The Slow Cancellation of Online Libraries

On the probable demise of #Libgen and the need for private offline #libraries.

https://networkcultures.org/blog/2024/09/22/henry-warwick-the-slow-cancellation-of-online-libraries/

#books #DigitalSovereignty

@books @libraries

Paywall removed https://archive.is/wK5sZ

Drag showed the Artemis Fowl movie trailer to drag's dragon right before it started reading Artemis Fowl. So far:

Artemis is clearly an evil white collar criminal
Artemis is the bad guy in the story
Artemis is NOT a surfer.

If so, what did you think of it?

I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5845995

Check it out.

Hello! I am currently making a reading tracking website (a la Goodreads, StoryGraph, and LibraryThing) as a personal project and have hit a bit of a wall, so I've come to the internet for ideas.

What do y'all like about your tracking service of choice. What features do you think are cool or important? Are there any things that your service doesn't do that you wish it did?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

So many books have characters remark "it was well past moonrise", or something else equally ridiculous, to show the passage of time at night. ~~The moon cycle is a month long (~27 days), not some paltry 24 hours.~~ If you know any authors please spread the word. Together we can stamp out this astronomical disillusionment!

[EDIT]

A smarter than me commenter below pointed out that, due to the way days work, it does indeed rise and set once a day. Hard to do a complete rotation and keep a celestial body in the sky. Womp womp, I am silly.

I should have instead argued that moon rise and set are not linked to sun rise and set, and that the moon doesn't exclusively rise and set at night. It is possible to have the moon out during the day time. They are on different schedules is all.

What's some books with an interesting vision of the future? I don't just mean more advanced technology, I mean the way it's organized.

I find often people can't envision past the society we have now. There's that quote, "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", and it seems more and more true, but sci-fi authors seem best equipped to actually imagine beyond that.

I've heard some sci-fi authors mentioned in this category before, like Heinlen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

I haven't read any of them lol. Would have no idea where to start within them that fits this category, or what other choices there are that people would suggest.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5600161

Thoughts on this book?

Thoughts on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?

I might watch The Rings of Power but I've heard mixed things on it. What do you all think of it?

Mostly though: I'm hoping that some people here can expand on what I'm reading so far.

'Cause honestly, I do like what I'm reading, I do, and that's because I genuinely like the mythological tone that the world-building takes. And Numenor as an "Atlantis" is a fine way to do things, but honestly, I doubt they'll be able to do much with it in whatever Amazon property they decide to make of it (which, I mean, is fine). I wonder if there are other shows or serials besides The Rings of Power that are coming out? Either way: I really like the beginning and how everything started with music and song.

Your thoughts?

Example: I’m reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville to get back into reading classic books.

When libraries across the country temporarily closed in the early days of the pandemic, the Internet Archive, an organization that digitizes and archives materials like web pages and music, had the idea to make its library of scanned books free to read in an online database.

The question of that library’s legality became a long-running saga that may have finally ended on Wednesday, when an appeals court affirmed that the Internet Archive violated copyright laws by redistributing those books without a licensing agreement.

The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan, is a victory for the major book publishers that brought the lawsuit in 2020, and could set a precedent over the lawfulness of broader digital archives.

A federal court ruled against the Internet Archive in March 2023, and the archive removed many works from its online library of books. It appealed the decision last September.

A final appeal could potentially be taken to the Supreme Court. In a statement, the Internet Archive said it was “reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend and preserve books.”

In its appeal, the nonprofit argued that its Free Digital Library was protected by so-called fair use laws, and that scanning the books was a transformative use of the material done in the public interest. The court firmly rejected that claim.

“People are worried about book bannings and the defunding of libraries, but I don’t know that there is really an awareness of what’s going on in the movement toward license-only access to electronic material,” Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Libraries are “not just a Netflix reseller of books to their patrons,” he added. “Libraries have always been more than that.”

Unlike traditional libraries, which pay licensing fees to publishers to make their books available for lending, the Internet Archive acquires copies through donated or purchased books to scan and put online. The nonprofit is also known for the Wayback Machine, a popular database of past web pages.

Archive link

Recently I decided to start writing a science fiction novel. I reserved a desk in my room for this purpose, I also picked up an old Thinkpad X200 on which I installed Lubuntu 24.04 and plugged in a gaming keyboard for night writing. I chose to install a minimum of applications in order to stay focused.

My main writing App for the moment is Joplin

And you?

Are you writing a book or have you already written one?

What type of tool do you use to write?

Do you have some advice to share?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19239162

The 60,000 books in the Joanine Library are all hundreds of years old. Keeping texts readable for that long, safe from mold and moisture and nibbling bugs, requires dedication. The library’s original architects designed 6-foot (1.8 meters) stone walls to keep out the elements. Employees dust all day, every day.

And then there are the bats. For centuries, small colonies of these helpful creatures have lent their considerable pest control expertise to the library. In the daytime—as scholars lean over historic works and visitors admire the architecture—the bats roost quietly behind the two-story bookshelves. At night, they swoop around the darkened building, eating the beetles and moths that would otherwise do a number on all that old paper and binding glue.

The library dates the bats’ entry to the late 18th century. That’s when records indicate the purchase of large leather sheets from Russia, presumably to protect the hall’s desks and tables from the nightly rain of guano. Employees use the same system today, while the books themselves are behind wire mesh, says the library’s deputy director, António Eugénio Maia do Amaral. (The bats’ tendency to pee next to a portrait of the library’s namesake, King John V, is harder to address.)

TL;DR: Got any of them "banned" book recommendations for kids? We have a 2 1/2yr old and a 6 yr old who love book time

So a recent popular post in politics was about a book that stirred up controversy - My Shadow is Purple, which is the second book in a series (Here's the first).

Local library doesn't have them unfortunately, so I'll be putting in a request (then checking out a local store).

It made me wonder about some other great books out there that more conservative areas might not have. My township is pretty progressive (, but not large, so the school library is only OK. The county library is literally a few blocks away, so no town library. And while amazing as a library, the in-county magas have made the library slow down on some kinds of books. Its ridiculous, but one problem at a time.

So I'm hoping to get some kids books they might not otherwise see, like the My Shadow is Pink/Purple books mentioned, but I don't know what's out there.

Anyone have some favorites to share for the young kids? Looking forward to any ideas!

The term "neoliberalism" gets thrown a lot in intellectual and political discourse, yet with seldom clarity to what it entails. Some may loosely relate it to the de-politicisation of the economy, the weakening of the State in favor of private corporations, or even the revival of laissez-faire capitalism. While one cand find some truth in those assumptions, they inevitably stray from the ideology as conceived by the neoliberal intellectuals of the past century.

Besides narrating the marriage of neoliberalism and human rights (which we will cover later), this book sheds a light on what actually neoliberalism stood for. Whyte contends that what the neoliberals envisaged through their numerous gatherings following the second world war, was a new, global economic order premised on what they have termed the “morals of the market.”

[T]he ‘morals of the market’ were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others. (Intro.)

Far from the early liberal concept of the "invisible hand" or the criticisms by opponents of “amoral economics,” what the neoliberals proposed was state interference for the sake of maintaining individualistic freedom in the market. Neoliberalism is what it is: it is not a return to the old fin de siècle liberal economy, but a solution to the problems that the latter faced.

In developing their moral order, neoliberal intellectuals played with notions of "civilisation" and "anti-totalitarianism." The Mont Pèlerin Society of 1947 met in the context of two fatidical events: the decolonisation movement in the Third World, and the drafting of an international human rights charter. The neoliberal discourse evolved in relation to colonialism and human rights throughout the decades. For instance, while neoliberal intellectuals were critical of the British administration of the colonies for obstructing the competitive market, they saw the decolonial movements as a turn towards "communist totalitarianism" which must be stopped in order to secure global free trade and the extraction of natural resources, in other words "neocolonialism".

Similarly, the intellectuals at Mont Pèlerin Society invoked many critical remarks regarding the UDHR. In particular, they sought to undermine the "superfluous" rights and prerogatives which it included, namely social, economic and cultural rights that, in the eyes of MPS, was a stepping stone for totalitarianism: welfare policies lead to socialism, socialism to communism and finally towards totalitarianism. Their criticism for human rights accrued in degree with the drafting of the human rights covenants which accentuated social and economic rights. However, the neoliberal criticism was not directed towards human rights per se, but the scope of said human rights. These intellectuals adopted a Lockean conception of human rights that limited itself to the protection of individualistic freedom and private property.

The theoretical doctrines of the neoliberals contended with the real-life events in an intriguing manner. Neoliberals supported several undemocratic regimes, namely in Pinochet's Chile where they enacted economic reforms and even defended the political crackdown of the Pinichet regime. This weird stance did not invalidate their defense of human rights and freedom:

Friedman’s argument in Chile was not that political freedom and economic freedom were ‘entirely unrelated’, as Letelier and Klein both argue.40 Rather, he argued that they were intimately related: property rights are the essential foundation of all other human rights, he contended, and a free market is necessary for realising the ‘equal right to freedom’. (Ch. 4)

In addition, the showdown between the neoliberals and human rights NGOs' investigating Pinochet's violations wa sless radical than what it seemed. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Liberté Sans Frontières originated from a similar human rights discourse to that of the neoliberals, which limited the scope of human rights that are worth protecting.

Their [humanitarian NGOs] special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia. (Ch.5)

Whyte's critique of human rights and neoliberalism is very essential in this day and age, especially in a Third World inflitrated by humanitarian NGOs whose agenda serves the interests of global capital and reproduces the injustices of the past century's colonialism and coercive interventions in the affairs of postcolonial polities. Whyte's reference to postcolonial intellectuals such as Fanon and Nkrumah is also very much cherished.

The ending felt somber in the realization that, there is really nothing we can do to save this planet. We're living on borrowed time. The best we can do is help the next apex species realize the mistakes we've made so that they don't repeat them. But maybe I'm just over here dooming. What are your thoughts?

I haven’t read it yet. Just found this in our neighborhood little library 📚