In a way paper books "stop working" after 10 years or so when the paper turns yellow and dusty
Books are much more resilient than you think, especially if the publisher used good materials.
“The books will stop working.”
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Re: “The books will stop working.”
#32Another case of "Stallman was right": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
What's RMS up to these days? Haven't heard from him for a while...
He seems to travel a lot giving speeches about Free Software. If you get the FSF bulletin, you get updates each quarter, e.g. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#33I 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 is a ludicrous solution to preventing ebook piracy.
One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied.
It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#34In a way paper books "stop working" after 10 years or so when the paper turns yellow and dusty
"or so" is doing a heavy lifting in this sentence. 10 years is an absurdly short time for a book to last.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#35I 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.
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Re: “The books will stop working.”
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, but in a community where there wasn't an actual public library, I do believe one would inevitably come into existence as the effort of the community, in the same way those tiny libraries do. "People have spare books; community centres exist; so why not put the spare books in the community centre?"
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#37Can 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…
Project Gutenberg is really a modern day equivalent and is one of the better things created on the internet.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#38Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose. It's so sad that this is necessary.
Take a look at ArchiveBox [0] if you're thinking on automating this work ;)
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#39I don't suppose anyone ever cracked the DRM on Microsoft books such that the De-DRM utilities for Calibre would work to scrub them before they're rendered inaccessible?
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#40This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.
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