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While it may seem odd, there are not many difficulties in adapting this model to the digital world: instead of buying a book and throwing it away after forty people check it out, a library simply buys a license to circulate an ebook forty times. Functionally, it’s the same. The problem is that where previously libraries could buy any book they liked on the open market for the same price that any individual would pay, the move to digital licensing allows publishers to enforce more fine-grained “library pricing.” Now, instead of paying $10.39 on Amazon for a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and circulating that book until it falls apart, libraries will have to pay whatever publishers demand for the right to circulate a book a set number of times—probably a lot more than $10.39. It’s likely as well that libraries will eventually be competing with the literary equivalent of Netflix for the right to circulate ebooks. But while this new regime may force circulating libraries to cut back on the number of titles they provide, it won’t threaten their basic existence. Once publishers determine the market price to circulate a book, they will be all too happy to charge libraries that price.
omg fuck this
At the moment, most licensing arrangements for university libraries are set up so that students and faculty can log in and use the databases not just from the physical library but from anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours a day. University libraries can afford to pay for comprehensive access because they have a limited and well-defined user base—in the case of NYU, around 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. The New York Public Library can’t buy similar licenses because it has 1.9 million cardholders. “When a publisher hears that they get very nervous,” Denise Hibay, the library’s head of collection development, told me. That’s because if the New York Public Library did somehow persuade a company like ProQuest to let it buy licenses on the cheap, then NYU (and every other college and university in town) could just stop paying ProQuest and tell all their students who want access to sign up for a library card and log in through the New York Public Library.
abolish proquest tbh
We assume that the internet can only make it easier and cheaper to access information, but what the internet really does, when it’s commercialized, is commodify information. In the future, publishers will be able to determine exactly how often a specific book or article is accessed, try a few different prices, and charge whatever turns out to be most profitable. If that profit can be generated by selling advertising, then the book will be made available “for free”; if not, users will be forced to pay. In the case of romance novels, this means “ad-supported books”; in the case of scholarly journals, if you don’t have an institution to support you, it means paying $5.99 to “rent” a single article for one day, the price currently being charged by Cambridge University Press.
[...] The work the new Latino immigrants find—at construction sites or on the line at restaurants—can’t cover a down payment on a mortgage. They’re renters, not owners as their predecessors were, and so subject to owner move-ins and other means of tenant eviction. The value of properties in the Mission, Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, and Cole Valley, in proximity to the corporate shuttles of Google, Apple, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, and other dot-com employers, has risen 10 percent over the last six months alone. Latino tenants are moving out to Daly City, Stockton, Richmond, Gilroy, and Hayward—some of these places nearly an hour away on the inefficient and inconvenient commuter rail. But every morning they still come in, to build houses they can’t live in and make food they can’t afford.
WHEN ART FAILS TO IMITATE LIFE, even the unafflicted are driven to make their lives somehow imitate art. Building an inner world is exhausting: we look to film and television to show us versions of ourselves, to allow us to process our lives, to excuse them, and maybe to ennoble them. And yet, at this task, Hollywood is notoriously deficient. Some stories do not get told. Some identities are never offered up for examination.
i like this
IF YOU HAD TO PICK the first shot in this conflict, you could do worse than reread the section in The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, former holder of an “assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts,” teacher of “Consuming Narratives,” lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, and casualty of a drug-fueled affair with an undergraduate, heads repeatedly to the Strand Bookstore to sell his large, costly collection of Theory. It is a miniature triumph of realist notation at its most aggressive. Starting with his Marxist theorists, whose collective sticker price of $3,900 is knocked down to $65, Chip works his way through “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers” to raise money for expensive dinners to impress a new girlfriend. Reduced at the end to “his beloved cultural historians,” Chip “piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.” The pathetic, specific numbers, the terribly accurate roster of names (not just famous Continental names, but the kind of American academics that demonstrate Franzen’s realist-insidery expertise): this is what Theory is worth.
Scenes in which the vain things of this world are sold — auctions, foreclosures, negotiations with pawnbrokers — occur often in realist fiction, always expressing the hard principle that our ideals don’t translate into market terms. In the end, our fantasies or desires or self-delusions come to the bar, not of Truth, but of what others will give us for them.
[...] it is wise to be suspicious of those who claim to pursue selflessly the prosperity of others even as they pursue their own. [...]
[...] Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs taught the hackers to think of the people who used their products as assets to extract value from, rather than simple folk who through the kindness of programmers would learn about the infinite power of computers.
McCarthy’s grand vision for domestic computing was notable for being anti-commercial. He predicted that greater access to information would promote intellectual competition, while “advertising, in the sense of something that can force itself on the attention of a reader, will disappear because it will be too easy to read via a program that screens out undesirable material.” With such low entry costs for publishing, “Even a high school student could compete with the New Yorker if he could write well enough and if word of mouth and mention by reviewers brought him to public attention.” The only threat McCarthy could see to the beautiful system he was conjuring were monopolists, who would try to control access to the network, the material available, and the programs that ran there. McCarthy suspected that the ability of any individual programmer to create a new service would be a check on the concentration of digital power, but he agreed, “One can worry that the system might develop commercially in some way that would prevent that.” As, indeed, it has.
John McCarthy, founder of the field of AI, at Stanford
The way Terman saw it, the benefits to Stanford could flow in any number of ways. There were the significant payments from the government to cover overhead costs at the research labs; the expensive equipment donated by companies eager to encourage research related to their specific technologies; the experts from industry who, for similar reasons, became visiting professors in Stanford’s science departments, their salaries paid for in part by their employers; and, more broadly, there was the goodwill Stanford earned from alumni and faculty members who had achieved business success and would give back to the school with hefty donations. The happy coalition of academia, government, and private industry that Terman proposed has been called “the military-industrial-academic complex”; he preferred to call it “win-win-win.”
Fred Terman. there is no such thing as a win-win-win bro