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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

#361

Post by acomjean »

cbrogrammer wrote: post #254
DocTomoe wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.

Saying anyone is "responsible" for a suicide is disingenuous

Over zealous prosecution can make one’s life a living hell which certainly didn’t help.

Add to that a young man who might have had some depression issues (I’m not sure) and you have a heartbreaking tragedy.

From the Wikipedia:

Days before Swartz's funeral, Lawrence Lessig eulogized his friend and sometime-client in an essay, "Prosecutor as Bully." He decried the disproportionality of Swartz's prosecution and said, "The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon'. For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

It’s heartbreaking even years on.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#362

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #355
andrepd wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those user hostile features are what drive me to piracy. No way I'll pay money to have the privilege of installing spyware just so I can stream low-quality video to whatever device the provider deems worthy at that particular moment. I'll just go on 1337x and in 2 minutes I have an high quality mkv that I can play anywhere I want. I'd happily pay 5-10$ a pop for this, and for indie movies I do make the effort of seei…

What a way to justify a crime. "I don't like how they act, so I don't comply with their rules". You pirate because you have no respect for law, because you are a entitled child or because you don't have enough money. Piracy isn't plain theft, but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners. It's close, isn't it? Would you sneak into a amusement park? Not pay for dinner if you found it not to…

The reason people think piracy is ok is because there is no victim being deprived of property.

But more than that, you're not even technically correct. piracy is copyright infringement, which is not criminal.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#363

Post by BeFlatXIII »

garfieldnate wrote: post #335
adalacelove wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is…

I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me , the content was st…

That's why I encourage everyone with a desktop system to run their HDMI outputs through a capture card as well as the monitors.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#364

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #314
yywwbbn wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rooting the device voids the warranty. I’m pretty sure it would depend on the country you’re in . Even if that’s actually the case in the US

Even if it doesn’t void the warranty, it voids SafetyNet, so now Netflix and other apps might refuse to work. And even if it didn’t, it increases the attack surface. Random apps can ask for root, and the average user won’t know what it means. And even if you know the risks, now it’s much more of a hassle keeping your device up-to-date. So yes, rooting is theoretically a solution, but it’s not practical in the least.

Is there a root method that falsely reports that SafetyNet is still intact?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#365

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

DocTomoe wrote: post #241
strix_varius wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out. Is this the real range? Intuitively, it seems low, but I have no idea. I remember those "Due date" tables in books from my childhood, with what must have been at least a couple of dozen rows...

Hm, I worked at a national library during my university years, for some extra cash and free access to the more silent part of the building. State/National libraries in Europe often work on a "required (free) copy" aspect: publishers are required to provide the national library with a free copy of any book they publish. This makes them huge, but it also makes them have all kinds of books of different quality, both con…

I think this context is important, thank you for providing it.

If i were to summarize succinctly I would say the lifetime of a book in a library is akin to the lifetime of a car at a rental car company. The natural wear and tear on it is far greater than one that is owned by a single, private owner, and so the expected lifetime becomes much shorter.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#366

Post by marcus_holmes »

underdeserver wrote: post #358

EPUB, the current standard, is a zip containing UTF-8 HTML files. Zip, UTF-8 and HTML are all ~30 year old standards. They're not going anywhere. It's just that we haven't had the chance to see how long they'll last. As for the processing and reprocessing... We can't really do anything with printed books at scale without lots of manual labor. E-books open up that possibility. That's supposed to be a bad thing? Printe…

I have digital books from 12 years ago on my hard drive (I switched to digital 12 years ago and got rid of all my dead trees about 10 years ago). I don't see any reason why they won't still be available and readable in another 20 years, or 50 for that matter.

I used to have about 500 physical books, which took up a dozen or more book boxes and were back-breaking to move (I move a lot - every year on average). Every time they got moved they got damaged, and in one place the only storage area for them was damp, so they started getting moldy.

I have probably 2000 books stored on a couple of backup drives (duplicated). I can move them (and my e-reader) in my pocket.

I did lose a few in the early days because I stupidly went with Kindle and Amazon's DRM crap. But I managed to convert most of them to EPUB and now I only buy DRM-free books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#367

Post by peoplefromibiza »

ketzu wrote: post #313
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. the point is exactly that: if you have to rely on very complex setups to keep the data fresh, it means that the data is not safe. can you imagine an hard disk surviving from the ancient Egypt to us?

Wasn't the point of the original comment that the setup to keep paper safe is also very complex? Another question I wonder about: How hard is noticing the failures?

yes, it's hard, but papyrus kept inside a very strong, possibly waterproof, possibly not affected by rust (alluminium, stainless steel etc), metal box will last much longer than hard drives kept inside the same strong metal box.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#368

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

I got a Kobo and it does bookmarks, text selection and dictionary search fine. I shop from a variety of places, but only buy DRM-free EPUB books (https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free/ for example)

I use Calibre to organise the books (and convert formats if necessary) and push them to the device.

I backup the entire collection using a USB backup drive irregularly (once a month or so). I'm experimenting with Syncthing to backup to a rented baremetal server. So far so good.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#369

Post by rdevsrex »

garfieldnate wrote: post #335
adalacelove wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is…

I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me , the content was st…

You will own nothing and be happy.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#370

Post by theNJR »

vel0city wrote: post #201
theNJR wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this exact worry as a dad of a seven day old. During pregnancy, my wife and I read various new parent books out loud to each other. The plan is to continue that with baby. Maybe she’ll associate the Kindle with reading, but my dad collects books, so I grew up absolutely surrounded by them. If he just had a big kindle library, not sure it would have had an effect

Consider taking your kid to the library often, pretty much as soon as they can walk. The library near us even had a good collection of board books. My kid loves going to the library, playing with some of the toys, looking at the small aquarium, and browsing all the books to pick out the three to take home for the week. He's under 5 and has already checked out about 200 books! Be sure to pick up at least one for yours…

This is awesome advice!

And it turns out the library is less than a mile away from me. How cool!

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