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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Books and libraries have existed for thousands of years. It’s copyright that is the young intruder.

Most people who write non-fiction books do it because they want to contribute to human knowledge and be recognized as an expert in a particular field, not because they think that writing a differential geometry textbook is their path to riches. With the internet, more and more text books are made freely available by their authors - the reason this didn’t happen in the past is because there was no other way to pass knowledge around than teaming up with a publisher who is able to put your knowledge on to dead trees. It’s fair game to put older books on the internet, so that the whole world can benefit, not just rich people in rich countries.

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And books and libraries existed under a system of patronage and royal imprimatur which severely restricted access, even beyond the expenses of copying a book by hand or physically printing a copy using metal type.

The problems with authors making texts available directly are:

- no gate-keeping, so it's hard to find what is worth reading and what isn't

- no proofreading --- it kills me that errors in books are so casually accepted these days

- few authors have the skills to draw illustrations so as to have a meaningful and clear presentation

I've worked with raw author manuscripts --- in most instances they're not something anyone would choose to read given any other option.

Yet not as young as some people are inclined to think. For example, Charles Dickens was known for pushing for international copyright [1] (domestic copyright was already well established). I acknowledge that he wrote fiction, while you're primarily talking about non-fiction, but the point that it's not recent recent still stands

Also you've said yourself that many people can and are offering their work for free. Awesome. So I would prefer not to force others to (though I would certainly be up to consider repealing many of the posthumous copyright extensions that are fairly recent)

[1] https://www.charlesdickensinfo.com/life/copyright-laws/

Since you mentioned textbooks on differential geometry, I can recommend anyone interested Sigmundur Gudmundsson's lecture notes in introductory differential geometry as well as Riemannian geometry. You can find them freely available on his personal academic page.

https://www.matematik.lu.se/matematiklu/personal/sigma/

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