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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

> A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150.

If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay. Also some thrift store chains have certain locations that are book focused.

You can get older edition textbooks for practically free. It's not like Claude Shannon's equations have changed. The old editions are effectively just as good.

I've picked up plenty of classic books, HBR, Drucker, Christensen, Moore, etc ... $2-3 in fine condition. To be honest, half the time it looks unread. Then you can donate them "back into the stream" when you're done for others.

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Also hit charity shops near to universities at the end of the academic year.

About 15 years ago when I was utterly broke I bought 20 text books (good ones like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms-third... ) for .50p a book (they didn't know what they had so I gave them £20 for the lot instead of £10, would have done more but I really didn't have it).

> If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay.

Just google "library genisis" ;)

Back in the 90s tech futurists were talking about having "the library of congress on the size of your finger nail".

Now we actually could do something in that realm (LoC is about ~10tb and there's 1tb microsd cards; we're probably talking "within 5-7 years" without any exaggeration) but there's so many courts and laws stopping it from happening, the great cambrian explosion of knowledge has been held back.

Every local library could store the full digitised book contents of the LoC[1] for about $5,000.

That this isn't happening is a crime.

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Notes:

1. I get about 200 TB based on 40 million books, OCRd at 5 MB per book. A 2 TB SATA 5200 RPM drive runs about $100, and the full collection would fit on 50 such drives. Full optical scans are ~10x larger. The LoC's collection includes another 130 million non-book items. https://www.loc.gov/about/general-information/

Interesting. I web searched and Google told me 10TB so I went with that.

I think we're still within the information revolution and to put it into perspective let's look at the textile revolution.

Clothes used to be expensive. Someone maybe owned 1 or 2 sets, often passed down from their parents. You could easily illustrate your wealth by wearing many layers of fine material. Simply owning many clothes was sufficient to signify great power and prestige.

Then the textile revolution came and today durable well fitted clothes are cheap. Unless you're a fashionista or have children, they are almost unmeasurable in ones budget (children used to wear dresses because it was a practical solution for one garment throughout growing childhood)

But this took generations AFTER the mechanical loom and all the technology existed. The society of clothes making also needed to be overhauled and that took arguably a century.

That's where we're at with information. Our industrialism can create the material requirements for the storing and transmission of information readily, sustainably and cheaply. However our cultural and societal overhaul to accommodate it is still maybe only a 1/3 done.

After the printed word became really cheap with the advertisement supported penny presses of the 1830s it still took about 100 years of public education advocacy before you could safely assume every adult knew how to read. These things take decades because it's a function of generational churn. It's at the pace of human lives

I have a partially written book on this interplay I'll eventually finish one day... maybe people will be able to pick up used unread copies for $2 - I look forward to that day.

Clothes always had a social signalling component. The signalling dynamic shifted, becoming both increasingly accessible, capable of defining increasingly finer social groups, esspecially those not associated with high-powwer or high-status groups (nobility, royalty, clergy, miltitary, artisans, merchants).

Fads-as-signalling shows up in many places if you look for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

Information is ... somewhat trickier. Clothing is manifest and overt. Information ... mostly isn't. (Memes, logos, jingles, musical hooks, and slogans being prime exceptions.) Possession of specific information becomes a credible (expensive to obtain, hard to falsify) indicator of strong group identity --- whether you're talking about membership within a religious sect, programming subspecialty, profession, banking cabal, political party, or neihbourhood gang. Various fandoms seem to be a reasonably benign (for now) expression of this.

Denis Didrot despaired at the overwhelming abundance of information facing him and his fellow Encyclopédists, in 1775. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877

The total number of titles in Europe at the time was about one million. Today, one millon titles are published per year. (http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html) On average, that's one book per 330 Americans. Who read fewer than one book per year, on average.

What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.

Or if different cultures (religious, geographic, professional, political,...) share no common literary or informational references?

> What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.

The mere act of publishing itself is a form of capital and political and social exercise regardless of who reads it.

This is a deep rabbit hole and I don't have time to go into here (there's 2 chapters in this mythical book I speak of on it) but I'll point you in two directions, both centered on xerox

1. As a brief premiere look up the scholarly work 'Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”' - or look into how the open society foundation supposedly helped defeat apartheid south africa and bring down the soviets via copy machines and cottage publications.

2. As a cornerstone of the first step of the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1950s. "ONE magazine", one of the first LGBT magazines using a specific Xerox machine as best I can determine either in Mar Vista or Venice california. Shortly there after, the Mattachine society, a second LGBT rights group, used the same copy machine to do their publication as well. The machine was also used to fight anti-mccarthyist blacklisting publications for the film industry as well. A similar effort happened for civil rights in Jim Crow south (I live in LA so I can do better research on the LGBT stuff since I can drive to the physical archives)

Even if nobody ever read any of these and the publications went into the garbage can, the maturation of thought and the coalition building as a function of the geographic space necessitated by the access to the machines had meaningful political ramifications.

You can also read the book 'Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture' for a decent deep dive on this.

It's all fascinating stuff.

Xerox machines also played a crucial role in the Pentagon Papers story.

You're familiar with Elizabeth Eisenstein? *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

> That this isn't happening is a crime.

I agree and like the discussion you guy's started from my seemingly innocent comment.

I add one argument why I think scientific papers and nonfiction books (Library Genisis) should be free (and legal) ...

You often hear the complaint that so many people are uneducated and believe in conspiracy theories (or other stupid things). This is (imho) problematic for a democracy.

Giving free access to books and papers could really help.

Also a lot of research is founded by tax money and papers are by far the most expensive literature....

Re: Uneducated / conspiracy theories... I think you are discounting the general public’s desire to seek knowledge outside of what the ‘engagement’ driven algorithms feed them.

The algorithm’s prime directive is at odds with serving quality books and papers because they are not as engaging relative to fiction passed as non-fiction (lies) and misinformation.

I started this by downloading all of the books the LoC put out until 1918 (locserendipity.com). Full text sources in an external drive took up around 200 GB.

I have gotten a lot of books via alibris.com (no affiliation, just a happy customer), a marketplace for used booksellers. I got a brand new $170 statistics textbook for about $35 because it was intended for another country; thinner paper and crappier binding, but the same book. I've also gotten used books that were indistinguishable from new books.

Not as cheap as ebay, but an enormous selection with pretty reliable quality ratings.

Tech books for the Indian market have been a good resource. The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market.

I acquired a huge stack from an Amazon UK seller for literally pennies each.

>>The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market.

No.

They are mostly a little low quality books in terms of paper quality, photo graph color etc. Every thing else is the same.

I buy a lot of books as I stay in India. US publishers partner with local publishers and get it printed and sold for cheap.

The academic text books are known to have different test questions so US students can't buy (relatively) dirt cheap "foreign" prints. The text might be the same elsewhere in the book though.

One thing you can also do is specifically look for the international edition. These will often be paperback and non-color, but otherwise have the same content. I've found some popular comp-sci textbooks for ~20% the cost of the cheapest paperback US edition.

I always check for a used book first. I got a basically unused copy of the original Dragon Book for $9 shipped. The spine even still cracked when I opened it. Some student out them probably didn't do too great in their compiler class...

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