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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#411

Post by [deleted] »

linuxftw wrote: post #394
cyphar wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely very good and thought-provoking television shows today. I would definitely be in favour of students watching them in class too. But that doesn't mean that books and other creative media made more than 40 years ago are useless. For one thing, books written in the past give us insight into our history (I hope we can both agree that learning about our history is a good thing). For another, some of t…

> I can't imagine anyone trying to apply this logic to any field other than literature. It's about going obsolete. We don't teach people how to use an abacus anymore, or even write in cursive. I'm not saying there's not a place for history, but it's time to stop fawning over things that happened 200 years ago and focus on more modern things.

[deleted]

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#412

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #294
docker_up wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was the price of this. book? Numerous engineering texts run $100s, some north of $1,000. Pure rent-seeking. Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.

I a word: "piracy deterrent ".

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#413

Post by thelazydogsback »

LeonM wrote: post #374
PowerfulWizard wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait... you bought the book and still got ads? That's unacceptable. Ask for a full refund and never ever buy anything from that company again.

You can now pay $200/mo for cable and still be forced to watch un-skippable ads for on-demand programming.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#414

Post by c0vfefe »

derefr wrote: post #36
adrianhon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.

Sure, but in a community where there wasn't an actual public library, I do believe one would inevitably come into existence as the effort of the community, in the same way those tiny libraries do. "People have spare books; community centres exist; so why not put the spare books in the community centre?"

Except communities that under-privileged will be unlikely to have the bandwidth or know-how for activism at that scale.

Unfortunately reality does not "inevitably" progress towards utopia, any more than the life of any individual does.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#415

Post by c0vfefe »

m463 wrote: post #217
JudgeWapner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen. The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no r…

There are a lot of things that wouldn't exist if they weren't grandfathered in. I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines. And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today. And then there are guns.

At the risk of sounding too conservative for HN, this 'grandfathering' is an invaluable means of insulating societal infrastructure from the tyranny of cultural value shift.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#416

Post by newsgremlin »

la_barba wrote: post #201
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.

Have you found a solution to piracy that doesn't involve DRM? What was its success rate? I'm sure the publishers would love to switch to a better system if it exists.

No company has ever gone out of business because of piracy. How is adobe still going in that case? I doubt the average user of photoshop was willing to drop hundreds of dollars to purchase a software license off them over the years.

If someone is willing to pirate one game no matter the cost, then they are very likely to pirate all games they play. That doesn't translate into lost sales, they are stopping people who have no interest in making a purchase to begin with.

From the music industry to software industry, you have to ask, are big companies trying to protect their revenue, or profit? I find it hard to sympathize with companies that are disappointed with making only tens to hundreds of millions in profit. Exponential growth is not realistic, it means more monopolies over products and services.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#417

Post by c0vfefe »

redisman wrote: post #331
lukewrites wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love reading. I resisted ebooks until we had a baby at which point my reading time shrank to situations (bed w/the lights out, on the bus) where my Kindle is more convenient than a paper book. I buy/acquire ebooks that are the sort of thing I'd probably purchase, read, and then sell. For books I think (or know) I want to keep, I buy a paper copy, even if I've gotten an e-copy. I want my kids to have lots of book ar…

I much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.

Audiobooks and podcasts are the go-to for those seasons of life.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#418

Post by gdulli »

porker wrote: post #118
gdulli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a collection of over 1000 faved tweets that's one of my favorite possessions. I noticed that one would occasionally get deleted by the author so I wrote a script to screenshot them all with a Python package called Splinter.

Would you mind publishing it? I'm in the same situation

Sure, here you go: https://pastebin.com/iXzscHW6

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#419

Post by EdwardCoffin »

Herrin wrote: post #8
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…

You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared. This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.

Note that I probably have a backup of this book (I'm sure it is on one of my old decommissioned backup drives), it's unlocking it that is the problem.
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