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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

#31

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

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.

Larry Correia has a great article[0] about where his money comes from. His backlist (previously published books) are his bread and butter.

[0] https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#32

Post by rolobio »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #25
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

That is a placeholder site?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#33

Post by bnj »

I’ve definitely had a better time with maintaining my collection of digital books through more than one move to different countries. I’ve kept three or four of my most cherished books, but my digital collection are independent of location.

I’ve always made a habit of trying to get digital copies of any book that I’ve felt was worth buying. DRM is a completely different story, giving books a shelf life which is limited to the lifespan of the retailer and often less.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#34

Post by riversflow »

xoa wrote: post #15

> Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. 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 eith…

> It really sucked.

Huh, I have a number of books that have been in my family for a long time, reading them is awesome. I never got to meet my grandfather, so reading the same copy of Huck Finn he did, or referencing the same dictionary he used is about as close as I can come.

That said my dad's collection of fiction ebooks will carry a lot of the same value, if only because there is _so much_ fiction out there.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#35

Post by pdonis »

linuxhansl wrote: post #14

Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one. Every hoop is taken to make them like real books whether it makes sense or not, except for the time when you actually want to lend or give them to someone else. Then it gets complicated, depends on the vendor, or is simply impossible. I have no need for that. Imagine 200 years in the future, all license servers are disabled and we cannot read our own…

> Digital books are a scam.

Not if you like carrying your whole library around with you everywhere. Try doing that with physical books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#36

Post by rolobio »

systemicdanna wrote: post #27
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.

PDFA? I wouldn’t call it e-reader friendly exactly, but it is pretty universal.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#37

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

rolobio wrote: post #32
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love buying eBooks from Baen.com directly. Edit: fixed. Stupid autocorrect

That is a placeholder site?

It was supposed to be the publisher, Baen, but I didn't catch my autocorrect. Fixed.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#38

Post by falcolas »

abracadaniel wrote: post #28
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.

> the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable

Not really. The paper's acidic, which means that the paper degrades to the point of not being usable without a huge amount of intervention. I have trade paperbacks which are under 20 years old whose paper are downright brittle.

> but libraries canno

Which is, I hate to say, irrelevant to the discussion of preserving digital documents. Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#39

Post by novalis78 »

I consider my extensive library of physical books ‘nuclear powered reading devices’ - with that mindset they are actually very lightweight. The occasional move was always a great workout and the motivation to find a permanent home and build it out as a dynastic seat for the family and a bunker for civilization quite motivating. Electronic reading materials on the other hand are the … great for immediate and temporary research.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#40

Post by jeroenhd »

systemicdanna wrote: post #23
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.

The funny thing is that I found a DRM-free copy of the book you mentioned on the internet in less than a minute. PDF or ePub, your pick; probably converted from the same source.

Whatever these publishers are trying to do, they're only hurting their honest customers. It's trivial to find popular eBooks online regardless of library licenses and DRM usage yet honest people's lives are made so incredibly difficult for no good reason.

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