121–130 of 457 posts
In 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too! IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this cas…
All my ebooks get their DRM removed instantly and I back up my kindle every now and then. This shit is not ever happening to me.
There's also a great story regarding "right of first purchase" in the USA where Redbox literally purchases DVDs at retail so that they can rent them out to customers because Disney would not sell directly to them: https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-d...
This 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.
It's also simply an inferior technical solution due to its unnecessary complexity and dependence on servers, corporate entities/departments/decisions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think mine also allows you to watch movies online, but I never tried it yet.
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…
If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large var…
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've found this website very useful: https://archive.org/details/texts My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc). I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.
It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.
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…
Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.
It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.