Many of those "new" books offered for sale on Amazon are in fact print-on-demand editions based on Google Books scans of pre-1923 editions, without any additional value, and probably a bad deal, even for the low amount asked for it. Better go to the Internet Archive, locate the book there, and download it for free.
All those cheap reprints involve another scam. Google Books will delete books, based on a publisher's claim it is still in print, even if it is Public Domain, so now some unscrupulous "publishers" will republish a book, based on Google's scans, then claim it is in print, and thus have it removed from the freely available books in Google (back to snippet view, or worse, completely eliminated).
Good thing a user "tpb" has copied many of Google's scans to the Internet Archive.
The fact that prices of "content" go down is dictated by simple market mechanisms. Technology allows the prices to go down, as it reduces to costs of copying and distribution to something very close to zero. The market will simply follow that possibility, given some healthy competition. If you look at storage capacity, prices have come down million-fold (expressed in dollars per megabyte), over the last two decades, and it should be no surprise that prices of "content" will follow. The only problem here is that we have copyright laws in place that seriously obstruct competition -- in name to correct a market failure, but in practice used to build unjustified monopolies. Fortunately, market forces will in time find ways around such obstructions, and still drive the prices down to levels that the technology allows. The real spoiled brats here are the companies that are stuck in the past, and do not want to adjust to the new reality, but try to stop technology and the progress it offers.
A country that has non-waivable licensing schemes are for example the Netherlands for mechanical recordings, where the collection agency (SENA) has a monopoly on collecting levies for playing music in publicly accessible spaces.
This leads to the absurd situation that a dentist, who happens to be a composer/musician in his free time has to pay for playing a recording of his own music in his patient waiting room..., and never get anything of it back.
Whether such things will hold under EU law is still an open question, but such cases are very costly to fight.
Another example of non-waivable schemes are the levy on empty recording media in various European countries (as they are not attached to a particular work, so if your CC-BY work gets very popular, you can still claim your share of the booty, if you want to.)
Sourced from Google Books and a scam
Many of those "new" books offered for sale on Amazon are in fact print-on-demand editions based on Google Books scans of pre-1923 editions, without any additional value, and probably a bad deal, even for the low amount asked for it. Better go to the Internet Archive, locate the book there, and download it for free.
All those cheap reprints involve another scam. Google Books will delete books, based on a publisher's claim it is still in print, even if it is Public Domain, so now some unscrupulous "publishers" will republish a book, based on Google's scans, then claim it is in print, and thus have it removed from the freely available books in Google (back to snippet view, or worse, completely eliminated).
Good thing a user "tpb" has copied many of Google's scans to the Internet Archive.
It's all about the market...
The fact that prices of "content" go down is dictated by simple market mechanisms. Technology allows the prices to go down, as it reduces to costs of copying and distribution to something very close to zero. The market will simply follow that possibility, given some healthy competition. If you look at storage capacity, prices have come down million-fold (expressed in dollars per megabyte), over the last two decades, and it should be no surprise that prices of "content" will follow. The only problem here is that we have copyright laws in place that seriously obstruct competition -- in name to correct a market failure, but in practice used to build unjustified monopolies. Fortunately, market forces will in time find ways around such obstructions, and still drive the prices down to levels that the technology allows. The real spoiled brats here are the companies that are stuck in the past, and do not want to adjust to the new reality, but try to stop technology and the progress it offers.
Non-waivable licensing schemes
A country that has non-waivable licensing schemes are for example the Netherlands for mechanical recordings, where the collection agency (SENA) has a monopoly on collecting levies for playing music in publicly accessible spaces.
This leads to the absurd situation that a dentist, who happens to be a composer/musician in his free time has to pay for playing a recording of his own music in his patient waiting room..., and never get anything of it back.
Whether such things will hold under EU law is still an open question, but such cases are very costly to fight.
Another example of non-waivable schemes are the levy on empty recording media in various European countries (as they are not attached to a particular work, so if your CC-BY work gets very popular, you can still claim your share of the booty, if you want to.)