41–50 of 453 posts
I 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]. [1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/
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…
Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Libraries are how humanity at large preserves documents! Sure, I might have a wonderful collection of books on my hard drive, but other than me (and whoever knows about my torrents), nobody's benefiting from that; whereas everyone with a local library knows (at least, in theory) that they can find information there.
When I kick the bucket, what happens to my hard drive? If somebody knew about it and cared enough, they might subsume its contents into their collection; and then the information would be safe for another… few decades? To quote Randall Munroe (https://xkcd.com/1909/ title text):
> I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.
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.
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.
If I go to a library to read a trade paperback from 1995, it's going to have been re-bound. And that's if the paper has survived. Trade-bound paperback books - which are usually price equivalent to ebooks - require intervention to remain usable for more than a few years.
As for my own collection, I have no books from 1995 left. They've mostly fallen apart or been replaced with ebooks (which are still in great condition).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I thought modern books were made with acid-free paper? I know this is a huge problem for books made in, for instance, the 1970s. Is it only the nicer books that are made with acid-free paper?
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…
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.
You'll eventually get it, and you might even like it so much that you purchase the physical copy, but that purchase won't happen for months because of some artificial constraint like this.
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…
I absolutely agree that for immediate research nothing beats electronic version short of a personal librarian.