VOL 3, NO 4
☆
At some point we all agreed that open access to all human knowledge was a good thing and accordingly made libraries a staple of every city, every town and every school. It was one of the rare areas we managed to mostly avoid fucking up for a really, really long time. Open Library is, in every sense and by every definition, a library. The only real difference is that it operates at the scale of the web, which is more or less the vision of the Library of Alexandria fully realized. Woo hoo, we did it! Nice work, everybody!
Enter capitalism; the big book publishers want it all stopped because Open Library presents "a fundamental devaluation of authors’ and publishers’ intellectual and creative investments," which U.S. courts are so far agreeing with despite it being a very stupid point. Even worse, the ruling implies that all libraries are, in fact, bad.
I love my publisher (small publishers are great and do a lot operating in a system that constantly punishes them), but books are absolutely broken, both as a functional business model and as a means of creating and distributing art and ideas. Libraries are the last institution putting value on them at all.
We really had our shit together there for a bit, didn't we?
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Confusions. / 📰 The death of Red Lobster. / How Moleskine won in the digital era. / This Žižek profile veers into sex way more than you'd think or necessarily want. ❝He has brought me an umbrella; he also has his own – he pats his top pocket – which in Žižek language is “of anal [pronounced annal] character”, meaning compact and easy to hide.❞ / 🗄️ ROMhacking.net is shutting down (Archive). / Citizen DJ. / 📺 Girls rewatch as existential crisis. ❝Whatever’s happening isn’t time, it’s just duration, and its only measure is decay.❞ / 🎨 Street Ghosts. / 💻 Merklemap, a subdomain search engine. / Free font: Departure Mono. / ChatGPT sucks at summarizing. / 📱InPress is a news app that is also a dating app and the only legit Twitter replacement. /🌜I'm going to start operating on Moon Time.
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