some authors will lose income, but society as a whole gains greatly when we fight artificial scarcity.

For what it's worth, I think authors should get compensated by some other means, especially when they write great books. But artificial scarcity isn't the answer, it never is.

(The current model is also unfair to authors because book sales follow a power-law curve where a handful of authors take practically all the winnings)

Only hobbyists and people that have something to say independent of monetary value would produce music, books, blog posts, etc.

In this dream I always find weird, interesting thing that challenge or move me in directions that I could not foresee.

But then I wake up and see 10 ways I could make more money or the best 4K display that will make me a 10x programmer and life is back to businesses.

How do you know how much you're losing?

From [0]:

> The average U.S. book is now selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime.

It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact people do not buy books, period.

0: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...

Now, the recorded shows are effectively advertising for the live shows.

You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality.

> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free?

Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?

> I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.

Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't write books for living, do something else. That how the rest of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into something that flops.

Publishing books in the current model is like planting flowers in a public space, with seeds you've just taken from a bunch of other people's houses, and then requiring people who walk there or look at the flowers to pay you. I mean, we should be encouraging caring about the commons in some way. But the creators or copyright holders for cultural creations don't inherently have the power to dictate the schemes they like.

The actual issue is about getting paid for work. I would ask another question to address that instead:

why does getting paid for author's work require limiting access to it?

https://leanpub.com/u/romanpushkin

I wasn't able to find your book in any pirated source. Do you think you're losing at least 50 sales per month from piracy since you sell the book for a suggested price of $20 each?

Not only are you not losing thousands dollars worth of sales a month right now, you also never were, even when it wasn't available for free.

His book was considered "the bible" of that subject, but it was also starting to become old and the community was becoming more established. At that point there were tutorials, youtube videos, other resources talking about the same thing, explaining concepts of that book and so on. So while, in the beginning a user strictly needed to buy the book to have access to those niche information, now info were more readily accessible (even the reddit wiki had basically the same stuff in it). So buying the book was more of a choice ONLY if the user wanted to dive deeper into the subject. All the rest of potential users that a few years back would have bought the book due to the "monopoly of information", now weren't interested in it anymore. Even more established community users only recommended the book as an advanced thing for people that wanted to go to the next step. That's quite an evolution for a product that is guaranteed to lower sales.

Besides this, the community was still relatively niche and this means that doesn't have a huge influx of new users. This means that over time people won't buy his book because the only people interested in it already have it.

The product lifecycle was clear from the data and kinda textbook behavior, with the product having surpassed it's mature phase and been declining. On top of this, for sure piracy further made things worse.

The point is that the author was convinced that piracy was the only reason revenue was dropping. He was convinced that his book (being influential et all in the community) would give him constant revenue potentially forever. That was delusional and so was his analysis.

Are you entirely sure that piracy is the only thing to blame? Maybe that's just one factor in a more complex situation and writing another book is specifically what you need to do. The previous one was successful, you have a brand and an audience to leverage. That's valuable and, maybe you just need to develop a new product because the old one is, well, getting old.

Alternatively: people now trust you, there is some way to monetize that for sure such as organizing events, conventions etc. Make them pay a bit more than you would to recoup the cost of piracy.

In the end it's the strategy used by the GOAT. Bill Gates knew he couldn't fight piracy and also it just charged Fortune500 companies a tad more so they'd essentially subsidize pirates all over the world. Ranging from PirateBay to CD sellers in Subsaharan Africa

- first as an author, want to be read, the more people read your books the better.

- second as a human, you need an income.

Imagine a charity (it could be government taxes as well) paying you proportionally to how much your books are read and providing the books for free to the readers.

What's wrong with that?

You will have more readers and you'll get paid for writing books (according to their popularity).

Do you really want to sell your books? (and get less readers)

Or do you want instead to have as many readers as possible and get paid for that?

* People should receive grants to create things. The grants should come from the value we create as a society with new technology

* The money should be taken from those who benefit from the internet traffic, i.e. large tech companies. Money should be taken from Google and Apple and given to content creators. That is because without content, Google and Apple would not exist

* We can already say that ads do this a little, but it's not enough. And ads are annoying and unsustainable and they also encourage slimy practises such as extreme SEO optimization

* Therefore, I propose a heavy tax on the largest tech companies, especially CEO salaries. That money should go to a government trust and content creators will get an income whenever they produce something people like

* For example, it could be made available for free but yet the author will be compensated. How much and how to measure its worth still needs to be figured out.

I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place. The RIAA's members tried the same propaganda and it didn't work then either.

I've published a few short stories and made $27.00. Like 99.999% of authors cannot live off of writing. It's like acting. If you include all the actors the average yearly salary is like $2,000. Some fields are just like that, and I'm not convinced that there's anyway to change that for either career. Nor am I convinced it should be. With programming I'm not paid for the work I've done, I'm paid for the work I continue doing. Why is writing supposed to be any different? Because publishers like it that way? They pay the author once, and get paid for 120 years?

And honestly as an author my biggest issue isn't that I'm not making much money, it's that almost no one is reading my work. I didn't do it for the money. And if I could charge less than $1 on amazon, I would.

Like they cannot see that they’re inserting themselves in between the readers and the authors, whom they effectively try to steal the money from. Authors of course can also only continue to write books if they’re getting paid for it. It’s truly parasitic behavior.

I’m sorry this happened to you and I share your pain. :(

I don't think people have the right to spread work that isn't theirs, but i also don't think you can assume the book will always make the same amount of money, or that book pirates were ever your customers.

To answer the question: Because just spreading information does not violate anyone's rights.

The vast majority of the writing I consume is free or donation supported and I personally donate around £1500 a year to a range of authors after having read and found their writings useful.

This is a far superior model to paying in advance, you get access to far more writing and the authors get paid.

http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Roman+Pushkin&open=0&res=25&...

Oh interesting question. I could probably answer but need some information first. What % of revenue went to you and what % went to the people who printed the book, chopped the trees, made the pulp, delivered the books across the world, etc? My guess is probably 10-50% to you, and the rest to the others. Am I close? That's probably fair.

Now, what % of your proceeds did you send to the creators of the letter "A", the letter "B", et cetera? Or did you use a different alphabet that you yourself created?

Was the book written in American English? If so, what % of your revenue are you sending to the widows and orphans of American soldiers killed in the wars who died protecting our freedom, language, and values?

Once I get those data points I can probably answer your question.

First is the unfairness of the system. Disney and other publishers have lobbied to push copyright up to the ridiculous life + 70 years using their political power. Publishers collectively have a totally ridiculous entitlement to governments being compelled to spend public money on enforcing their monopolies. So if you're say living in poorsville, you have no realistic opportunity to wait for your book to be published for free, because any work that is copyrighted during somebodies lifetime will be copyrighted until they're dead. Sure there's libraries but if your book is obscure enough it may not be available in one.

The second reason I'll give is accessibility. If your book isn't offered in a free electronic format from a library, and somebody is blind, and they can't afford the kindle, they're out of luck. The publishing industry has no problem being exclusionary towards disabled groups so long as it enables a better profit model, pirates on the other hand are totally inclusive and scan everything making everything OCRable.

So besides accessibility/fairness arguments, I'll also bring up that paying for books is a really shitty way to support authors. I paid $250 for physical books this week. Am I a hero to authors? Not at all. Maybe $200 of that went to the estate of some authors and most went to the publishers. $50 of it went to authors maybe closer to scraping by, for whom piracy can mean not putting food on the table, it means having to give up authorship. However of that $50 maybe $5 went to such authors. So I paid $250 and gave $5 to authors who really needed it. Does this prove I give a shit about authors? I think it proves that I don't, if somebody cares about authors they'll pirate the ebook and directly donate $250 to them.

Finally there's the issue of how books are secured. Frankly the legal methods for acquiring books are frequently broken and bad. DRM that auto-deletes books from people's devices is an abomination. Waitlists for ebooks are the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life. A huge reason people use zlibrary is their local library has broken software and it's like 8 steps to download something. Most of the money is in Amazon, so that's what gets funding to make the ebook/audiobook experience as seamless as possible for the wealthy of the world.

My proposal to fix all these issues would be for public libraries to require public ID authentication to download books, for copyrights to essentially ignore copyright, and then based on which books are being downloaded to compensate authors out of a public fund. This would not come with any enforcement efforts to shut down pirate sites (due to censorship/privacy concerns and concerns with the library's software being broken, not everybody has to use the library just a good number of people do), the libraries would essentially act as a voting system to direct monies to different authors which you could also use as an e-book distribution mechanism. This makes the availability of books for the wealthy contingent on them financing books for the poor, the disabled, and compensating authors.

Until such a day happens, if somebody pirate $100 of a books and donate $30 to some random author I think they're a better person that somebody who buys legally. We're in times where lawlessness enables the most ethical option available, so you know, maybe the law is screwed up.

Or you need to find a different business model other than revenue from sales. If you have an audience of a few thousand people, especially in a narrow professional field, you can monetize it.

Book will help you to establish your authority. Then, you can use this authority to make profit. Sell courses, lections, offer consulting services, etc.

Grow up.

But I'm with you. Sell it and fuck it. If the guy made a million and you're happy with $1, all the better we are for it.

The Google web search infrastructure consists of dozens of different services hitting hundreds of different databases, most of which obviously contain PII. We're talking about layer upon layer of abstraction and refinement. Thinking that there's one 'algorithm' to be open-sourced which tackles one of the most sophisticated software problems we've ever concocted is a bit juvenile, IMO :)

It's annoying to me that obscure 1980s children's books from authors no one's heard to are out of print and hard to find, but here's a science history book by one of the most famous authors around, and it's out of print with no ebook ever published. I can buy a used trade paperback for $35, use OpenLibrary, or pirate a PDF.

B) Disney would like to have a word about when something becomes the public domain.

Substitute "book" for "any creative work" for bonus points.

"This paragraph is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends! Join the fight hero."

/s

Like, I don’t think it’s right to spend thousands of lives and decades of time of slave-labor building the Great Pyramids, but it’s absolutely a Wonder, and nobody denies this.

This library project is absolutely a Wonder, however right or wrong you might ultimately believe it to be, and as the poster said, it has been attempted many times and never come anywhere close to this effort.

Because it doesn't help at all. The first four letters of an onion URL are unimportant because they can be chosen with little effort, as you describe.

Following random links and following random links that start with "zlib" is the same thing.

There is also another source of revenue for them you've omitted: Amazon unlimited.

But besides that I think you're overstating the quality issues. Most successful webnovel authors write really well and have proofreaders before the chapters get released to the general public. Sure, there are extremely bad works too, but they're not really getting money either.

But it is ironic, at least, that the organization is asking for money ...