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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#21

Post by squaresmile »

Herrin wrote: post #8
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #5

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle. The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address . They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decomm…

You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared. This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.

Is this the version you have been searching for? It is "A Fire Upon the Deep" and it looks annotated.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/260sH2V.png

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#23

Post by adrianhon »

ultrarunner wrote: post #18
blakesterz wrote: post #15

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never s…

On the flip side, people all over my neighborhood have put considerable effort into building awesome tiny sharing libraries. Perhaps without the issue being "solved" we'd see even more and varied institutions formulate organically. So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?

Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#25

Post by sp332 »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never s…

It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#26

Post by thaumasiotes »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #2

I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". With all that electronic junk that no one knows how to archive properly that statement needs to be revisited.

> I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased".

...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone.

You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works.

Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#27

Post by CodeTheInternet »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never s…

My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#28

Post by fooblitzky »

docker_up wrote: post #13

I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.

DRM has a long history of failing to stop piracy.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#29

Post by EdwardCoffin »

squaresmile wrote: post #21
Herrin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared. This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.

Is this the version you have been searching for? It is "A Fire Upon the Deep" and it looks annotated. [0] https://i.imgur.com/260sH2V.png

That might be it. The annotations look like the kind of thing I remember.
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