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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

#21

Post by kazinator »

falcolas wrote: post #10

This 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 a…

If you don't copy those files to new media, the piece of hardware itself that they reside on may be unusable. How easily can you read some HTML sitting on a 500 megabyte IDE drive from 1995, versus a book printed in 1995? If you come across such an object, you don't even know what is on it, and whether it is worth it to delve into it.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#22

Post by caconym_ »

Last year I decided to exit the Kindle ecosystem after buying quite a few books in it, and cracking the DRM was a pretty near thing. I was lucky to have an older Kindle device sitting around that didn't support Amazon's latest DRM. It seems like they may be winning the arms race.

As an individual with a few hundred ebooks rather than an institution with millions of them, I'm a lot less concerned about losing my un-DRM'd files and/or the ability to read them, but I very nearly lost my entire ebook library just because I fell into Kindle's convenience trap. I've decided now to only buy ebooks that don't have DRM.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#23

Post by systemicdanna »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #11

Planet Money did an episode on the "e-Book Wars" between libraries and publishers a week ago: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe... 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 tw…

This is really sad. Artificial constraints on a medium that was supposed to democratize access to information.

I am right now in line to borrow the new DeGrasse Tyson’s book and will have to wait for almost 6 weeks for my turn. They have only 3 digital copies available and almost a hundred people waiting ahead of me.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#24

Post by teraflop »

caconym_ wrote: post #22

Last year I decided to exit the Kindle ecosystem after buying quite a few books in it, and cracking the DRM was a pretty near thing. I was lucky to have an older Kindle device sitting around that didn't support Amazon's latest DRM. It seems like they may be winning the arms race. As an individual with a few hundred ebooks rather than an institution with millions of them, I'm a lot less concerned about losing my un-DR…

IMHO, there is effectively no moral or ethical difference between cracking the DRM on a book you've purchased and downloading a copy of the same book from Library Genesis. And the latter is usually more convenient, in my experience.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#25

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

caconym_ wrote: post #22

Last year I decided to exit the Kindle ecosystem after buying quite a few books in it, and cracking the DRM was a pretty near thing. I was lucky to have an older Kindle device sitting around that didn't support Amazon's latest DRM. It seems like they may be winning the arms race. As an individual with a few hundred ebooks rather than an institution with millions of them, I'm a lot less concerned about losing my un-DR…

This is why I love buying eBooks from Baen.com directly.

Edit: fixed. Stupid autocorrect

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#26

Post by [deleted] »

armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Physical 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 Inte…

[deleted]

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#27

Post by systemicdanna »

vel0city wrote: post #18

DRM-laden digital books should be seen like the extra cheap paperbacks which fall apart sitting untouched on the shelf after a couple of years. Extremely different than the well-bound books one might think of when handling a 100 year old book. Non-DRM'd ebooks in formats which are open, easily parseable, and that people care to archive should be fine for a long time. Some people here are talking about a decade as if…

Is there a non-DRM format + an e-reader combo that allows for bookmarks, text selection, dictionary search? Ideally I would prefer to keep my Kindle but would really love to buy and own non-DRM books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#28

Post by abracadaniel »

falcolas wrote: post #10

This 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 a…

The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable. An ebook takes a migration plan to remain readable. Yes you can remove DRM, but libraries cannot, they have to keep paying, and they're being sued to prevent them from preserving and migrating their data.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#29

Post by systemicdanna »

kgarten wrote: post #7

I 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.

Do you know if that affects movies bought through Apple’s TV app (US)? I have quite a few movies in my collection and would be really annoyed if they didn’t work in Europe.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#30

Post by systemicdanna »

bragr wrote: post #12
Yujf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Authors that published 10+ years ago don't have bills to pay? This is a weird moral distinction to me.

If anything they could depend even more on these individual purchases.
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