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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#251

Post by DenisM »

la_barba wrote: post #240
DenisM wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, Inc. did - they sell all of their music without DRM for the last, like, 10 years. Meanwhile the music industry is alive and well. The key is convenience. When it's convenient to buy, people buy.

Oh? I thought Apple Music was encumbered with DRM in their M4P format. I'm not super familiar with their service though. Maybe I'm wrong.. Edit: Looks like the M4P format was mainly on older songs pre2009. Though I see forum threads with people saying that they have to re-pay Apple w/ itunes match to get the drm-free version.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201616

No DRM for iTunes Store where you can buy music.

Apple Music a streaming service, and that is DRMed (I believe).

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#252

Post by cyphar »

la_barba wrote: post #232
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.

You just signaled that you find value in the DRM'd product, even if that wasn't your intent. Why not reward creators who choose to distribute their works without DRM? I'm neither pro nor anti-DRM, but I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.

> I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.

I pay for DRM-free versions of anything if it's available -- even if it's more expensive (I've downloaded many hundreds of dollars of DRM-free audiobooks). I eben refuse to buy physical books from authors like JK Rowling (who tried to force book-owners to return copies of the Half-Blood Prince that were accidentally sold early).

Here in Australia you sometimes can't even buy the DRM-up-the-wazoo version. Game of Thrones wasn't available through any legal channels for years. And that's ignoring the Australia Tax we get for not being from the US or Europe (the shipping costs of bytes is very high it seems).

Then again, I also don't watch too many films or shows these days. Mainly because I can't get many DRM-free versions.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#253

Post by CWuestefeld »

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…

general disdain for most things run by any type of government here

Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#254

Post by Retra »

la_barba wrote: post #235
docker_up wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with. Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads.…

You can't dismiss it all as entitlement. Imagine that you have a gym membership and someone is offering a service to life your weights for you for a fee. Do you have a right not not lift weights without paying this fee? Of course you do.

Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#255

Post by nine_k »

patmcc wrote: post #223
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…

>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebo…

The AAA-class games with a budget of a blockbuster movie? Well, I'm fine with them following the movie locked-up route.

New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#256

Post by dredmorbius »

marvindanig wrote: post #176
filoleg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the interface and interaction of physical books which is lost.

I can keep my hand between two sections and flip between them, insert colored post-its, or bokmarks or index cards. Dog-ear pages, make marginal notes, star, underline, or (shudder)highlight.

The one thing missing is full-text search, though a good index is a 90% solution (and so: not optional).

Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works. Fluid layout is great for screens, but lousy for recall.

And the interface is consistent across books, authors, publishers, and centuries. Whilst, yes, various ebook formats offer facsimiles of many of these features, they are just that, and mediated to bot. Want to highlight? Better hope that's a rendered or OCRd (and reliably) PDF, or you're SooL.

Source; A tablet with over 5,000 epub-type docs, of various sources and provenance, from single page to multi-volume book length. I appreciate the weight and space savings, but miss much physical books deliver.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#257

Post by cyphar »

DenisM wrote: post #244
cydonian_monk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when it comes to an engineering textbook. While my university's selected electrical engineering books were all sub-$500 (usually in the $300 range), most of the "core" civil engineering books were at or over $1,000. Just insane for anyone who was not on scholarship. (And this was 20 years ago!)

Surely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.

Many students do that, but print shops might refuse to do the copying if they notice it's a textbook. At least, that's my experience in Australia.

That's the kind of system draconian copyright laws create.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#258

Post by cyphar »

dageshi wrote: post #155
NoodleIncident wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.

Most DRM is there to protect it during the initial sales window when demand and awareness of the product are at their highest.

So why not release a DRM-free version after that window? I'd be happy to wait 6 months to buy a movie if that's what it took to get a DRM-free copy.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#259

Post by cyphar »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #224

GNU's The Right to Read sounded utterly and totally laughable to me in circa 2000 when I first read it. A fanciable dystopia. It has come too close to reality in more recent years since.

Despite having some fairly questionable social views, Stallman has been living 40 years in the future for the past 40 years. Every time I read him, I'm saddened that nobody listened.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#260

Post by javchz »

I have a Kindle for a few years now, and I love it... but the weird thing it's that most of the books I have read on the platform, haven't been acquired through Amazon. All of this it's thanks to me being afraid of this kind of practices, plus the weird pricing doesn't help (like some hard covers being cheaper than digital books).

I kinda like the humble bundle approach to this, where I can buy bulks of books DRM free in my PC, that are easy to use thanks to software like Calibre. I hope soon the e-book industry have an equivalent to gog in games, or bandcamp to music.

Yeah the subscription model it's cool, comfy and all, but what happen when the company behind decides to shutdown the product because didn't reach the desired metrics? I mean I can see Google having their own Stadia for books, and a few years go by and then they GoogleReaderIt/PlusIt, and that's it, my library of started books with their literally bookmarks and notes are gone.

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