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> Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups. Doesn’t seem all that nefarious. Get your money back, order the paperbacks. No DRM issues again.
From where? The bookstores that no longer exist? Or hope that there is a 1/1000 chance you might get lucky and find one on fleaBay?
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Overdrive ebooks are DRMed (or at least the majority of them are).
Overdrive primarily uses Adobe's DRM system. You can "liberate" the titles with the use of the DeDRM toolset or get the resources directly off their "libby" platform, which simply requires reassembling the assets into an EPUB
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"Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups." that... I mean, if they automatically refund everyone? that sounds... really pretty good? I mean, I've got a few grand into my kindle books. I bet I have more than a grand in obsolete technical books alone. If the kindle was no longer the dominant platform (or rather, if there was another platform wit…
if you wanted to pay me several thousand dollars to re-buy my library on a different platform? Sure, I'd take that deal And what do you do when the media you want isn't available on another platform? In the recent article about the burning of the Universal music archive we learned that less than 11% of recorded music is available online. Anyone who subscribes to a streaming service knows content comes and goes. The o…
Eh, as someone who has owned (and lost or destroyed) a bunch of physical things, my experience is that I have to continually rebuy physical things I use; I mean, records, CDs, books... these all get lost and destroyed in various ways if you carry them around with you and otherwise use them. I don't think that the way I own and store things is more reliable than a major content licensing platform. If I use a thing consistently and long term, then licensing it is certainly more reliable than buying a physical copy, and may very well be cheaper for me than buying physical copies new.
I'd argue that what protects availability of things that go out of print is more that other people own the thing and can sell me a copy when mine is lost or destroyed. You could argue this is a bit of a tragedy of the commons, or it could be, if E-books started pushing physical books out of print (as opposed to books that are e-only mostly being books that wouldn't have been printed at all before the advent of e-book technology)
Of course, for things that are rare (and things that are popular are a lot less likely to go out of print) this gets expensive pretty fast, but first sale doctrine does assure me that I can usually get a copy, if I'm willing to pay enough, while the possibility does exist, with electronic copies, that I won't be able to get a copy at all... that's true.
From https://help.walmart.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/~/music-... : "If you downloaded music from Walmart before February 2008, some of your music files may be in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format."
Walmart shifted to selling 256k non-DRM MP3s after that, and then that store was also killed in 2011: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/08/walma...
I also can't think of the Walmart music store without thinking of this dramatic reading of a timeless 2004 (!) rant about the usability of the Walmart store in non-Microsoft browsers/players. The SWF probably won't play for most of you, but the original post is screenshotted below it: https://www.somethingawful.com/flash-tub/letter-from-interne...
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Conversely, the US is far more strict with diesel emissions, while the EU allows for a LOT more loopholes to favor certain companies that prop up certain economies..
That's a difference in priority between particulate emissions and CO2 emissions, right? With one favoring a relative reduction in soot and the other favoring a relative reduction in CO2. That's my understanding anyway, I'm not a car guy.
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Most DRM is trivially easy to fool: Just pirate. When you circumvent DRM, you are pirating, except you paid for the privilege. You probably also have a bigger risk of being caught, as you still run the DRM software.
well, you're still supporting the people behind the works, which - believe it or not - i like to do. and also, while the iso/tv/movie scene has strict quality rules, the ebook "scene" seems more ad-hoc. pirated ebooks are sometimes OCR scans with tonnes of spelling mistakes or weird formatting, or ancient editions. in short, de-DRM can still be preferable.
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Most DRM is trivially easy to fool: Just pirate. When you circumvent DRM, you are pirating, except you paid for the privilege. You probably also have a bigger risk of being caught, as you still run the DRM software.
well, you're still supporting the people behind the works, which - believe it or not - i like to do. and also, while the iso/tv/movie scene has strict quality rules, the ebook "scene" seems more ad-hoc. pirated ebooks are sometimes OCR scans with tonnes of spelling mistakes or weird formatting, or ancient editions. in short, de-DRM can still be preferable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most DRM is trivially easy to fool: Just pirate. When you circumvent DRM, you are pirating, except you paid for the privilege. You probably also have a bigger risk of being caught, as you still run the DRM software.
well, you're still supporting the people behind the works, which - believe it or not - i like to do. and also, while the iso/tv/movie scene has strict quality rules, the ebook "scene" seems more ad-hoc. pirated ebooks are sometimes OCR scans with tonnes of spelling mistakes or weird formatting, or ancient editions. in short, de-DRM can still be preferable.
> Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups. Doesn’t seem all that nefarious. Get your money back, order the paperbacks. No DRM issues again.
It's more a trust issue in a technology. Pirated ebooks don't have DRM and never expire, can be opened on any device and you keep the money anyway.
I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to remove the DRM from the books I buy for my Kindle or the like. Assuming I don't share them with friends, family or strangers (which is a different issue), the authors, publishers, & copyright holders aren't losing sales.