This is important for blind people too, since a lot of stuff like Kindle, Apple Books and such, use DRM. That means that if I wanted to read a book on my Braille EReader, without using my phone which adds another device, another battery, and so on, I'd have to un-DRM the book. Lately though, Kindle have changed their DRM stuff so the tools used don't work anymore. So getting them from these types of sites; thankfully EPUB versions are available, is the only way I can choose what device I read my book on.
It's a bit like using emulators to read text from the screen using OCR.
This is great to hear. We've put a decent amount of time into accessibility when building the site. If you have any feedback for us on this, that'd be very helpful!
David K Levine; Michele Boldrin - Against Intellectual Monopoly (2008)
> So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps
Plenty of others to tickle the norms; eg two editions of, and commentary on:
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1975)
~ E.F. Schumacher
“Small is Beautiful is E. F. Schumacher's stimulating and controversial study of world economies.
This remarkable book is as relevant today and its themes as pertinent and thought-provoking as when it was first published thirty years ago.
Small is Beautiful looks at the economic structure of the Western world in a revolutionary way.
Schumacher maintains that Man's current pursuit of profit and progress, which promotes giant organisations and increased specialisation, has in fact resulted in gross economic inefficiency, environmental pollution and inhumane working conditions.
Schumacher challenges the doctrine of economic, technological and scientific specialisation and proposes a system of Intermediate Technology, based on smaller working units, communal ownership and regional workplaces utilising local labour and resources.”
Schumpeter pointed out that innovation is rarely the result of free market regimes but instead of monopolistic competition. A situation in which individual winners temporarily capture markets and use high surplus returns to fund fundamentally expensive innovation. In dynamic economies usually a handful of firms dominate in the medium term. They're replaced across time, they don't compete in the same space. More and more complex and developed economies naturally move towards this because progress requires immense capital.
Under conditions of extremely free markets firms profits are reduced due to competition, consumers capture immediate value, but the sectors remain stagnant. An example are many service industries.
This also applies to open source software. it is by its nature extremely competitive and as a result almost all value is captured by its users. This is great at any given point in time, but it also means that open source software is constantly underfunded, and research is in fact ironically driven by surpluses of large firms.
All effortful "culture" comes from surplus. And investment is crucial, not marginal.
Let us not forget that the surplus need not be astronomical to create innovation - e.g. some innovative design comes from a shop¹, some comes from very expensive prototyping. Still surplus, but on remote points in the scale.
If the circulation of tools is curbed, surely the freedom to progress is limited. Comparatively in outcomes to other scenarios, that is to be analyzed. But surely a reply to Schumpeter should be found in Levine and Boldrin: their work is explicit part of the discussion against competing theories.
In modern capitalism, resources are not invested to find better ways to create things, but to find better ways to lock people out of the things you create until they pay you.
> This is great at any given point in time, but it also means that open source software is constantly underfunded, and research is in fact ironically driven by surpluses of large firms.
> ... and use high surplus returns to fund fundamentally expensive innovation
We might still see examples of this, but in the more than 70 years since Schumpeter developed his theories, the financial sector as well as state spending (military budget, infrastructure, public research, pension funds, etc.) expanded a lot. So there are many other sources for large capital needs available today.
Thanks for sharing, found this interesting. Presumably this could be quantified/tested empirically? Are you aware of evidence in favor? What would be the strongest case against this position?
Presumably there are NBER papers etc arguing this to death, but I don’t know the literature.
"Monopolistic competition" only exists between states at war, since any "monopoly", by definition, has no competition in the same polis.
Willing to confuse cause with effect for a moment, is it true that innovation has mainly been the child of centralized monopolies competing under their respective wartime governments? ...mayyybe... but much of what they did militarily was built on the back of peacetime (or at least freelance) amateur discoveries by their respective member bodies.
That's actually why, supposedly, America "won" the cold war. We promoted the birth of Mom's Garage Engineering.
[edit: Strike. "Engineering your home PC in your mom's garage" is what I meant to say. And clearly, that more than any military/industrial/monopolistic program has made America the dominant power in the global technocracy today.]
> In his earlier view (emphasized in The Theory of Economic Development, originally published in 1912), Schumpeter highlighted the function of entrepreneurs who is carrying out new combinations. He viewed the occurrence of discontinuous and “revolutionary” change as the core of “economic development” which breaks the economy out of its static mode (“circular flow”) and sets it on a dynamic path of fits and starts. Three decades later, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter took the view that dynamic capitalism was executed to fail because the very efficiency of capitalist enterprise would lead to monopolistic structures and the disappearance of the entrepreneur
> Schumpeter took the view that dynamic capitalism was executed to fail because the very efficiency of capitalist enterprise would lead to monopolistic structures and the disappearance of the entrepreneur
Which seems to be more or less spot on, except that 'the entrepreneur' also includes the lucky few that end up with the new monopolies.
Hi J.; I am not sure about your interpretation but if I understand correctly, the reply would be:
that «fail» refers to the spirit of entrepreneur-iality, i.e. the dynamism centered on innovation. Schumpeter was called (by Joan Robinson) «Marx with the adjectives changed»: his idea was that innovation be "the driving force of capitalism", but since efficiency creates bloat, the lean becomes heavy, the dynamism becomes bureaucracy, the "entrepreneur" becomes a """manager""" (an insulting label in Sch.), capitalism proceeds towards atrophy and finally transforms into socialism. In Schumpeter, "entrepreneur" means "the dynamic innovator"; the monopolistic phase is that of the heavy bureaucracies - that would be the failure. The Schumpeterian school (Sch. died in 1950 - crucial time) deals consequently with "why socialism did not happen".
If it was you that hit my parent post: I only reported that quote to help the poster asking for a bibliography - the paragraph contains reference to the two main books, with short descriptions left to the writing researcher (my own competence on Schumpeter is minimal). I am not personally defending their theories.
He addresses it in IIRC chapter 7 & 8 of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. But another more recent book I'd recommend that takes this kind of framework is The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato.
I followed the "blog" link in the footer and found some interesting posts, like this one [0] about the technical and operational details of running the archive.
> Cloudflare does not accept anonymous payments, so we can only use their free plan. This means that we can’t use their load balancing or failover features. We therefore implemented this ourselves at the domain level. On page load, the browser will check if the current domain is still available, and if not, it rewrites all URLs to a different domain.
Are there any free and open source tools for load balancing that rival Cloudflare’s paid offerings?
I fully agree with them, copyright is a limited monopoly granted by governments. It doesn't have the properties of private property, it's an artificial limitation to creative work/ideas, which is basically unlimited by nature. It's government intervention creating scarcity where there isn't scarcity, it's an evil intervention of government on the free market.
Really cool archives. Another project you might wanna check out is DocuWiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki the software). It often gets looked over because it leverages the Ed2k network but it's often been the only source I've found for certain rare documentaries
I don't get it, on the frontpage you have books like "Harry Potter", I'm fairly sure that's not open source or even available for free distribution. It also seems counter intuitive that you get preferential treatment if you login, why would that be the case, if it's truly open?
In this case open-source does not mean only open-source books. Anna's Archive is a shadow library, they also maintain a pirate library mirror. So you can think of them like an anarchist(?) archivist?
I think only the high-speed direct downloads require logging-in but other downloads and torrents are freely available.
Violating copyright is the whole point. The contention of this archive seems to be that Project Gutenberg is in fact not "open," because it's constrained by its adherence to copyright laws.
You're missing the entire argument. The argument here is that they are not pirates, because copyright is stifles the spread of knowledge and should therefore be completely abolished.
Whether you get it or not is something different all together. But that's what people are fighting for.
Where do they discuss the topic ? as much I loved zlib .. I cannot forget that copyrights is what allows knowledge to be spread most of the time. If people couldn't at least live from their writing (not even make a big profit) how else would book emerge ?
Somewhere, a publisher is giggling as they change the constants in problems in an otherwise unchanged first semester physics book with an upcoming new edition.
I think a lot of good books never pay their authors much, at least in proportion to the effort that goes into researching and writing them. Scihub was also violating copyright, but academic paper authors don't get paid by publishers; they the journals. Lots of intellectual labor goes into producing a good where the author would much rather you read it without paying than buy it but not read it.
This is all to say, the publishers, who are perhaps no longer needed in the 21st century, are sales motivated, but there's at least a substantial category of authors who are not.
Project Gutenberg has been fought (censored, blocked, sued) by statal entities, like germany and italy - it may happen because of occasional improper insertions, or because of local legislation inconsistent with that which the Project references, or because of bestiality of the attacker.
The Internet Archive might be better example, depending on your definition of open. They have over 4 million books archived. I believe Project Gutenberg have around 70k.
The Internet Archive include books still in copyright, which can be read by "borrowing" them virtually.
Reminder: based on the idea that "if the library holds a physical copy it can lend an electronic view over it, respecting the same principle of the physical object, i.e. one user per item per period (i.e. one user per use instance)". Such principle is being fought.
The idea of a shadow library is to disseminate knowledge to everyone, to provide easy access to readily available content which is made inaccessible through paywalls, copyright, or other similar barriers.
At inception, these databases were created to make academic content freely available which generally does not compensate the original publishers. But now it has been expanded to support the knowledge for free movement.
The legal status is questionable as creators can provide their own content to such libraries but their publishers might not agree to it.
oh that's weird are they honeypotting me like if I try to fast-download harry potter the intellectual property police will come at me for violating the wizarding world extended universe franchise
I would expect a nasty letter delivered by an owl, followed by a visit by a stern gandalf looking mf flanked by two furries guards each seven feet tall and armed with a different medieval polearm
2. Spread the word about Anna’s Archive on Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, at your local cafe or library, or wherever you go! We don’t believe in gatekeeping — if we get taken down we’ll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source."
While I wouldn't download books via this website, the search engine is excellent! (Better than Amazon and Google.) Could you consider adding filtering the results by year? Also, just out of curiosity, how much storage does your archive take? I am guessing it is in the order of petabytes.
> Smart question: How much do the politicians who made this illegal care about YOUR finances?
How is that a smart question? You very likely can’t name the "politicians who made this illegal" because haring others’ intellectual property without permission has been illegal by definition since the beginning of intellectual property.
The front page of Anna’s archive makes it clear they want to organize the would’s information, and make it universally accessible, so no.
The next question is why the courts would say that Anna’s archive is illegal, but Google is not.
There are some tests around encouraging copyright infringement, and Google is very careful to pass those tests despite providing extremely similar services over similarly-illegal sites.
The mental and legal gymnastics required for all this are fascinating. I suggest studying internet IP law.
Are you really asking what's the points of making almost any book freely available online?
This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but could not easily get it for whatever reason.
You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry, but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast, reliably or at all.
I mean libraries are a thing, but it's a logistics problem. My local library has thousands of Dutch language books, how is an expat or student in the US going to get to them? And that's between two countries with good relationships and transport links - although said transport is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people.
Consider another argument: book bannings are a thing in the US again, a facist practice [0]. Making these banned books accessible to all despite the bans is a clear anti-facist statement and move.
You may have missed a t-shirt photographed a couple of days ago, on a demonstrator, going along the lines of "We do not delegate education to the state" (oblivious of the principle that schools are there to fix the issue of faulty parental education, and conversely parents orient the children which are necessarily exposed to the world). it is from a group that demands censorship - it counts over 100'000 members. I understood they are also those who want the genitals of Achilles and Hector covered on Greek urns (or them urns hidden altogether from culture, "what is their use").
And of course, each similar group has a different set of "books to burn".
I was in a Kindle Book Club some years ago. The idea was to pay a little fee, from which books are centrally bought. Which books to buy was decided by voting. The books then would be shared with the members. There were never more concurrent users than copies purchased.
Buuut, apparently that violates some TOS and Amazon was terminating the accounts. So it's back to the shadow libs.
You could always buy DRM free books, or destructively scan + OCR dead tree books.
For destructive scanning, the obvious question is why you’d go through the trouble and not upload it to some sort of shadow libs.
I get the impression that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back to piracy as a moral imperative.
I was happy paying for HBO Max due to the high quality original content, but then they fired all the actors.
So, there was an implicit social contract (you produce tv/movies that generate revenue, we distribute it, and pay you for the next one), but now it has been broken.
From a customer perspective, paying the middle man, knowing the people that produced the product will not be paid is immoral.
(Yes, I know residuals exist. That’s not good enough.)
There are some books for which official ebooks don't exist.. but those ebooks appear on Anna's archive. And they are well done conversions, not just OCR copies.
There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist.
I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in both collections.
Kindly present your arguments explicitly, because it is unclear what you mean - why this would be unimportant, why that more important etc. We cannot invest hours trying to reconstruct a "best interpretation".
It's a bit like using emulators to read text from the screen using OCR.