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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#171

Post by why-el »

rhino369 wrote: post #46
hyperman1 wrote: post #4

I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.

"and you will receive a full refund of the original purchase price." Seems fair enough to me.

What's the definition of "fair" here? There are many scenarios under which that makes no sense. Is the price inflation adjusted? What if the currency in question tanked in the mean time? What about actual labor done on the copy (annotations, notes, ...). Not faulting Microsoft, but we really need to rethink this model.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#172

Post by cortesoft »

docker_up wrote: post #136
satysin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months? Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book. To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.

There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.

So.. I am confused what your point is? DRM wouldn't have helped this situation, which I think actually HELPS the case against DRM... it only hurts legitimate readers, pirates would have gotten it anyway.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#173

Post by cortesoft »

docker_up wrote: post #90
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.

The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?

We can agree that content creators should get paid AND that DRM sucks. The key point is that DRM DOESN'T REDUCE PIRACY, IT JUST MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR LEGITIMATE READERS.

DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.

How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#174

Post by PowerfulWizard »

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…

I have 300+ books purchased and read on iOS Kindle, after buying Neal Stephenson's latest recently I discovered it has an obnoxious popover Audible ad on the page browse screen which must be re-dismissed each time you open the book. I was shocked how quickly it totally ruined the experience of reading a book. I haven't read more than about 10 pages on Kindle since, and I can't bear to buy another kindle book knowing this could happen at any time. It has been a couple weeks, it is probable at this point I will never read another book on Kindle (the only device I care about is iOS). I had sort of the opposite reaction, if there is some other entity mediating my experience with the text, I genuinely don't care what happens to my "library". Luckily these are mass produced and distributed books that are essentially immutable, so it isn't like I've lost anything that isn't available elsewhere.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#175

Post by cortesoft »

docker_up wrote: post #138
na85 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he should publish his next book in dead-tree format.

It was in dead-tree format only.

So are you suggesting authors shouldn't sell hard-copy books, because they don't have DRM? I am REALLY confused as to what you are advocating.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#176

Post by marvindanig »

filoleg wrote: post #163
harimau777 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.

I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal. My personal rule is tha…

Any kind of book is possible on web. Here's a photobook (only graphics) by Satyendra Sharma, for example:

https://bubblin.io/cover/ladakh-by-satie-sharma#frontmatter

Disclosure: I'm the developer behind the project.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#177

Post by sjy »

tolmasky wrote: post #83
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…

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…

It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#178

Post by vehementi »

sp332 wrote: post #48
CodeTheInternet wrote: post #27

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.

Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.

Wow that is repulsively scummy.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#179

Post by 0815test »

klez wrote: post #160
dmix wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse. It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put fi…

Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.

The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#180

Post by dangus »

I'm astonished that Microsoft is apparently just refunding the original purchase price of (everybody's?) books.

What's most mind boggling is the realization that apparently nobody sat down and planned this situation out - because if they did, the idea that someone could get an okay from their boss on the idea that even a mildly unsuccessful result and end of life of the product would end in full refunds for everybody.

What's the point of even doing business?

Am I misunderstanding this outcome? That means anyone who used this product got free book rentals for whatever they wanted to read?

...

Let's talk about DRM now.

DRM in itself as a concept is not bad (IMO), and it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay.

However, I think what we fail to talk about is how there's no agreed upon standard regulating the end of life and transferral procedures involved with works sold under DRM.

I suspect that book publishers would not agree to allow Microsoft to say "the store is closed, your books can be unlocked once you follow this procedure." Even if they're okay with that, Microsoft probably didn't even have the foresight to implement that sort of thing on a technical level.

So, what we need in the digital goods industry is some kind of statement to the customer that's set in stone regarding what will happen with your content if the business ceases to exist and the platform is canceled.

There's some semblance of this concept around. For example, Ultraviolet is shutting down in July - so, you have the option to transfer movies to other services for most movies on that platform (it should be all movies).

MoviesAnywhere is also a DRM service making an attempt at avoiding platform lock-in for digitally purchased movies.

But beyond that, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that you'll get perpetual access or a refund. The fact that Microsoft is dishing out refunds since that's cheaper than getting sued by every customer they've ever sold a book to is not a given - imagine if Valve were to go bankrupt and simply shut down their servers one day. That's where DRM should have a sort of mandatory living will.

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