That's why you should never buy DRM-ed anything if you intend to keep it long term. Companies change, businesses get bought & sold, collapse, disappear - thinking that your particular DRM scheme would be supported for 20 years is insane. For a movie that you'll forget in the next 2 days it's ok, for a book that you intend on re-reading years late - no reason to "buy" DRM-ed version of anything. Or, at least, if you have no other options, strip DRM from it immediately and export into a common format.
“The books will stop working.”
141–150 of 457 posts
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#142They will fully refund all purchases, seems reasonable to me.
Imagine if one day you went to find your well-thumbed, most loved book in your bookshelf, maybe to re-read your favorite chapter, and the physical book was missing, replaced by a note from the publisher: "this book no longer works, but worry not: we've refunded you!"
But this is not a physical book, so it is not a "unique" copy.
All of my e-books are entirely replaceable by buying them again from a different store (or as a physical book).
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#143My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-…
I'm pretty sure I'll happily recite The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be it. The annotations look like the kind of thing I remember.
I got it from a private tracker but it looks like you can find it on libgen fiction too [0]. The 1.7Mb epub one is the one I got. [0] http://gen.lib.rus.ec/fiction/?q=A+Fire+Upon+the+Deep
>O site a que pretende aceder encontra-se bloqueado na sequência do cumprimento de ordem judicial ou administrativa.
(The website you want to reach is blocked due to the execution of a judicial or administrative order).
Ah the World Wide Web, less world-wide every day. I guess now if you don't use a VPN you're a second class netizen in many places.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#145> Remember: Free with DRM is not the same thing as free. I agree with him the whole way that this is weird, but this particular tweet made no sense to me. It seems akin to "Hey, we'll allow you to rent something for some duration for free", and it sounds like he's saying that that situation is also not free .
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Re: “The books will stop working.”
#146I 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.
Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#147My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-…
I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#148I 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.
Paying for books is the old model. I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
> I will gladly donate
Everyone says. Nobody does.
Re: “The books will stop working.”
#149Re: “The books will stop working.”
#150This 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…
Principle of the thing aside, is the annotated version worth reading? I read the book and it was quite good, curious what the annotations add to it.
I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.