I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book?<p>Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.<p>I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. Highly <i>highly</i> unlikely, but I hope for it nonetheless. At the very least I'll get to see the "oh fuck what do we do with all these truck drivers" problem get tackled, probably.
Just a reminder for anyone who values the Internet Archive as much as I do: it's easy to set up an automatic monthly donation.<p>If IA were a SaaS, they could easily charge more than my modest contribution and I would gladly pay it.<p>If you only know IA from the Wayback Machine, take a look at the other things they offer and you will find something of interest. I was delighted recently to find that they had digitized my BYTE Magazine articles from the '80s!<p>Of more general interest, IA has the entire Prelinger Archives, including all the wonderful Jam Handy films and A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFire" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/TripDownMarketStreetrBeforeTheFi...</a><p>If you previously saw the original version with the ending that is out of frame sync, this one is cleaned up so you can watch it from beginning to end. Look for the gentleman with the windblown beard when they stop at the Ferry Building.
<i>Hundreds of thousands of books can now be liberated. Let’s bring the 20th century to 21st-century citizens. Everyone, rev your cameras!</i><p>If this was 10 years ago, they would be talking about scanners --- this brings me back to the days when P2P filesharing was absolutely blooming, and people would freely scan and share in various forums ("bookz scene") the books they had either bought or borrowed.<p>The average camera of the time was far less capable than ones today, so digitisations made with one were of lower quality than scans, and in the jargon they were known as "cams" - borrowing the term from the film piracy scene. Nonetheless, everyone mostly appreciated someone "camming" a book, especially if it was particularly rare or difficult to scan.<p>But over time, cameras improved significantly in quality and their speed was unrivaled, so they gradually replaced scanning --- especially with the friendly competition that tended to happen:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830212" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830212</a><p>Seeing that we can now again be doing this completely legally and openly to older books, makes me tremendously happy. Nonetheless, I don't think it can completely replace that sense of adventure and thrill of risk involved in participating in a scanparty a decade ago.
<i>> Now it is the chance for libraries and citizens who have been reticent to scan works beyond 1923, to push forward to 1941, and the Internet Archive will host them. </i><p>If individuals have private scans of rare books (1923 - 1941), how should these scans be delivered to Internet Archive for hosting?<p>Does "not being sold" mean out of print? Used, out-of-print books may still be sold. In fact, that's sometimes the only way to find a (possibly very expensive) copy for scanning and preservation.
Despite their age, many of these books are still extremely readable even by young readers. I thumbed through <i>Frog: the horse that couldn’t be tamed</i> and really enjoyed it. The hand-drawn pictures in the book are also very readable and cool in a retro way. Makes me sad about the current quality of our children’s literature.
Does someone know the difference between what archive.org will take and what Gutenberg will take? It seems like they should just coalesce into one data set, right? I imagine archive.org can easily fit the Gutenberg data set; you can reasonably get it yourself via Kiwix.
I wish this was extended to all stuff under copyright - I think this could do great things in eliminating the abandoned works problem (in my opinion the largest issue of our current copyright regime).