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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#361

Post by TeMPOraL »

la_barba wrote: post #276
Retra wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 justif…

It is the freedom of the creator to pick a license and method they wish to use to distribute their work. I'm talking about DRM for things which are mostly entertainment - things like movies, games, music, etc. We all have equal freedoms to not support such platforms. I don't follow what point you're trying to make with your gym example. If the gym has some policies which you dislike, you can simply chose to not go th…

Gyms are substitutable, "movies, games, music, etc." are not. Your argument works for e.g. Steam vs. GOG when both carry a particular game, but it doesn't work in general, because a DRMed work is usually DRMed everywhere.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#362

Post by dageshi »

mark-r wrote: post #273
dageshi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Citation needed. It seems very clear from the history of copyright law that the whole thing is just a money grab.

I'm not talking about copyright law, I'm talking about DRM. Go look at the videogame industry and denuvo. They use it because it's hard to crack during the initial sales window, once it gets cracked usually after a couple months they patch it out and don't bother to replace it because its job is done.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#363

Post by lloeki »

tomsmeding wrote: post #339
lloeki wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot a…

> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you pers…

Turns out this guys was right:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#364

Post by scottlocklin »

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…

I agree with this sentiment when using a paperwhite tablet (glowing screens with stuff formatted for paper is painful). Serial reading, ebooks are fine.

There are a few cases where a PDF/djvu textbook with strategic bookmarks can also be used. When I'm on the road I have a decent reference library in a rooted Kobo H2O running koreader. Not an ideal solution; something with an 8x12 screen would be much closer to it, but nobody makes these any more, and if I need to look something up in Golub, it can be done.

FWIIW the only thing that makes this doable is koreader does reflow on columnated text.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#365

Post by ricardobeat »

dgudkov wrote: post #350
dredmorbius wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A physical book can readily be hand-scanned in an hour. There are numerous guides to processing the scans from that point. Two of the besst I've found: https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file

It's not about scanning. It's about printing (replicating) a book - it is significantly more expensive to replicate a real book than a digital book.

Well, he is arguing it’s not. I imagine you’ve seen a photocopier. You don’t need the copy to be the same print quality, size, or even bound at all.

In fact copying entire books was done daily where I went to university and took no longer than 15m, at something like five bucks each. You’d bring that stack of A4 home, and maybe hand it down if it survived the semester.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#366

Post by inflatableDodo »

sp332 wrote: post #25
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…

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.

Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.

Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#367

Post by serf »

lloeki wrote: post #363
tomsmeding wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you pers…

Turns out this guys was right: https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

NSFW:

FYI if you click that link and the referrer is hacker news it redirects you to a nice picture of a testicle in a cup, first thing in the morning.

(it redirects to : https://imgur.com/32R3qLv )

The link is fine, just don't click it from here -- well, unless cup-testicles are your bag. Pun intended.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#368

Post by sametmax »

kenjackson wrote: post #341
ajuc wrote: post #7

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

Morally evil? They’re giving full refunds on the books. This type of hyperbole makes it hard to take anti-DRM arguments seriously. “It’s a less desirable technology choice” feels more like the right level of angst IMO.

I don't want a refund. I want to keep my books.

"yeah, we take back your transplanted heart but don't worry we will give a refund so it's not immoral"

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#369

Post by yorwba »

dheera wrote: post #284
cyphar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project Gutenberg self-censored themselves to all German users in protest of the lawsuit.

If they did not have servers in Germany couldn't they have just ignored the lawsuit? They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my si…

They explain all this in the notice I linked above:

...

Because PGLAF operates as a legitimate non-profit organization, however, it is appropriate to act as the German Court ordered - pending appeal - even though it disagrees with the order.

...

The decision to acceed to the German Court's order to make items inaccessible from Germany is intended to be a temporary appeasement, while the appeal occurs - this is because the German appeal Court will likely look disfavorably on PGLAF if it shows contempt for the German Court. Ultimately, PGLAF seeks to establish that any complaints about copyright must be brought either to the US Courts (where PGLAF operates) or WIPO processes (as guided by international treaties).

...

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#370

Post by cjg »

kenjackson wrote: post #341
ajuc wrote: post #7

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

Morally evil? They’re giving full refunds on the books. This type of hyperbole makes it hard to take anti-DRM arguments seriously. “It’s a less desirable technology choice” feels more like the right level of angst IMO.

Giving refunds isn't sufficient.

The reason why trades happen is that both sides value what the other party has more. So I value a book more than I value the money the seller wants to charge for it, so I buy it.

So that means that I would lose out with a unilateral unwinding of the trade.

Imagine the outcry if this happened in the financial world: "Yeah, we sold you that stock, but we're taking it back now, you'll be OK because we're giving you the money back." Isn't going to fly.

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