Digital books wear out faster than physical books

I learned a few things about digital library books that made me sad:

* Publishers only allow a certain number of "rentals" of digital library books, after which the eBook license expires.

* Publishers also put an expiration date on the license, so after maybe two years, the eBook license expires even if nobody borrows the book.

* Publishers have repeatedly put hard limits on the abilities for libraries to purchase eBook licenses, for example allowing only one copy per library for new releases.

* Publishers raised the prices of library eBooks to be far higher than a physical book. A $15 physical book might cost $60 as an eBook to a library.

No, it worked terribly because they hadn't been stored well and were covered in mold (even the ones from only 70 years ago) or otherwise falling apart. I couldn't search them for specific phrases I remembered my grandfather reading me as a child, and I didn't have the physical space of my own to store them all either anyway. Even making a stab at indexing them all was enormously labor intensive. I was the only one in the family interested in even trying. It really sucked.

>Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience.

Yes, it was excellent, since naturally it was DRM-free or I wouldn't have paid for it. I have digital stuff from the 80s, still perfectly preserved, that I can call up as I wish, when I wish, anywhere I wish anywhere in the world.

I'm 100% onboard with the correct argument that modern copyright and DRM go against the core bargain of IP (societal agreement for public benefit) and could use major reform. But I don't think this piece does a very good job of making that argument, the entire comparison and pretending that books don't require any sort of preservation and so on really distracts from the core issues.

While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either).

EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuances, but a DRM-free EPUB book should be readable indefinitely. You can check this out by unzipping the EPUB and looking at the files inside with a web browser (if you're doing it from a GUI, you will probably have to change the file extension to .zip first, so it unzips rather than opens in your ebook reader software).