Digital books wear out faster than physical books
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Digital books wear out faster than physical books
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Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#2I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it.
I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#3I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it. I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
If your goals are 1) pay for it 2) have the convenience of no DRM, then it sounds like doing it this way worked out fine. Except maybe that pirating as a second step is slightly less convenient than downloading directly from the same place you bought it.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#4I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it. I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
I generally buy books that came out recently (but pirate 10+ year old books) and the first thing I do to a new book is crack the DRM so I can just save an EPUB that I can read where I want to read it, when I want to read it.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#5Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years, and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk.
But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? The way to preserve media is to distribute it and store it in many places, not just one central location. Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats?
Also, figuring out what information is "meaningful" and which is completely useless or redundant is extremely important. Because we want to store everything with the potential to be important in the future, but we also have an incredible amount of data (hence one of the reasons why IA is the only major archiver). It may be good to strategize data collection, e.g. a shallow list of all sources and a deeper list of popular sources, a sample of various sources from every region, etc
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#6I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it. I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
If your goals are 1) pay for it 2) have the convenience of no DRM, then it sounds like doing it this way worked out fine. Except maybe that pirating as a second step is slightly less convenient than downloading directly from the same place you bought it.
One good thing about technical ebooks is that they know their audience can just pirate it if they want, so they don't bother with DRM. Was happy to pay for my digital copy of "Practical Object Oriented Design".
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#7I moved my apple account between countries and lost a lot tv series and books I bought ... oh sorry I didn't buy them I bought the right to temporary view them.
same with some old games/apps, they work still perfectly on my older iPhone with newest updates, yet due to changing the store and developers not "updating" them they are no longer available for me.
moved to android, with linageOS.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#8I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it. I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
If possible, consider buying from DRM-free bookshops instead. Libreture maintains a list of them [1].
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#9I totally agree that digital media isn't anywhere near as permanent as many people think. Here today, gone tomorrow.
But I've moved all my reading over to Kindle, even so. Because my old eyes can't handle paperbacks anymore. And reading glasses make me so very ill. That's a personal problem, yes, but it is 100% of why I buy eBooks now and why I'm glad they're an option.
I guess I could back up the Kindle books, right? They all claim to have no DRM, at the beginning of each book.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#10This is a really weird article for me. Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside. That's about it.
These three technologies are some of the oldest and most robust we have when it comes to digital media at large. Being concerned about reading and displaying HTML pages in a zip file in a decade is absurd. They're both already over 30 years old themselves.
DRM, yes. DRM is a complete and utter pox on the digital media world. Almost as bad as trade-bound paperbacks which tend to fall apart after (sometimes during, grrr) a single read. Preserving trade paperbacks, however, takes more effort than removing ebook DRM, and both procedures are well documented with broadly available tools.