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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#191

Post by ftrsprvln »

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…

I'm super, super grateful to our public libraries and the amazing resources they offer— coming from an immigrant farm-laboring family in a tiny (My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.

I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#192

Post by tim333 »

salutonmundo wrote: post #169
nabla9 wrote: post #156

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!

Legal grey area.

> But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use. https://info.legalzoom.com/copyright-law-making-personal-cop...

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#193

Post by sjy »

dangus wrote: post #180

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…

DRM caused this problem, and if you want to convince me that the solution is more advanced DRM that somehow fails open when the company that built it goes out of business, you'll need a stronger argument than "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."

Abolishing copyright wouldn't eliminate all creative works. It would eliminate a lot of the funding, but there would still be plenty of people willing to create things for free and other creators working on a patronage or cross-subsidisation model. It's not obvious to me that the world would be a worse place under these conditions. I'm prepared to give up the certainty of the next Marvel movie being produced if it means giving everyone free access to all the other creative works that have already been published.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#194

Post by evanb »

inscionent wrote: post #70
sp332 wrote: post #25

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.

The one in Washington DC is now an Apple store.

Not the one in Mount Pleasant!

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#195

Post by EdwardCoffin »

headcanon wrote: post #68
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…

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 interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text.

The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc.

I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc.

[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#196

Post by stordoff »

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…

Interestingly, I find I'm the other way. Reading for pleasure, I want a physical book. Anything where I'm flipping back and forth, I prefer an e-book, so I can quickly make bookmarks and have a clickable table of contents/index.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#197

Post by tzs »

dmix wrote: post #72
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…

> 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…

> Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices

Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#198

Post by [deleted] »

mullingitover wrote: post #127
tolmasky wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediat…

[deleted]

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#200

Post by taneq »

nabla9 wrote: post #156

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.

I do the same now with movies, as well as making sure I have unencumbered digital copies of any music I buy. I'm happy to pay for good content but damned if I'm going to buy it again every time the disc scratches (and besides, who even has a CD drive any more?)
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