Hacker News Reader

> I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today.

Not a chance. You can see this with the US Postal Service today, with some people arguing that it should continued to be stripped because it isn't profitable. It isn't supposed to be profitable!

I think the closest we could ever get would be an "old Netflix" approach, where you have to pay a monthly membership fee based on the number of books you want at once that turns a profit.

As for eBooks, I generally find a spot to buy them online (with or without DRM) and either rip the DRM out or pirate them after purchasing. Voila, it's just like a normal book now!

> You can see this with the US Postal Service today, with some people arguing that it should continued to be stripped because it isn't profitable. It isn't supposed to be profitable!

That seems unlikely. Why do you think it's given a formal legal monopoly on the service it provides?

While USPS technically has a monopoly on your mailbox, you can send someone a letter via UPS or FedEx--for significantly more money.

And if you send something to a remote area, UPS and FedEx will themselves delegate to USPS precisely because it's not profitable to develop the infrastructure to service remote populations.

It's not profitable to develop the infrastructure, but considering the price of delivering something where I live, I'm sure Fedex/UPS make a nice margin by delegating the last 400km drive to an unprofitable postal service.

> you can send someone a letter via UPS or FedEx--for significantly more money.

Right, the reason it costs significantly more money to use UPS or FedEx is that it's illegal for them to charge less. Paying more puts your letter into a different legal category that is not reserved to the USPS.

Nobody cares about the mailbox. The USPS holds a monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent mail, which is defined as mail that costs below a certain price point to send.

TIL it's illegal for UPS and FedEx to charge less. That was certainly a part of this equation I was missing, thank you!

you can also send an email nowadays, or a <whatever chat>

Because that makes most sense to offset the fact that it also must serve everyone. Problem for postal service really isn't profitable areas, just look at delivery services. It is the unprofitable hard to reach ones. If single company was mandated to serve these too while others where allowed to pick the easy ones or even exploit the single one it would have hard time surviving.

> If single company was mandated to serve these too while others where allowed to pick the easy ones or even exploit the single one it would have hard time surviving.

But this answer explicitly contradicts the idea that the post office isn't supposed to be profitable. If the goal is to make sure everyone gets served at a loss, it doesn't matter that you're taking a loss.

> It isn't supposed to be profitable!

It’s supposed to break even. It’s supposed to be a service that provides value. If it isn’t providing value, it loses its reason to exist.

You can argue that the consumer captures a lot of surplus value from the postal service. But it doesn’t exist just to please people who like public programs.

The same with libraries.

> It’s supposed to break even. It’s supposed to be a service that provides value.

Do SNAP, Medicaid, etc. provide value? Do they "break even"?

Who/what says it has to break even at all?

Provide value != make money

Schools also do not break even.

The point is a good one - we assume that the benefit of K-12 public education is worth spending money on, and that there is a societal benefit to providing that education at no direct cost to students or their parents.

In contrast, (nominally) private higher education seems to do pretty well financially - even "non-profit" universities. Charging up to $80K a year and/or eating billions of dollars in government grants probably helps - so they aren't exactly independent from public funding, but we consider that funding to be wortwhile in terms of research and education outcomes, even when it goes into the pockets of wealthy, elite institutions.

US Postal Service at this point is mostly paying people to deliver paper advertisements though.

It has to be about 50 to 1 at this point in terms of the ratio of important mail I get compared to junk mail that goes straight in the garbage.

It doesn't have to be profitable but the cost to send mail should cover the operation. It is absurd that it is worth it for so many companies to flood people with literal garbage.

FedEx and UPS both use USPS to do unprofitable last-mile deliveries, and USPS is the backbone of our identity system (delivering identification documents, credit cards, etc).

> The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend.

I wholeheartedly agree, and it snowballs. The way I see it is:

1. One time purchases are the least lucrative.

2. Subscription fees, and therefore control of device, are more lucrative than one time purchases.

3. Advertising (tracking, privacy invasion) is more lucrative even than subscription fees.

4. Both subscription and advertising combined is more lucrative than on their own.

5. There are a bunch of other upsell type models depending on the industry. This includes accessories, warranties, in-app purchases, etc. Hard to generically categorize these, but they are almost always more lucrative than one time purchases.

It's easy to see where an unfettered market will gravitate over time.

This could be solved via regulation if (big if) we had enough uncaptured legislators (and voters that held their feet to the fire), however we now have large swaths of the economy who's business models are complete non-starters if sufficiently regulated. So we'll at best end up with some inn-effective watered down regulation that has the appearance of doing something, and probably not for a while still.

It's a slow moving disaster that everyone sees, but only a minority care enough about or even want to try and fix. You know, like artificially low interest rates.

"I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today. Had the concept not been given a prior place in our minds, the very idea seems otherwise inconceivable in contemporary society dominated by corporations."

It's interesting to compare today's corporate information hoarding to the information-sharing philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 20th Century, whose money was used to build 3,500 libraries.[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

Wealthy individuals during and around the gilded age had a view of charity that was in some senses very similar to modern charity by the super-wealthy, but also quite different. Like today's wealthy, they often used charity as a mechanism for social climbing, and as a dick-measuring contest. They also used it to try and fend off criticism that is usually directed at them when income inequality gets very high.

However, they were also often guided by a strict idea of noblesse obliger, which we would consider patronizing and archaic today, but which was considered an extremely serious task for them. It was fundamentally their role in society, as they saw it. They were also quite a bit more religiously motivated. This extended to the idea of public service and holding public office (of course they also held those positions as a way to help themselves to the pot, but the two ideas were often present at the same time). They saw charity as an act of duty before as an act of kindness in many instances.

The modern super wealthy no longer think of themselves as constrained by a notion of "duty", for better and for worse.

The 1% of the past were much more involved in government and ofcourse the military. I always found it interesting that in ancient Rome even the most decadent senators spent a few years as an officer in the legions.

Google actually went and scanned every book they could get their hands on - including the libraries of multiple universities - as part of the Google Books project. It could have been a digital library of Alexandria (I also seem to recall that universities had hoped to make their collections available to their students and faculty at the very least.) I believe the Library of Congress was also scanned, so we could in theory make any book in the collection available to anyone in the world over the internet in seconds at almost zero cost.

Copyright law seems to have locked most of the works in these amazing digital libraries up so that they are currently available publicly only via a search function that returns small excerpts (and even that would have been shut down had Google not prevailed in court against the Authors' Guild's claims of copyright infringement.)

At the very least, it would be nice to be able to read all of the scanned books in the Library of Congress that are out of copyright, out of print, and/or not being sold or rented by the author or publisher.

> However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required.

You're right, but it's very hard for me to believe even halfway decent legislation will be passed. It's clear that the political process is not working for the common people, at least not in the US.

Then we're even more in agreement. Political corruption is at the root of so many of our problems today.

Every time I see a mutual-aid solution for a societal problem or a duct-tape-and-glue coping mechanism (like the one espoused in this article), I like to remind myself of the fundamental problem.