MULTITUDE OF BLOGS None of the PDFs are my own productions. I've collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing. This blog's project is to create an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology Φ market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap. this is an uprising, do ya punk?

Saturday, May 17, 2008

A Question that Came Across ...



gregory recco writes (a comment on nancy's globalization)
Translators work very hard and make a pittance. Maybe they do it for the love of what they translate, or for other, less noble motives. Still, you're stealing their labor, and you should stop. The only people you're "rising up" against are overworked and underappreciated translators (and everyone else who works at the presses who publish these books).

What part of "No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form ... without the prior permission in writing of the publisher" did you not understand?


I think here a question that should be under-stood.
[above all, what a brute way of speaking to the other]


the focus on 'you' is somewhat misleading. anyone can download any of the books from gigapedia or avax anytime. [this is already said in the header] I'm not denying responsibility. for example "made in istanbul" ones: when people heard of this blog here, they said hey we can contribute, so I'm publishing books scanned by students in istanbul, things developed in a way that I'm totally out of action, I just publish.

coming to poor translators; I also translate and totally agree with you. but here is the issue: an original book is about 25 - 50 dollars (for Husserl 100s), think a student like me who has 300$, and reading 6books in a month minimum. how can I live m'lord? or the students in 3rd world, what should they do? be silenced, obey information inequality. I have some pdf's that are not even in one library of turkey. [have you heard anything called 'print capitalism'?]

world is not so big brother, capitalism sucks, believe me. "my people" are hungry: for food, for serenity, for knowledge. colonialism fucks believe me, even in its handsome form of neo-colonialism, it deprivates Earth.

(do you understand this from your ivory tower? have you been in middle east? we try to dwell Hölderlin, home is not possible anymore. yes. but not because of the flight of the gods. bombardments... have you seen anyone dying because of the blameless west? you think the books and bombs have no relation, right? former is more destructive believe me.)

if there is a shame to be shared that is for all of us. Benjamin's 'the idea of mystery' on Kafka's "the trial" says a lot, all passed away, and still we are. and for you I am not. I try to understand Kurtz sorry I'm too dumb.

I don't how to handle world appropriately brother, if anyone knows please write down, at least a fragment, a comment, a testimony.

---
for my part I apologize. (I've no intenttion to normalize my acts by appealing economic anthropology). Being a muslim, it's haram [forbidden by religion(yet islam isn't a "religion" in western sense, there is no god but Law)] for me to use any thing without the permission of its owner. like my brothers in palestine who do haram by being suicide bombers, I'm on the violent track: an immense hecatomb of what is named 'right' by law. it's really hard for me. sometimes I get sick of this, look at posting dates sometimes weeks passed, I couldn't post anything. this is no attempt to justify. we bomb our body even it's wrong, I do wrong volitionally. I'll dynamite world, this is a promise to burn babylon.



syncopation of history on the side of the "rest" desolates even the abgrund, we suicide though. figure, muhmen, speechless we are at the closure of history. sorry, probably we have no "understanding" in the Kantian sense. I can't.

first photo is from sniper's alley in sarajevo, says all that is spelled above.
second photo is from palestine, he is sheikh ahmed yasin, rocketed by occupation forces in palestine. hatred, pure... trial haven't started yet.

edit: my voice may sound too abstract; indeed, symbolic violence takes subject into parentheses, ground slips away, too much.
----




please leave comments regarding the question if you are using this blog, I'm really thinking of closing down this space.

26 comments:

Marta said...

please don't.

There is no simple answer to the shit of this world, I don't have an answer, you don't, the people accusing you don't. What we all have is a temporary, insufficient, approssimative maladjustment by which we survive, facing the mirror every morning without too much shame, or fear.

Let's stop pretending that there is one only possible solution to each problem, that there is the right thing to do. Let's try, rather, to describe the complexity of the problem, just like you have start to do in this post, and hopefully will be followed by others.

I like your blog, I follow you since a while. You are doing what millions of others are doing. Your ideas are supported by many and are powerful ideas. The opposite position also makes sense. But it can't all be resolved with few sentences: it is a globabl problem, it should be addressed this way.

If only we had to make two lists of arguments, one in favour of public free culture and the other in favour of the more diffuse (powerful-ilitary imposed-hard/impossible to chanbe by a lay person) system of copyright (the american one) we would be busy for the rest of our life. Because the problem is huge and immensely complicated. Think to the medicines for AIDS, their copyrighted patents, think to the Chinese who have copied everything they had access to for 50 years, think of Alexandria, and the fire. Or to when the bhramins of India decided to destroy every tool with which measurement was possible.

It is complicated, but I like to discuss, and change my ind, and those of others. So, if you want to embark in this, I'll be on your side. In the meanwhile, please, as Voltaire says in the Candide, you have a garden to look after, you have a job to do, don't stop. Thanks

Tycho said...

I am doing a masters in philosophy and my dissertation is based on the works of Giorgio Agamben

1) I would have at my disposal 3 books written by Agamben if it were not for this site. This is because my library is terrible.

2) After finding this site I have been recommending it to all my fellow postgrad students and there are now a lot more people who are using books which they can only find here.


For me this isn't a free culture versus controlled culture issue. This is about the ridiculous academic demands made by universities who choose to spend all their money on making conference centres instead of stocking up their libraries.

Mathieu said...

Hi, like Marta, I should first say please don't stop.

In response to Gregory's accusation, I'd simply ask him another question :

What loses an author or a translator when someone download a book that he would not have purchased otherwise and anyway ?

I can already hear the reply : "They lose the copyrights that this acquisition de facto of their books must allow them to earn."

You'd tell something true, once again. But let's take a further step in this direction, to see where this logical would leed us. So let's imagine that people stop download books. What happens for those translators and authors ?

They'd lose nothing, ... but without winning anything so far.

And when I say "They'd lose nothing", I'm only talking about money, but in fact, they would lose many readers, which isn't a non-significant loss for translators or authors. And about what readers would lose... I just want to reply to you that this point sould also not be overlooked.

So what is preferable? I just let the question opened...

In conclusion, I just would like to say that I think that many people would be ready (and do it when they could) to pay for e-book (which would be cheaper than papers one, and I don't even mention the big environmental aspect of the thing). So I ask another question : What the hell the book industry wait to offer to readers a kind of iTunes Music Store-like ?

It seems to me that the problem is also come from the absence or weakness of the offer. Why not talk about that instead of blame people to act in consequence ?

Anonymous said...

Hi, I work at a UK academic press and appreciate what you're doing. It's impossible that your web site causes any substantial loss of revenue to publishers (and hence of income to translators etc). The books you post here are purchased overwhelmingly by "western" university libraries, not by individuals. A book's profit & loss calculation will be dependent on sales to institutions - sales to individuals are usually just a bonus.

Publishers have adopted a business model that has meant pricing individuals out of the market - the real market for specialist monographs is so small as to make publishing them unsustainable except at very high prices to institutional customers.

In my opinion you're not competing with publishers, so you're not taking away their business. If anything, from a publisher's viewpoint you're generating interest that might lead to further sales.

As a final note, Textbooks, Study Guides and Companions are different, as publishers derive substantial income from sales to individual students.

michael said...

it is praiseworthy that you allow this question to be raised. obviously blogging is different from simple piracy, which profits from selling unauthorized copies.

i work at a used bookstore. books that were $50 or $100 new from a university press, we buy for maybe $1 or $5 and sell for $10 or $25. it's a food chain.

stuff we won't buy gets thrown in the dumpster. sometimes a homeless person goes fishing in the dumpster for books, for whatever reason. some of us want to stop them, but i think: that's still the food chain working.

peace.

m.

pensum said...

Certainly there is no simple answer to this issue, the complexities are intricate and any single perspective requires a subtle and detailed analysis--sadly, emails and blogs do not tend to be conducive to the sort of sustained dialogue that discussions such as this require. And so we are left with merely tacking up a few signposts, tying a bit of string in the air to mark where we have just been before moving on and the wind carrying our traces far from their original position.

In our selective blindness we each believe our's is the only path, our bits of string coloured to set us apart from others. And perhaps more egregious, limited to our unique and solitary path we too readily conclude that there is but a single destination towards which all are headed.

The result of all this, all these bits of coloured string set upon the air? What else but a glorious ticker tape parade going nowhere? A celebration of nothing, but being free of capitalist and religious specificity more festive and joyous than Macy's Thanksgiving day parade.

So here i find myself joining in the celebration, a handful of strings in many colours tossed frivolously into the air.

The great American artist Robert Irwin once mentioned to me that the great thing about reading philosophy books wasn't seeking answers or solutions, but being able to see how another thinks, to have the process of thought laid out before you, to have access to another's mind.

A French poet i have translated once said, "Translation is a privileged form of reading." Yes, for the translator a privilege to delve so deeply into a text; and for the original author a privilege to discover that another seeks such a deep and intimate dialogue, let alone wishes to broaden the circle until it circumnavigates the globe.

Kluwer, the main publisher of Husserl's texts on phenomenology, was sold in 2002 to venture capitalists (London-based private equity funds Candover and Cinven)for approximately $591 million.

Yet a recently published translation of a major philosophical text published by another well known international publisher has a retail price of $129(US), though the editors and translators responsible for this magnificent effort receive no financial renumeration. (This was mentioned to me in an email from one of those involved.)

One can buy a book, one can borrow a book, one can lend a book, people can share a book. All without legal or moral complications. Why then is this suddenly a problem for an electronic file?

By making their creations freely available online numerous authors, as well as musicians from Trent Reznor and Radiohead to Coldplay (not to mention the countless indie bands out there), have discovered the benefits of what i call "the Gutenberg effect."

Even the popular and bestselling author Paul Coelho (i hesitate to mention his name here, and have not read any of his books) saw an exponential increase in his sales once pirated copies became available by bit torrent, i will let him explain:
"In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. [...]

"I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [...]

"So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.[...] Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site..."

For myself i have purchased more books and music CDs, thanks to the access i have had to new discoveries available online. To mention one specific example i cannot thank you enough for leading me to Cadava's Words of Light.

The knowledge is power argument cuts both ways: for the disenfranchised it is no doubt the way to a better life; for the privileged it is a cherished possession to be shared within the circle, one which enhances personal feelings of nobility leading to potential acts of generosity and philanthropy on a scale only possible by the privileged and wealthy; for the capitalist it is the way to greater riches by exploiting the uneducated and impoverished and thus must be withheld and rigidly controlled.

It is difficult to trust the accuracy and veracity of a translation by any translator who undertakes the task of translating primarily for financial reasons texts by such authors as Levinas, Deleuze or many others with ethical, democratic or anarchic perspectives.

I do not know whether conclusions can or should be drawn in the present situation, but diversity is certainly a glorious imperative both in the biological world, as well as that of thought and culture (including legal systems). I wish Paul Feyerabend's marvelous and very hard-to-find out-of-print book Science in a Free Society was available as i could then urge you all to download a copy and read it.

Ultimately, it is the face of the Other and the intimate dialogue that their sovereignty entails that is forgotten in most of these sorts of discussions. We are a small community, scattered about the globe, isolated yet far more closely bound than even we will ever acknowledge--let us not forget this, let us never forget this, for everything depends upon remembering these fragile bonds.

hori said...

Since all has been already answered - I just join the others by asking U: DO NOT DO IT,MAN!!!

Celal Mordeniz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
renc-u-ana said...

thanks for all the supports and ideas, I'll revise my publishing criteria.

Farhang Erfani presented the gist of our efforts here:
http://www.continental-philosophy.org/2008/05/17/some-etexts/

and blogbuddy nathan made a link to this debate:
http://philosophy-literature.blogspot.com/2008/05/urgent-attention.html

thank you all, question still remains.

(I wish gregory recco would write something)

pensum said...

As interesting and important as the debate of copyright and free dissemination of knowledge is for which i would like thank Mr. Recco for furthering; perhaps this specific instance arouse simply as a personal matter for Mr. Recco as he apparently is a co-translator of J-L Nancy's Gravity of Thought (Humanities Press Intl 1997) which is now out-of-print. Perhaps he didn't reap the financial benefits he had hoped and/or is suffering the disappointment of finding his translation in the remainder bin. Or perhaps he is unable to secure further publishing deals for his translations, which, if the Palintrope site (http://gregrecco.com/) is his, would certainly be no surprise considering the quality (or lack thereof) of the Heraclitus translation found there.

Unknown said...

I would like to thank you for introducing me to several authors that I hadnt previously come across. From these discoveries I have since purchased two books that you dont have links to, and one that there is a link to and that I started reading but wanted to take with me on holiday- all as a result of finding ebooks and authors linked from this space.
By having selected some fine books to link, I honestly reckon this space generates revenue as well as being responsible for some lost sales. Thank you again for enlivening my interest in philosophy.

PPC said...

Dear Sir,

This is the first time I have written to you though it is many times I
have used you and your labor. I am a young American exile living in
central europe, Prague Czech Republic to be specific. I only recently,
about two months ago, discovered your blog, and your links. In this
recent argument you have become entagled in I can only offer you a
remote anecdote of consolation and the assurance that you are making a
definitive difference. A difference in attitudes, in access, in image
production, and in my and our lives. I will explain and perhaps you
may forgive the more reified form of personal explication--the
arguments of intellectual property are not in the least abstract
though touch on precisely those issues-- I would rather approach you
personally.

I, having left an affluent and conservative American University after
receiving my masters degree some five years ago, have applied myself
to the production of an organization that is focused not so much on
the popularization of philosophy as providing a space of engagement
and contention and equally of access to the formidable problems and
theory that actuates our mental and physical lives today. Five years
on, we are at the threshold of launching a Brecht like forum as they
hold in Berlin with the purpose of integrating art, philosophy,
politics, performance, sociology, etc. We have had, over the past five
years, approx. 300 people pass through our cafe and home discussions.
The postings you make, having been discovered, provide an
indispensable segway to what is already available on the net in a
concentrated format. The theorists you provide links, and only links
to, are at the core of our discussions and the most captivating of our
time. I, and our members, would regret very much if you took such a
thoughtful and as we understand it time-consuming project off the web.
It is immensely difficult to get anyone involved in any sort of
project whatsoever and for whatever reasons--of time, of economy, of
money, of purpose, of consent, of vision . . . etc. What you have done
and we hope you continue doing is provide links with texts and your
occassional commentary. It is an invaluable resource for links
presented from a personal perspective and organized according to your
interests. We appreciate that and are encouraged by the fact, being an
international group ourself, that you and others in an international
context are making the effort, actualizing labor, and releasing it to
the public as a global public at large. For that we appreciate and
thank you.

What is more. Living in a foreign country without resources and
without access to these texts through the availble state library
system in the English (read--accessible) language puts us
automatically at a disadvantage. This would lead me to make an
exhausting critique on the status of academic and intellectual
material copyright and legal right in general, however I wish to
refrain only in order to offer you our concerted support. You may also
rest assured that we support the arguments you offered on your blog
under the heading of a question that came across, and would further
extend and supply arguments in your defence. I have seen links to your
blog posted on a number of sites and I can say that you perform a
thankless but extremely welcome task.

I invite you to attend or contact us at any point when you are in
Prague. Our group can be reached by the facebook group page at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21910463664 or by email at
praguephilosophyclub@gmail.com

We wish you continuing posting and success,

Sincerely,

Benjamin E. Beebe

--
Prague Philosophy Club

Benjamin E. Beebe MA General Secretary
00420 602 660 700

The will to truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a daring
exploit, that celebrated truthfulness of which all philosophers up to
now have spoken with respect, what questions this will to truth has
already set down before us! What strange, serious, dubious questions!
There is already a long history of that — and yet it seems that this
history has scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that at some point we
become mistrustful, lose patience and, in our impatience, turn
ourselves around, that we learn from this sphinx to ask questions for
ourselves? Who is really asking us questions here? What is it in us
that really wants "the truth"? Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil

pensum said...

Well, i think it has become clear by now that your efforts, have aided many of the less economically fortunate (and are we not the majority in this world). But i have just realized how this all began as it appears Mr. Recco was simply defending his friend Francois Raffoul with whom he collaborated on the translation of Nancy's earlier text The Gravity of Thought. An honourable action, though perhaps poorly executed.

A simple resolution to this whole issue would be if M. Raffoul or his publisher contacts you directly requesting the link to be removed, then you could simply oblige. Though such an action does not imply any guilt on your part, it would be the respectful thing to do in such a circumstance, though i would stress that such acquiescence would only be appropriate if the author or publisher of a work personally contacts you, the opinions of others are merely that however righteous or honorable their intention.

That said, the fact remains that as you are simply providing links and not creating documents yourself, i cannot see any culpability--moral or legal--on your part.

Keep up the good fight my friend!

Unknown said...

At my university the most important thing to learn is to reference properly, as a student of philosophy and political theory i see this as a limitation, in the sense that the quest for knowledge and truth is limited by the socio-economic system.

Of course there are many details to regard in such issues, yet i feel after reading your piece more than anything the disappointment i had when first discovering academia is more than anything focused on the protection of intellectual property rather than a search for new ideas.

I guess i was naive in my hopes, yet the internet is forcing this lifeworld to reconsider issues of copyright, we can see this in literature, as well as music, and film. Let's hope this new way of dealing with other people's ideas will come to embrace an integrity of the aim of learning and new ideas. An integrity that goes beyond a press agency's profit.

Please continue sharing your thoughts, I need you to spark mine.

Kind regards,

Tosca de Jong

University of Sussex student
and member of the Prague philosophy club

Filosòfica Ment said...

Dear Fark, don't close this blog. Share the culture is not a crime.

think that exist different people interested in this book makes me happy.

Please, ignore what they say and listen how the philosphy don't have limits...

Congratulations for your constant search...

my full support

print said...

It is useful and original blog.

If you will close it, I hope some of your readers will continue your work.

renc-u-ana said...

I will continue. yet, I'll revise my publishing policy. surely, a second phase. nowadays I'm too busy. finals, papers, ... be patient. 10th of june torture garden will sing again! take care of yourselves.

a longer account will be given about blog, its aims and ethics

Anonymous said...

renc-u-ana wrote
Being a muslim, it's haram [forbidden by religion(yet islam isn't a "religion" in western sense, there is no god but Law)] for me to use any thing without the permission of its owner.

The incumbent mistake here is that by posting PDFs on the internet you are using or misusing anyTHING at all.

I recently wrote a paper on the ontological status of copyrighted objects. Simply put, I argue that textual or linguistic works are not THINGS in any coherent sense, and even considered as entities, cannot be owned in anything but a completely metaphorical sense. They simply don't have the metaphysical character that physical things have, from which our concepts of ownership, as enshrined in law, are received. Property law applies to intellectual goods only at the risk of being considered erroneous, and metaphysically bankrupt.

Copyright is a social convention enshrined in law. Neither the moral exhortations of Recco, nor of the copyright industries have any good argumentative or moral weight. And the forbidden act in Islam does not apply to what you're doing. Posting PDFs on the internet is not using something that belongs to someone else without his permission, because he doesn't and CAN'T own it in any substantive sense, and it isn't a THING in any substantive sense either.

So you don't need to apologize. You've done nothing wrong (although illegal - should it come as a surprise the two are not coextensive on this? ) Recco should apologize.

SOME OTHER REPLIES FOLLOW

To Recco

Recco said:
you're stealing their labor, and you should stop.
The blog owner is not stealing ANYTHING in anything but a metaphorical sense. If you feel others are morally culpable for metaphorical theft, you ought to deal in artifacts which aren't nearly as susceptible to mass replication at the touch of a button.

In fact, this sort of moral exhortation is nothing short of hypocrisy. By all means translate. But if you think that you can hold the less fortunate to ransom for the modest work you've done, you really ought to find another line of work.

The real estate of the mind is a treacherous business.

The only people you're "rising up" against are overworked and underappreciated translators (and everyone else who works at the presses who publish these books).
You may be overworked. But this site is evidence that you are not underappreciated. That your texts are downloaded here is appreciation, and it ought to be appreciation enough.

What part of "No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form ... without the prior permission in writing of the publisher" did you not understand?
I, for one, understand every word of it. I defy it. It is a legal prohibition that serves only to disenfranchise each and every one of us, whether we choose to see it that way or not. The internet removes any constraints which would legitimate your expectation of monetary benefit from what you do. To be brief, the dissemination of ideas really is FREE now, and the arbiter of commercial value - scarcity - is no longer applicable. The copyright industry is obsolete. Copyright law these days is nothing but the attempt to manufacture scarcity - an attempt at holding every consumer of information to ransom by coercive force.

If you will not translate for love, you must get a REAL job. Payment is a bonus in this field. To have an expectation of monetary benefit from intellectual goods is CONCEITED in the internet age.


Also, some other comments:

NATHAN said:
Access to information must win out. Is the theft of a translators work to take primacy over the theft of a world just within reach, but totally unaccessible? I'm not professing to have answers, I'm armed only with questions. However, we must do what we must do, and live with the burden and take responsibility of what we have done - (on both sides of the fence, not just one).
Simply put, no theft takes place in copyright infringement. In most jurisdictions, the legal transgression is prosecuted under copyright law, under which it is a civil offense, and called "copyright infringement." It's neither legally nor morally considered theft.

The only theft taking place is to be seen within the social convention which gives precedent for LAWS which control your access to ideas conditional on your paying for them. There are no metaphysical facts to bar your claim to the ideas contained in any book in the world. The only facts that bar your claim are legal/coercion and your own conscience.

In the days of privateers, the seas were held by those who demanded payment for safe passage. This was the service they provided: pay us, and you will not be boarded, your goods taken, your crew killed, and your ship sunk beneath the sea. In the age of the internet, the copyright industries bear more resemblance to these, pirates in all but name. The only difference is that they have (unjust) laws behind them. But that does not make it moral or right.

PENSUM said:
One can buy a book, one can borrow a book, one can lend a book, people can share a book. All without legal or moral complications. Why then is this suddenly a problem for an electronic file?
Actually, as far as I know, you're not really supposed to do those things either.

Tosca said...
At my university the most important thing to learn is to reference properly, as a student of philosophy and political theory i see this as a limitation, in the sense that the quest for knowledge and truth is limited by the socio-economic system.

Of course there are many details to regard in such issues, yet i feel after reading your piece more than anything the disappointment i had when first discovering academia is more than anything focused on the protection of intellectual property rather than a search for new ideas.

Tosca, this is seriously confused. Proper citation is a GOOD habit to learn, and has nothing to do with the enforcement of copyright. By learning to reference properly, you are learning good academic skills, which will help you to avoid plagiarism, will help you organize your work, and will make what you are doing with what you write altogether more accessible.

The aversion to plagiarism is a GOOD aversion. It vastly predates the present day aversion to copyright violation. If you plagiarise someone, you are pretending you came up with an idea they actually came up with. If nothing else, this makes it confusing, and makes it harder for other readers to follow what's going on. Besides this, crediting people with what they've written is a moral observation that has nothing to do with remuneration, and more to do with respect and deference.

Copyright violation is something different. True, universities also are supposed to police this sort of thing too, and prevent people from infringing copyright by photocopying books from the library, etc. But by and large copyright infringement is tacitly supported by universities who don't really do anything about it.

AND THIS IS GOOD.

In brief, you plagiarize by pretending you wrote something you didn't. You shouldn't do this.

You violate copyright by making an unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. DO THIS AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

Unknown said...

Every time I deal with a text such as yours, suddenly everything change, This kind of text are like poems for me, Enter to a new world, another world. Or maybe looking through this window. You may say I'm talking utmost naive. But strengths us to talk about our "shared pain". Everyone is a shared pain. I just don't simply know that there is no alternative. I ask myself when there is a language, an international language, it should there just one alternative to this. when there is the language of money what is the alternative? When there is this very violence there must be one act: Violence
You are kinda orgasm.
Fuck me If I talk fucking.

N said...

Close the space? no, that would be ironic. the only change I'd make might be never again encouraging this Gospel According To Capitalism.

We all appreciate the fact that's what happening here is controversial, a hot-topic, sensitive to the touch, a real red-button issue. more liberal-consense. terrible.

Before bowing down, just take it private (yeah, i said private).

I "steal" day in-and-day out; music, books, food and kisses. i harbor dark secrets and do dirty deeds to do-gooders. i care nothing of a metaphysics for copywrongs (fionn), nor acknowledge anymore than one possible solution (Marta). there are wild winds brewing on the crypto-front my friends. this conversation is almost obsolete. so carry-on, savor your moral pickles, because soon you'll be sucking on something far more repulsive.......

Translate this; if you close this site, one translator will die for every hour until it's reopened. there's one cross i'd hate to bear.

peace, i'm out.

Unknown said...

Please don't close this blog. Without your blog, I would not have heard of these books, let alone buy them.

Sathish,
India

Unknown said...

dahocam türkçe yazacagım umarım bir sorun olmaz, blogu yeni keşfettim, kapatmayın lütfen. ama çok merak ettim kimsiniz, nesiniz, bu kitapları nerden buluyorsunuz?
iyi çalışmalar

lellipos said...

i thank you for this blog. being indigent should not equate to being ignorant. many people, myself included, would not have access to deleuze, agamben, or derrida were it not for this site. thank you for helping to allow poor or underprivileged readers access to these works

doggelgangers said...

This entire debate (online sharing, etc) will seem silly in less than a decade; don't lose what is obviously a good product simply because of an objection in the middle of a technological paradigm shift. I like your work & ideas, it'd be a loss.

Scu said...

Sorry I am so late on the scene, I hope you see that I made a post. The same question recently came up on a Foucault blog, and I want to first of all cut and paste my response from there.
"I understand the fear, the idea that there is a simple trade-off, free electronic copies of texts will equal less texts sold by academic publishers. This will hurt those publishers, and one assumes the authors and/or translators of those texts.

One of the interesting things here is that massive amounts of studies have been done on this issue and music. And there often really is a trade-off at the level of buying CDs. On the other hand, most people spend roughly the same amount of their money on music regardless. Sometimes it is still buying CDs, sometimes merchandise, sometimes it is purchasing music in other formants (such as vinyl), and often it is more concert traveling. Regardless, most people spend roughly the same amount on music, and several spend far more. Those that are likely to trade and download music the most are the ones likely to spend the most on music.

While clearly the same market is not at play here, I think some things are true. I think that first of all the people most likely to spend time trading pdfs are the people most likely to spend money on actual books (I for example have bought basically every piece of Foucault in translation). Also, much like with music, trading pdfs is likely to get people interested into various books and authors they would not otherwise know. I recently bought Schurmann’s Broken Hegemonies because I got it in pdf format a while back.

And while it is true that some people, like undergrads getting a required text, may not read buy the book, some of the passing along free texts are important. You already mentioned the research reasons, but I got into it by trying to make these academic books accessible to high school students.

I guess I’m not too worried about it."

I just started blogging myself, I look forward to seeing you keep with yours.

David Hilmer Rex said...

Get going please. :)