21–30 of 134 posts
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I can photocopy or scan every page. It may not be easy, but it's doable, and the publisher does not have technology that actively prevents me from doing this.
You can strip off DRM from an ebook. It's as illegal as photocopying every page, but slightly less cumbersome to do.
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To stay with the real world analogy: you also can't back up your book. You have that one copy and once it breaks, you are out of luck and have to buy a new one. I compare the ebook readers as a physical object with the books (also physical objects). If I can read books on that device even when my credit card has expired or other things have disabled my account, then IMHO the parity to the real world exists: I have th…
I can photocopy or scan every page. It may not be easy, but it's doable, and the publisher does not have technology that actively prevents me from doing this.
As far as I understood the article, this is about a second download of a book purchased some time ago. I think in this case, it's not as clear-cut as the article makes it out to be. To stay with the real world analogy: while the article is right that nothing will glue the pages of a physical book together once the credit card expires, it is also the case that purchasing a book once doesn't entitle you to go to the bo…
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While I can't speak to the DRM issues here, I can say that it's definitely silly to me. Valve lets me download games and films for gigs as much as I like. The idea that I could do that with ebooks? Why, I could rack up... Megabytes of bandwidth for them! Maybe even a Gigabyte! Okay, maybe that's a bit assholish of me to phrase it that way, but it really does seem like an odd decision to me as a user.
> Valve lets me download games and films for gigs as much as I like only if you have a valid account with them. Which is the exact issue the original article was complaining about. Now, a Steam account stays valid even after the credit card has expired, but if you lose that account for whatever other reason, all your content is gone. Which is worse than many ebook readers because they will allow you to continue to ac…
So I believe, that analogies like "glue the pages of a book shut" and "selling" are misleading. The much more interesting question is, what is a reasonable default licence for digital goods? Or to pose the question slightly differently, what can each side of a default licence agreement reasonable expect of each other?
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I have another word for similar policies, sleazy.
Occam would probably disagree with you. Absent evidence of malevolent intent, I'd chalk this up to a mediocre designer who didn't ask enough questions of himself or his subject matter experts.
Greed is a natural human feeling that usually comes from a basic survival instinct. That's why greed is deeply embedded in our society. Also, that's another reason why Vulcans are superior to humans.
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> ...then we can't rurn around and demand that it also isn't and that we should have right to infinitely ask for additional copies - however cheap it might be to create them. oh Yes, We can. The reason we're entitled to it is the fact that DRM stands in the way of us customers backing up our purchases. If my eBook were in a format devoid of DRM & I could back it up by saving it in Droppbox or my external hard drive,…
To stay with the real world analogy: you also can't back up your book. You have that one copy and once it breaks, you are out of luck and have to buy a new one. I compare the ebook readers as a physical object with the books (also physical objects). If I can read books on that device even when my credit card has expired or other things have disabled my account, then IMHO the parity to the real world exists: I have th…
Also, even though I have a child at home, I never had a book that "broke" - as there's nothing that some glue can't fix. The only real danger for the preservation of books in physical form is fire.
> by centralizing many books to one physical object, you risk losing much more content as you lose that physical object
No, you got it wrong. The far bigger danger is that the eBook reader is a device running on integrated circuits and battery, which will break in only a couple of years and those B&N servers will not be online forever (I would be quite surprised if they are still online in 10 years), it's only a question of when that will happen.
And making this whole thing defective by disallowing people to backup their books however they want is the most evil and stupid thing I've ever seen. DRM is defective by design and no matter how much you try painting this crow, it's still a crow.
Obviously this is an issue that should be fixed, but there isn't even any evidence that any attempts were made to contact B&N - just someone encountering an error message in B&N's software.
I'm as against DRM as anyone else here but this is a non-story.
The simple fact is that the ebook experience sucks all the way around. I gave it a shot with the Nook Touch, and I really dislike it, even if DRM wasn't an issue. Over the years my subconcious has grown used to indexing the story according to certain physical properties of the book. "Oh yes, that happend about a cm in on the right side page, like halfway down" is something I might think- but this coordinate system do…
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I can photocopy or scan every page. It may not be easy, but it's doable, and the publisher does not have technology that actively prevents me from doing this.
You can photocopy every page of your ebook too. Probably even easier to accomplish!