181–190 of 457 posts
This is why when I buy a DRM ebook, I also get the pirated copy and put it into my Calibre. Buying a ebook is just for the payment.
Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!
That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
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> 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…
I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
And that is exactly how I've interpreted it in all of my comments.
> The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
As I point out in response to your sibling comment, Mesopotamian works, which had to be copied by hand 3000 years ago, have been much better preserved than Chinese works that were mass produced 1000 years ago, simply because clay tablets are much more robust than paper is.
If you want your text to last, inscribe it high on a cliff: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription is still around and almost as good as new.
Though note that after the cultural upheaval brought by Islam, the Persians forgot how to read that inscription, which is a different form of book loss.
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"?
A similar thing happened with Ultraviolet's movies service: https://www.myuv.com/ 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...
I so badly wish I could buy a license to get a specific piece of content, get a copy to play on my own computer, then also have the ability to "upload" (aka, unlock) that content on a cloud streaming service of my choice.
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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…
E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaking lines that have been around for ages. Some poetry ebooks are in fact preceded by a publisher’s warning to this effect.
It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.
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I prefer Library Genesis.
PG has the advantage of being legal.
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Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!
Depends on your economy. Specifically what he does is of course illegal but the general principle of removing drm from your own purchase isn't That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
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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.
Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime. In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.
The much bigger problem with DRM content is that I cannot give them to my children. My kids can browse my many bookcases, and might be curious to read one of hundreds of book they may not choose to buy. That cannot happen with DRM ebooks.