51–60 of 453 posts
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…
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…
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.
According to this community post (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253966277) that implies that DRM'd content is not available in those countries, and that you'll need to download your movies and for them to work depending on the country you're visiting.
If you're coming over for a temporary visit, setting up a VPN on your home network may be a good idea. Many American services are not available in other countries, even if you're a paying customer.
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'm picturing someone in the crowd saying this while the Library of Alexandria burns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 getting shafted - humanity at large is not. 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…
And that's cool.
Now then, should Libraries be getting shafted like this? Fuck no. Can any actions I take - short of running for office and making my way up to the federal government in charge of interstate commerce - effect that? Also, sadly, no. I will continue to support librarians seeking change while facing reality.
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…
IMO, the article's title should say, "DRMed ebooks wear out faster than physical books."
And that's clearly correct: digital data that you don't make copies of is quite physically fragile, and even if the physical media survives, it may be difficult or impossible to read it. (Reading data off an old IDE hard drive or Jazz drive, for example.)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>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. 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?
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.