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How to find free ebooks while libraries are closed:
Shelter in place orders throughout the country haven't just brought the economy to a grinding halt, but frozen civic infrastructure as well. Sure, water still flows from our taps, police and firefighters are still on the job, but your local library likely isn't considered an essential service. But that doesn't mean you can't ride out this plague with a stack of good books by your side, they just might be of the digital variety.
Your first order of business should be to check in on your neighborhood library branch. Systems throughout the US have begun offering "second line" services -- from 24-hour free wifi and homeless services to emergency childcare and foodbank distributions -- to help their communities through these difficult times.
What's more, even if your local doesn't have physical books for borrowing, many now offer a variety of online services to augment their closed locations. A recent study by the Public Library Association found that while 98 percent of the 2,500-system respondents did have to close their buildings to some extent, among them 76 percent continued, expanded, or added online renewals for already-borrowed books while 74 percent built or expanded their e-book and streaming media collections.
The San Francisco Public Library, for example offers a smorgasbord of online classes and workshops, e-books and e-magazines, newspapers, streaming music, and virtual storytimes for the smol ones. LA County shut down its central branch and all 72 satellites in response to COVID-19 but is similarly offering music, movies, books, magazines, remote learning resources and workshops through its web portal. Chicago's public library system has also shuttered its branches but is offering to pipe ebooks directly to your Kindle for anywhere from 1 - 3 weeks. You don't even need to worry about "returning" them, they'll automatically remove themselves from the device once the borrowing window has closed. The public libraries of both Boston and New York have followed suit.
If you're a university student, be sure to check in with your campus library for its ebook collection and access to a variety of temporarily free remote learning and teaching applications. University presses around the world, including MIT, Cambridge and Duke, are offering free ebooks and course materials during the quarantine to their students and faculty. And if your school licenses content from Project MUSE, a multidisciplinary collection of e-books and online journals, you've hit the motherlode. More than 80 publishers have signed on to make their content free during the outbreak.
"The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to the global scholarly ecosystem and its institutions. This move is our way of helping to ease the burden on students and instructors so that they can continue research and coursework as smoothly as possible, as well as to honor the work of our authors in making their research available when the world needs nuanced and rigorous scholarship the most," Tony Sanfilippo, Ohio State University Press Director, said in a recent press release.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 13 2020, @10:12PM (4 children)
The question I want answered is, why do we even need to ask where to find writings? They ought to be freely available, period. Available all the time, not just during an emergency. And available unlocked, free of any and all DRM.
Part of the problem is the very name, "book". Prints are indeed scarce. E-"books", however, are not scarce.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday May 13 2020, @10:28PM (3 children)
The majority of the cost of producing a book is in paying the writer, editors, etc. a semi-fair wage for 8-15 months of full-time work; the price of producing physical copies is actually minimal.
Feel free to put in the long hours required to become good at writing fiction, complete a book, edit it (not just for typos, but for inconsistencies, weaknesses in the plot, etc.), and then give the product of your efforts away. For a regular-length book (not counting the practice needed to become competent), that's at least the equivalent of eight months of full-time employment. (There are authors that pump books out at a much greater rate, but their quality tends to suffer greatly over time.)
Otherwise, consider that low-quality amateur-written stories are freely available all over the Web, and it's only the experienced, successful professionals that (gasp) actually expect to be paid a fair wage for their work. Not all that different from any other profession.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 13 2020, @10:48PM (2 children)
I did not say authors, editors, and others who work on writings should go unpaid.
I do however object to trying to perpetuate a system that worked okay when copying was harder, but now that copying belongs to the masses, does not make any sense. Publishers may choose whether to roll with this massive change, develop and refine other business models, or go out of business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @11:39PM (1 child)
> ... develop and refine other business models ...
Lots of people working on this problem--have you seen any model that actually works and results in more than pennies to the author (or artist in the case of streaming music)?
You can beat on the publishing industry all you want (and some of the abuse is justified, imo), but the publishing companies have been responsible for paying advances that supported a lot of good work, that wouldn't have been created otherwise.
Here's an example, Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorite authors) was a SAAB salesman for awhile, when TV took away the market for his early short stories--until he worked out how to sell fiction and support his family. These days he probably would have stayed in the car business--and we never would have had "Slaughterhouse-Five."
[PDF warning] https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/MSADA-AUGUST-Vonnegut-single-pages.pdf [vonnegutlibrary.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:41PM
> have you seen any model that actually works and results in more than pennies to the author (or artist in the case of streaming music)?
Why, yes. I believe Humble Bundle is doing quite well. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are two other names that I think of when thinking of crowdfunding, though there are many others.
ASCAP imposes levies on restaurants and other businesses that play music. They use copyright to do it, but we can certainly come up with other mechanisms. Copyright is too blunt. Like trying to fill a cup of water by flooding the building. They have overreached, also, extorting money from any place that plays music regardless of the copyright status, but apart from that I am generally okay with their business model.
There's also the AM/FM radio and TV model of interleaving paid advertising among the songs and shows. Seems to be working okay still, though with constant tension about the acceptable ratio of commercial time to show time -- 25% appears to be about the most that viewers and listeners will tolerate.
> publishing companies have been responsible for paying advances that supported a lot of good work
Yes, and I thank them for that. But they've more than worn out the welcome and gratitude, by viciously and hysterically biting the hand that feeds them. They have willfully misunderstood the problem. Instead of leading the way towards a fair solution, they have resorted to force to try to keep change from happening. The things our greatest stories warn against, they won't see that they're doing it. They're the villains now.
I am especially disappointed in authors, many of whom have supported these efforts to criminalize copying, and have even propagandized on what they believe to be their own behalf. Metallica I recall being particularly notorious for that. It is even more nutty to encounter this in SF. The author tries to take us on an imaginary journey into the future, when humankind has grown tremendously in power and knowledge, but jars the readers out of the story by having in the story copyright as we knew it in the 20th century. Steampunk is kind of fun. But, copyrightpunk? An example of this can be found in Hyperion, which is a Hugp Award winning novel, no less.
Another reason to abolish copyright is that it poisons our thinking. Would it surprise you to realize that the great Tolkien, of Lord of the Rings fame, fell for it, hard? The story has a very Goth flavor to it, lots of drama over losses of all sorts, and ruins everywhere. And, one kind of loss that is overdramatized is the loss of knowledge, because lots of important things were not recorded or if recorded, not copied, like the password to get into Moria. The words on the One Ring, yes, but only one copy in one place, no others. The elves of Rivendell should have had the password to Moria recorded. Instead, Gandalf thought he had to hack his way in. Fortunately, they suck at security. Password stayed the same for over 1000 years, and was in fact written down in what would be plain text, right there on the door, if anyone could still read the language. But it's not just Tolkien, it's the entire fantasy genre that's guilty of this. To be sure, the fragility of recorded knowledge was indeed a big, big feature of the Middle Ages, but I believe fantasy authors have overplayed that card, out of ulterior and perhaps unconscious motivation.
Copyright is too readily co-opted as a tool of oppression. Indeed, the concept had its origins in the desire of the Catholic Church to maintain complete control over the Bible. It was too holy. Had to be "protected" by locking it away. I always thought it weird that, for centuries, the Church stuck to Latin. Even burned people at the stake for translating the Bible into a common tongue. But if the goal is to maintain the supremacy of the Church, and the people remain willing to take priests at their word on what the Bible says, then they most certainly do not want the masses to have and read their own copies! Ironic that today, the Bible is often held up as a work that should not be protected by copyright, not just because its term has most definitely expired, but because God meant that everyone should have His words, and to keep the Word of God from anyone is a grievous sin.
We don't burn people at the stake today, we're much too civilized for that. Instead, we let the RIAA and MPAA victimize a very few with extreme punishments such as losing all their money, including future earnings, for "making available" only 2 dozen songs, and in addition to the heavy financial penalties, add prison time for running a bittorrent site or just bragging about capturing a few movies on a camcorder, in hopes it will scare the rest of us away from piracy. And these industry advocates have the nerve to say the victims of their witch hunts deserved to lose all their money and be forced to drop out of college, while excusing the reaching, cheating, and lying the industry pulled to sway judges and juries their way as justified in a classic "the end justifies the means" argument.
It's one of many massive failures of corporatism. E pluribus unum wasn't supposed to mean that the concentration of power was supposed to go apeshit and wail that they're actually the victims of an imaginary problem, then exert all their might to reckelssly and carelessly fight said problem at great cost to innocents who happened to get in their way, or worse, were deliberately targeted to provide an object lesson to the rest of us. No, they were supposed to employ their resources to understand things. They were supposed to help find the way to a new system, not fall into the folly of being the Copyright Inquisition.