“The books will stop working.”

https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432

by _Microft • 7 years ago

1044 439 7 years ago

I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". With all that electronic junk that no one knows how to archive properly that statement needs to be revisited.

thaumasiotes3• 7 years ago

I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased".

...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone.

You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works.

Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.

LeifCarrotson2• 7 years ago

The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets and some funeral documents were preserved simply by lasting a long time. Others, like many religious documents, were preserved in some form or another by expensive, tedious, completely manual copying. Some information (both fiction and nonfiction) was only ever verbally communicated, as it wasn't deemed worth the expense and difficulty of putting it onto paper.

Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.

It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.

henryfjordan• 7 years ago

I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether

_Microft• 7 years ago

Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose.

It's so sad that this is necessary.

EuAndreh• 7 years ago

Take a look at ArchiveBox [0] if you're thinking on automating this work ;)

[0] https://archivebox.io/

gdulli2• 7 years ago

I have a collection of over 1000 faved tweets that's one of my favorite possessions. I noticed that one would occasionally get deleted by the author so I wrote a script to screenshot them all with a Python package called Splinter.

porker• 7 years ago

Would you mind publishing it? I'm in the same situation

asdff10• 7 years ago

I get so frusterated when anonymous reddit users overwrite their posts with some script in the name of privacy. Just leave out personal details from the public internet, it's not hard. Plus, if I really wanted to, there are at least a half dozen different ways to look at a cached copy of your overwritten reddit comment.

asdff10• 7 years ago

firefox singlefile extension is pretty nice for this but still not perfect given how much dynamic bullshit gets shoveled on top of every website

hyperman13• 7 years ago

I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.

luisaguimaraes• 7 years ago

Let's just wait for who's it gonna be! And how will it look when "books stop working".

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

The UK Consumer Rights Act (CRA) appears to anticipate this as it has no absolute date beyond which goods should remain suitable for purpose.

Digital goods should last infinitely, so a digital good that 'expires' should be fixed or the cost fully refunded (fully as there are still an infinite number of years of use left available; and that should be accounting for inflation too).

knd775• 7 years ago

They are fully refunding all purchases, though.

afandian• 7 years ago

I feel the legality should surround the description. This isn't "selling" it's "lending".

rhino3693• 7 years ago

"and you will receive a full refund of the original purchase price."

Seems fair enough to me.

rmcrx• 7 years ago

Only that I wanted the books, not the money.

hyperman13• 7 years ago

That's like saying the car factory is allowed to take an old timer from you if they refund its original price.

Can I use the money to buy the same book? Is my time lost searching for this replacement worth nothing? If I added annotations, do they end up in the new book? If you answer any of these questions with 'no', its not fair enough.

why-el• 7 years ago

What's the definition of "fair" here? There are many scenarios under which that makes no sense. Is the price inflation adjusted? What if the currency in question tanked in the mean time? What about actual labor done on the copy (annotations, notes, ...). Not faulting Microsoft, but we really need to rethink this model.

TomMckenny• 7 years ago

So can I reverse any contract at anytime or is this something only large companies are allowed to do and only to consumers?

tpush• 7 years ago

You probably only obtain a license to read a book and don't actually own it, similar to streaming movies & music.

AnssiH3• 7 years ago

I doubt the law requires anything more than the full refund which MS is providing.

Similarly, if someone sells you a physical product that is faulty, the seller is not required to produce a replacement, they can just refund you instead.

DenisM6• 7 years ago

the seller is not required to produce a replacement

As well they cannot demand any such thing - the country's money is legislated to be accepted as a settlement for any kind of debt. It's the "legal tender" thing.

dredmorbius15• 7 years ago

Defective instances are a random (though not unpredictable) event occurring independently between instances, with no influence by the manufacturer, designholder, or vendor.

Hitting the Molly Switch on a DRM service is the exact opposite.

EdwardCoffin4• 7 years ago

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle.

The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address. They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decommissioned, so if I wanted to license any new computers to use the book I should do so then.

I've not been able to replace that book either, so it's not like the refund they finally begrudgingly gave me could be put towards a replacement - that book has never been republished in any form that I have been able to find (Vinge's annotated version of his book A Fire Upon the Deep).

Herrin• 7 years ago

You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared.

This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.

anchpop• 7 years ago

And for rare, out of print books, you can put them on libgen if you want to save someone else the time

squaresmile2• 7 years ago

Is this the version you have been searching for? It is "A Fire Upon the Deep" and it looks annotated.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/260sH2V.png

EdwardCoffin4• 7 years ago

Note that I probably have a backup of this book (I'm sure it is on one of my old decommissioned backup drives), it's unlocking it that is the problem.

headcanon• 7 years ago

Principle of the thing aside, is the annotated version worth reading? I read the book and it was quite good, curious what the annotations add to it.

owenversteeg• 7 years ago

I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.

EdwardCoffin4• 7 years ago

I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text.

The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc.

I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc.

[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

PowerfulWizard2• 7 years ago

I have 300+ books purchased and read on iOS Kindle, after buying Neal Stephenson's latest recently I discovered it has an obnoxious popover Audible ad on the page browse screen which must be re-dismissed each time you open the book. I was shocked how quickly it totally ruined the experience of reading a book. I haven't read more than about 10 pages on Kindle since, and I can't bear to buy another kindle book knowing this could happen at any time. It has been a couple weeks, it is probable at this point I will never read another book on Kindle (the only device I care about is iOS). I had sort of the opposite reaction, if there is some other entity mediating my experience with the text, I genuinely don't care what happens to my "library". Luckily these are mass produced and distributed books that are essentially immutable, so it isn't like I've lost anything that isn't available elsewhere.

LeonM• 7 years ago

Wait... you bought the book and still got ads? That's unacceptable.

Ask for a full refund and never ever buy anything from that company again.

jjkaczor• 7 years ago

...This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either...

This is technically the 3rd time, with just Microsoft alone.

They turned off eBook authentication servers for "Microsoft Reader" (.LIT) format years ago... (2012?) Then, after they launched their also-now-dead store on Windows Phone which had some eBooks, well... that went away too...

Next - how many subscription/Music services has Microsoft launched and then abandoned? More than one, but I remember: PlaysForSure" - DRM servers turned off 11 years ago...

So - unless it is Xbox, don't think Microsoft is going to be a reliable source for your digital media.

hokus• 7 years ago

I've always considered the internet (in its current form) to be histories biggest book burning event. Hoarding rss feeds I often reached a point around 35 000 subs where the number of new ones I find is roughly equal to the deleted websites. I'm sort of stuck in a mental loop thinking of book burning.

logifail2• 7 years ago

histories biggest book burning event

If you've not been to Bebelplatz in Berlin to see Micha Ullman's sunken library installation[0], do try and get there.

It's one of the most upsetting art installations I've ever seen, but it absolutely should be on everyone's list.

[0] https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelpla...

ajuc• 7 years ago

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing.

This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

lazyjones• 7 years ago

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing.

It's also simply an inferior technical solution due to its unnecessary complexity and dependence on servers, corporate entities/departments/decisions.

la_barba19• 7 years ago

Have you found a solution to piracy that doesn't involve DRM? What was its success rate? I'm sure the publishers would love to switch to a better system if it exists.

mdpopescu2• 7 years ago

For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)

jforberg2• 7 years ago

Are you implying that DRM is a solution to piracy? If anything, DRM is a big driver for piracy, and its success rate is near zero. Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release.

The "better solution" is to treat your customers with respect and let them own their bought goods. Gog.com is a good example here, in my opinion.

What definitely doesn't work is to burden your paying customers with digital locks and hurdles to enjoyment, that the pirates will shortly find a way to remove for the non-paying audience.

DenisM6• 7 years ago

Apple, Inc. did - they sell all of their music without DRM for the last, like, 10 years. Meanwhile the music industry is alive and well.

The key is convenience. When it's convenient to buy, people buy.

dredmorbius15• 7 years ago

Isn't the underlying problem sufficient and predictable pay to authors, artists, and other creators?

Seems to me DRM addresses this exceedingly poorly.

iNate2000• 7 years ago

Yes. Make good content, sell it at a fair price, and trust your users. iTunes music store has been DRM-free for years.

modsiw4• 7 years ago

Have you found a solution to piracy that does involve DRM?

loup-vaillant5• 7 years ago

I recall an author flooding the relevant network (Bittorent) with an incomplete "pirate" version of her own book.

It did have a measurable (and positive) impact on sales. Not sure how much of a solution that is, but at least it worked this one time.

newsgremlin• 7 years ago

No company has ever gone out of business because of piracy. How is adobe still going in that case? I doubt the average user of photoshop was willing to drop hundreds of dollars to purchase a software license off them over the years.

If someone is willing to pirate one game no matter the cost, then they are very likely to pirate all games they play. That doesn't translate into lost sales, they are stopping people who have no interest in making a purchase to begin with.

From the music industry to software industry, you have to ask, are big companies trying to protect their revenue, or profit? I find it hard to sympathize with companies that are disappointed with making only tens to hundreds of millions in profit. Exponential growth is not realistic, it means more monopolies over products and services.

kenjackson3• 7 years ago

Morally evil? They’re giving full refunds on the books.

This type of hyperbole makes it hard to take anti-DRM arguments seriously. “It’s a less desirable technology choice” feels more like the right level of angst IMO.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

GP wrote DRM is morally evil, not Microsoft. That MS is giving refunds is nice of them, but doesn't invalidate the problems with DRM in general.

sametmax• 7 years ago

I don't want a refund. I want to keep my books.

"yeah, we take back your transplanted heart but don't worry we will give a refund so it's not immoral"

cjg• 7 years ago

Giving refunds isn't sufficient.

The reason why trades happen is that both sides value what the other party has more. So I value a book more than I value the money the seller wants to charge for it, so I buy it.

So that means that I would lose out with a unilateral unwinding of the trade.

Imagine the outcry if this happened in the financial world: "Yeah, we sold you that stock, but we're taking it back now, you'll be OK because we're giving you the money back." Isn't going to fly.

IanSanders2• 7 years ago

We desperately need a way to pay most/all authors directly

Crinus2• 7 years ago

Paying authors directly doesn't mean the book will not have DRM nor using an intermediate book selling service mean that they will have DRM.

The problem is having DRM, not how the book authors are paid.

ohithereyou3• 7 years ago

We need legislation that only affords copyright protection to DRM-free works. Works protected by DRM should not be afforded any more protection than normal trade secrets.

otakucode• 7 years ago

There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is.

Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).

uryga• 7 years ago

If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers.

idk, spotify et al seem to be doing alright...

docker_up5• 7 years ago

I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.

So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.

fooblitzky2• 7 years ago

DRM has a long history of failing to stop piracy.

asark• 7 years ago

Further, pirated works have a long history of not getting shut off or otherwise made inaccessible, unlike "legitimate" DRM'd copies. :-/

[EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.

hombre_fatal2• 7 years ago

Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)

INTPenis• 7 years ago

DRM is a ludicrous solution to preventing ebook piracy.

One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied.

It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.

dgudkov2• 7 years ago

There is a big difference between copying physical objects and digital ones.

Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity).

In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high.

Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.

bunje• 7 years ago

I don't understand your comment. So was your friends book not DRM'd or how could people share it illegally?

docker_up5• 7 years ago

There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.

na85• 7 years ago

Perhaps he should publish his next book in dead-tree format.

docker_up5• 7 years ago

It was in dead-tree format only.

rahimiali• 7 years ago

Does your friend get royalty for each copy of the book? Could your friend have negotiated an upfront fee from the publisher and no royalty? This way, only the publisher would be exposed to piracy risk, a risk it can manage much better than an author ever could.

rhinoceraptor• 7 years ago

Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.

SkyBelow• 7 years ago

$200 each

Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.

noonespecial• 7 years ago

At this point we've seen this play out so many times that using DRM to "stop piracy" is like tossing the virgin into the volcano to stop the eruption.

Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...

tomxor2• 7 years ago

Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?

zamadatix3• 7 years ago

It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.

la_barba19• 7 years ago

As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.

unpwn• 7 years ago

Piracy sucks for creators, but I also don't think it's fair that poor people should have less access to text books.

satysin• 7 years ago

So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months?

Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book.

To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.

docker_up5• 7 years ago

There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.

docker_up5• 7 years ago

The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?

NoodleIncident• 7 years ago

Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.

cortesoft3• 7 years ago

We can agree that content creators should get paid AND that DRM sucks. The key point is that DRM DOESN'T REDUCE PIRACY, IT JUST MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR LEGITIMATE READERS.

DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.

How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?

la_barba19• 7 years ago

It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.

Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads. I filter Google results to exclude domains which I will never visit because of their ad policy.

asdff10• 7 years ago

It shouldn't be when you consider that the topic is textbooks. I agree, work hard, give good content that's better than the competition on the market, and I'll gladly pay for that value. However, textbooks are not a free market. They are a captive market, where the professor decides what textbook is ordained for the course.

Students usually have the choice of the brand new print edition $$$ that they can resell for $, the ebook edition ($$) that expires after the term and you cannot resell, or fighting for one of the two copies of the book on 2 hour loan from the main campus library. Some professors do not let you use an older copy, and for some classes, they make you do your homework on proprietary publisher websites that charge for temporary access codes. So even if you pirated your book you would still have to pay McGraw Hill their cut to get full points in the class.

Curious how well textbook prices correlate to the maximum federal loan you can apply for.

warp_factor2• 7 years ago

Paying for books is the old model.

I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.

hombre_fatal2• 7 years ago

I will gladly donate

Everyone says. Nobody does.

Miner49er• 7 years ago

DRM isn't the answer. It's always been trivial to break DRM on e-books, and I wouldn't be surprised if DRM actually increases pirating. Why buy something that restricts your ability to use it and is inconvenient when you can pirate a version that doesn't do that?

shawnz• 7 years ago

It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.

It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?

justinmeiners• 7 years ago

This definitely sucks. Why do you think people are buying this book? Is it required for a course?

When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it. Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.

asdff10• 7 years ago

Who do you think pirates textbooks?

Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.

blakesterz2• 7 years ago

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance.

Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)

ultrarunner3• 7 years ago

On the flip side, people all over my neighborhood have put considerable effort into building awesome tiny sharing libraries. Perhaps without the issue being "solved" we'd see even more and varied institutions formulate organically.

So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?

adrianhon2• 7 years ago

Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.

sambe• 7 years ago

Wouldn't the small sharing libraries also be at risk under a system with more power held by copyright owners?

sjy6• 7 years ago

Do you use these libraries? I see them around from time to time, but I've never been tempted to borrow from them. Usually there's nothing more than a random selection of popular novels from the last 20 years.

sp3323• 7 years ago

It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.

marvindanig4• 7 years ago

Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too!

IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.

inscionent• 7 years ago

The one in Washington DC is now an Apple store.

thatfrenchguy• 7 years ago

IDK, 15m of early 20th century dollars for a sound like it could finance buying a lot of books.

sdegutis• 7 years ago

I've found this website very useful:

https://archive.org/details/texts

My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).

I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

Nice shout-out. Truly, the world owes railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie a huge debt.

My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.

inflatableDodo2• 7 years ago

Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.

Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.

CodeTheInternet• 7 years ago

My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.

snazz• 7 years ago

As I understand it, the number of copies is enforced using DRM (which isn’t the best, of course), but the books are free and there’s usually a pretty wide selection.

sp3323• 7 years ago

Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.

dsr_• 7 years ago

Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime.

In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

I think mine also allows you to watch movies online, but I never tried it yet.

josephorjoe• 7 years ago

Project Gutenberg is really a modern day equivalent and is one of the better things created on the internet.

carom• 7 years ago

I prefer Library Genesis.

dmix• 7 years ago

Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here,

I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse.

It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia

Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.

klez• 7 years ago

Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.

tzs• 7 years ago

Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices

Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.

tolmasky• 7 years ago

If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large variety of still-somewhat-recent works would be public domain, and thus creating tools to read them would be profitable. Right now, a "public domain" Kindle would be for what, works that are over a hundred years old or something? Few people will ever encounter public domain works they want to read so it's as if everything fits the rent model.

The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.

mullingitover• 7 years ago

If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them

Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.

sjy6• 7 years ago

It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.

patmcc• 7 years ago

>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them.

Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.

whenchamenia• 7 years ago

You can thank Disneys lawyers and lobbyists.

warp_factor2• 7 years ago

For what it is worth I love my local libraries.

I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.

I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.

I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.

Once a month I bring back all the books I got.

And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.

From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.

40acres• 7 years ago

Today libraries would be decried as socialist, when in fact they are a public good. The idea of a public good is malleable, so perhaps the way for left leaning policy makers to advance certain types of legislation is through re-branding as a public good.

JudgeWapner• 7 years ago

the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen.

The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.

m4632• 7 years ago

There are a lot of things that wouldn't exist if they weren't grandfathered in.

I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.

And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.

And then there are guns.

ftrsprvln• 7 years ago

I'm super, super grateful to our public libraries and the amazing resources they offer— coming from an immigrant farm-laboring family in a tiny (<1000 population) town, our equally tiny library introduced me to computers in the 8th grade (which later got me in trouble for, um, "exploring" our police and school district's networks) thanks in part to a grant they received by the Gates Foundation. I wouldn't have the career I do now, or honestly even been aware of it, if it were not in part due to it.

My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.

I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.

zouhair• 7 years ago

The thing you can find a book that is hundreds of years old that is still readable, how long would data in a hard drive last in the wild?

asdff10• 7 years ago

And who is to say you can even open the file? Not many ebooks are being written in plain text or pdf after all. Usually it's something clunky and proprietary with DRM.

CWuestefeld• 7 years ago

general disdain for most things run by any type of government here

Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

lopmotr2• 7 years ago

Just because it's good for some people or used to be worthwhile doesn't mean it's good overall that it exists. If you could buy a cheap license for time limited access to DRMd copy of any book, to me, that would be better than a library because it would be cheaper in principle, as long as copyright owners cooperated and it didn't suffer from monopolies and things, and far more books would be available to far more people without the physical constraints.

My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.

Kinnard• 7 years ago

Idk, some hackerspaces are like public libraries. cf noisebridge which is open to the public at no charge and has a library:

http://noisebridge.net

bayareanative• 7 years ago

Yes, this. I'm surprised they're not labeled as scary "socialism" and replaced with public-private "partnerships" with commercial ads, membership fees and overpriced concessions. It seems the public commonwealth is being cannibalized for vampiric exploitation at every opportunity. You can't sit down anywhere, because it's been replaced with a sterile multi-use zoned commercial areas with a Code of Conduct* without buying something. Remember water fountains and public parks? Not anymore.

*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

Another case of "Stallman was right": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

bitL• 7 years ago

What's RMS up to these days? Haven't heard from him for a while...

fooblitzky2• 7 years ago

He seems to travel a lot giving speeches about Free Software. If you get the FSF bulletin, you get updates each quarter, e.g. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms

delecti• 7 years ago

We need someone to be the Carl Sagan for Stallman's philosophy. He's right a lot, but he's also abrasive and doesn't package his arguments in a publicly digestable way.

beagle3• 7 years ago

But Carl Sagan did not have a horde of anti-Sagans from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon etc to ridicule him. Really, this is the crux of the matter.

I have been to several Stallman talks and have had a chance to speak with him privately. He is weird in his manners, to put it lightly, and he is uncompromising in his positions, but he is very clear, very eloquent, very factual, and has a great track record at predicting the future.

You have hundreds of Carl Saganesque people fighting against big tobacco, hardly making a dent. The problem with Stallman is not that he is abrasive, it is that he is outnumbered by people trying to make money.

0815test2• 7 years ago

"The books will stop working"? They were never "working" properly in the first place! There's a reason why DRM systems are said to be "defective by design"; DRM is inherently anti-consumer (in denying entirely lawful rights, such as format shifting and copying for the purpose of fair use under copyright law) and DRM-encumbered media of any sort should always be regarded as fake media.

rbreve• 7 years ago

In a way paper books "stop working" after 10 years or so when the paper turns yellow and dusty

scandox• 7 years ago

I read Don Quixote in a 4 volume edition printed in 1796. It had been sitting on a shelf in a house my parents bought for 200 years quite readable.

jumelles• 7 years ago

Books are much more resilient than you think, especially if the publisher used good materials.

SCdF• 7 years ago

"or so" is doing a heavy lifting in this sentence. 10 years is an absurdly short time for a book to last.

Raphmedia• 7 years ago

In fact, the majority of books you will find in most libraries are at the very least 10 years old.

ddingus• 7 years ago

Is readable = TRUE?

Book working = TRUE

adtac• 7 years ago

Even ignoring the fact that physical books last for much longer than a decade, the alternative to DRM'd books isn't physical books. It's digital, non-DRM'd books. And the lifetime of a DRM-free digital copy of a book is practically infinite.

pessimizer• 7 years ago

I've got hundred year old books on my shelf that aren't even particularly fragile. I'd estimate that maybe 5% of my shelves are younger than 10 years.

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

That's not "stop working". That's "work slightly less well". A book is dusty? Dust it. A book has yellowed paper? Still readable.

matwood2• 7 years ago

10 years

The British Library would like to have a word with you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/27/british-librar...

lukejduncan• 7 years ago

I think you're being downvoted too much for this. It's a reasonable statement, and it's the premise of the licensing mechanisms libraries pay for with ebook subscriptions. Books have an average shelf life, you can compute the number of reads per copy and use that as a proxy for how much to charge a library to lend an ebook. (That's the premise anyways, there's plenty of politics to deal with too)

wiml• 7 years ago

This is only really true for books published during a certain interval when high acid (wood pulp) paper was common. Before the late 1800s paper was typically made of other plant fibers ("rag"); by the mid-late 1900s de-acidified wood pulp paper was cheap enough to be common. Many books today still have a small remark in the front matter telling you that it was printed on low-acid paper and will last.

Pulp paper was much cheaper, which is how lurid mass-entertainment paperbacks came to (a) exist at all and (b) be called "pulp fiction".

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

I don't suppose anyone ever cracked the DRM on Microsoft books such that the De-DRM utilities for Calibre would work to scrub them before they're rendered inaccessible?

user17843• 7 years ago

I'm so shocked about this, my Iphone almost slipped out of my hands while I googled the Microsoft ebook store, but then I asked Alexa and she said everything will be ok. My Tesla is now driving me to an analogue bookshop to show my full support against dependence on digital platforms over my daily life, I might even upload a protest video to Youtube.

hyperman13• 7 years ago

Tesla's software in the car is probably phoning home on a regular base. What happens if they pull the plug on those servers? You didn't buy that softare, you're only licensing it, after all.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

That was the joke.

sergiotapia• 7 years ago

It's why I only buy games from Gog now. I just install the .exe and it works. I no longer tolerate DRM.

lone_haxx0r• 7 years ago

But you tolerate Windows?

aaron695• 7 years ago

OUYA stopped working this week.

Games lost (hacks available to get around it do exist though, like you could hack the Microsoft books) even 100% free apps stopped working correctly.

For all OUYAs extreme self-righteous about open source they became the worst.

Perhaps a middle ground is needed

jdonaldson• 7 years ago

The books still work if you drink a verification can. Just make sure nobody else is in the room and trips the antipiracy measures.

AnssiH3• 7 years ago

They will fully refund all purchases, seems reasonable to me.

the_af2• 7 years ago

Imagine if one day you went to find your well-thumbed, most loved book in your bookshelf, maybe to re-read your favorite chapter, and the physical book was missing, replaced by a note from the publisher: "this book no longer works, but worry not: we've refunded you!"

AnssiH3• 7 years ago

But this is not a physical book, so it is not a "unique" copy.

All of my e-books are entirely replaceable by buying them again from a different store (or as a physical book).

Causality1• 7 years ago

I forget which store it was, but back in the day when I bought e-books to read on my PDAs they came encrypted, with the credit card number I used to buy them being the decryption key, so I was completely independent of the store to read them and could share them with anyone I trusted with my card number. It seems like a quaint solution to modern sensibilities but thoroughly satisfying on a moral level.

These days I buy the digital version on Amazon but don't download it. I pirate the copy I'm actually going to read and archive.

jmiserez5• 7 years ago

Some (few) stores offer DRM-free PDF versions, usually with a personalized watermark.

I feel like that's a good compromise, I get a DRM-free PDF and I can only share it with people I trust not to put it online. And the watermark is a non-issue because it doesn't bother/impact me.

logifail2• 7 years ago

My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week:

Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her

Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young [1] It was first published in 1924

jgtrosh• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure I'll happily recite The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.

Nikaoto• 7 years ago

Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.

ohithereyou3• 7 years ago

The real tragedy of this is that nobody will know who Mister Rogers is by that time.

linuxftw5• 7 years ago

I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded.

Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?

asdff10• 7 years ago

Because our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released.

The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.

lukewrites2• 7 years ago

We should treasure poetry and literature because it's about the experience of reading, just like video games are about the experience of playing. Describing Super Mario Bros (You jump on, over, and around things, sometimes throwing fireballs, until you rescue the princess) doesn't do the experience of playing the game justice. Describing "i carry your heart with me" (I love you so much that all I do is by and for you) doesn't do the poem justice.

And here is the poem:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                    i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-ee cummings

tannhaeuser• 7 years ago

Ignoring the provocative/trolling part, studying digital design from a cultural-historic PoV might turn out to much harder than reading books written centuries ago because of lost sources, formats, and devices. Even HTML, with its deep roots in the digital humanities (SGML), has been brittled to death because $reasons.

tallanvor• 7 years ago

Unfortunately schools often fail to teach the message behind the works we view as classics.

Shakespeare wrote not just to entertain, but to inform and comment on what was happening at the time. Unfortunately many teachers don't do a good job, or don't have the time, to explain the background of the works. Students often don't know or understand that his works were often directed at specific royalty or other influential people. And so when we first read his works, we don't get the insults, slights, and compliments that would have been obvious to people back then.

Other classics speak about what it is to be human, and evoke imagery that most works never manage. What we consider to be the classics are only a small percentage of novels, poetry, and essays created in their time. There are works being written today that will become classics, but they have to be shown to be meaningful to future generations, just like the current classics have.

There are some games telling wonderful stories, and maybe they'll come to be regarded as classics in their own right. But the Super Marios, Warcrafts, and even Assassin's Creeds are not going to be among them. They're pioneers in their own right, but they don't actually have anything to teach us about the human condition, politics of their day, or have a timelessness that help towards enlightenment.

tnolet• 7 years ago

If you ever feel inclined, take some courses in any cultural or art history department at a somewhat reputable college or university.

You will see professors are already tying "classics" to current cultural products. Drawimg parallels, discussing patterns and influences.

We jumped from Nietzsche to Japanese manga.

It's not either/ or, it's both.

I was at SFSU and Amsterdam uni. YMMV.

lukewrites2• 7 years ago

I love reading. I resisted ebooks until we had a baby at which point my reading time shrank to situations (bed w/the lights out, on the bus) where my Kindle is more convenient than a paper book. I buy/acquire ebooks that are the sort of thing I'd probably purchase, read, and then sell. For books I think (or know) I want to keep, I buy a paper copy, even if I've gotten an e-copy. I want my kids to have lots of book around, not _an extensive ebook library_. There's too much joy in happening across a new book at random on the shelf; Amazon recommendations can never recreate or supplant that.

coffeefirst• 7 years ago

Yes. The one feature I want from Kindle is the ability to buy a digital book and "upgrade" to a print version if I want to own a physical copy.

redisman• 7 years ago

I much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.

thirdsun2• 7 years ago

And that is why I still buy my all my music. Digitally, but lossless, DRM-free and forever mine. Another concern to me is the limited selection on streaming services, particularly when it comes to rare and old releases.

teekert2• 7 years ago

All my ebooks get their DRM removed instantly and I back up my kindle every now and then. This shit is not ever happening to me.

Johnny555• 7 years ago

How do you strip Kindle DRM? asking for a friend.

amaccuish• 7 years ago

Search for DeDRM plugin for calibre. There's several ways to do it. If you have a physical kindle, you can download the books from your amazon account, and plug the serial number of your kindle into DeDRM. If you have the Kindle for PC or Mac app, DeDRM can pick up the relevent keys. I recommend getting the books in the AWZ3 format rather than KFX.

ar_lan• 7 years ago

Remember: Free with DRM is not the same thing as free.

I agree with him the whole way that this is weird, but this particular tweet made no sense to me.

It seems akin to "Hey, we'll allow you to rent something for some duration for free", and it sounds like he's saying that that situation is also not free.

peteretep• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

ekingr• 7 years ago

I understand it as two slightly different meanings for the word 'free'.

In French we have separate words for (a) 'free' as something we don't pay for (gratuit) and (b) 'free' as your have the freedom to use it as you wish (libre).

rchaud• 7 years ago

Back in 2005, my undergrad school gave students access to the then newly legit Napster. Everything was DRM-d WMA files, but there was a third party tool that stripped it out and let you play it on any device that played WMAs natively.

I'm reminded of that occasionally when I see files with "noDRM-$Artist-$Title" pop up in the File Manager. Does Napster even exist anymore?

nknealk• 7 years ago

A similar thing happened with Ultraviolet's movies service: https://www.myuv.com/

There's also a great story regarding "right of first purchase" in the USA where Redbox literally purchases DVDs at retail so that they can rent them out to customers because Disney would not sell directly to them: https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-d...

xtracto• 7 years ago

Worthy of the DRM Graveyard (a subreddit I created just for this, thanks!)

B-Con• 7 years ago

Yep. This is why I don't have a cloud-based digital library. UV offered a way to migrate to other providers, but will the next one? I don't know that they're legally allowed to. What if the other provider doesn't have the content, am I SOL?

I so badly wish I could buy a license to get a specific piece of content, get a copy to play on my own computer, then also have the ability to "upload" (aka, unlock) that content on a cloud streaming service of my choice.

paul• 7 years ago

I’m more disturbed by the fact that they can also edit or remove books that I’ve already purchased. How long until Amazon is forced to “deplatform” something offensive? Those old books contain a lot of words and ideas that have no place in 2019.

It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.

ojagodzinski• 7 years ago

All ebook sold in Poland are without DRM, You just pay and download epub+mobi+pdf versions and thats all. It's the only one working system...

smsm422• 7 years ago

That's why you should never buy DRM-ed anything if you intend to keep it long term. Companies change, businesses get bought & sold, collapse, disappear - thinking that your particular DRM scheme would be supported for 20 years is insane. For a movie that you'll forget in the next 2 days it's ok, for a book that you intend on re-reading years late - no reason to "buy" DRM-ed version of anything. Or, at least, if you have no other options, strip DRM from it immediately and export into a common format.

nabla9• 7 years ago

This is why when I buy a DRM ebook, I also get the pirated copy and put it into my Calibre.

Buying a ebook is just for the payment.

salutonmundo• 7 years ago

Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!

ggm2• 7 years ago

Depends on your economy. Specifically what he does is of course illegal but the general principle of removing drm from your own purchase isn't

That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?

tim333• 7 years ago

Legal grey area.

But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use. https://info.legalzoom.com/copyright-law-making-personal-cop...

taneq• 7 years ago

I do the same now with movies, as well as making sure I have unencumbered digital copies of any music I buy. I'm happy to pay for good content but damned if I'm going to buy it again every time the disc scratches (and besides, who even has a CD drive any more?)

la_barba19• 7 years ago

You just signaled that you find value in the DRM'd product, even if that wasn't your intent. Why not reward creators who choose to distribute their works without DRM? I'm neither pro nor anti-DRM, but I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.

I pay for DRM-free versions of anything if it's available -- even if it's more expensive (I've downloaded many hundreds of dollars of DRM-free audiobooks). I eben refuse to buy physical books from authors like JK Rowling (who tried to force book-owners to return copies of the Half-Blood Prince that were accidentally sold early).

Here in Australia you sometimes can't even buy the DRM-up-the-wazoo version. Game of Thrones wasn't available through any legal channels for years. And that's ignoring the Australia Tax we get for not being from the US or Europe (the shipping costs of bytes is very high it seems).

Then again, I also don't watch too many films or shows these days. Mainly because I can't get many DRM-free versions.

ineedasername2• 7 years ago

Why not reward creators who choose to distribute their works without DRM?

Your average author doesn't have a choice in this, they have no clout to dictate terms to their publishers over the inclusion of DRM

shmerl• 7 years ago

How many times does this need to happen, for people stop paying for DRMed junk? Buy digital goods DRM-free only. Vote with your wallet, otherwise it's pointless to complain.

dangus• 7 years ago

I'm astonished that Microsoft is apparently just refunding the original purchase price of (everybody's?) books.

What's most mind boggling is the realization that apparently nobody sat down and planned this situation out - because if they did, the idea that someone could get an okay from their boss on the idea that even a mildly unsuccessful result and end of life of the product would end in full refunds for everybody.

What's the point of even doing business?

Am I misunderstanding this outcome? That means anyone who used this product got free book rentals for whatever they wanted to read?

...

Let's talk about DRM now.

DRM in itself as a concept is not bad (IMO), and it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay.

However, I think what we fail to talk about is how there's no agreed upon standard regulating the end of life and transferral procedures involved with works sold under DRM.

I suspect that book publishers would not agree to allow Microsoft to say "the store is closed, your books can be unlocked once you follow this procedure." Even if they're okay with that, Microsoft probably didn't even have the foresight to implement that sort of thing on a technical level.

So, what we need in the digital goods industry is some kind of statement to the customer that's set in stone regarding what will happen with your content if the business ceases to exist and the platform is canceled.

There's some semblance of this concept around. For example, Ultraviolet is shutting down in July - so, you have the option to transfer movies to other services for most movies on that platform (it should be all movies).

MoviesAnywhere is also a DRM service making an attempt at avoiding platform lock-in for digitally purchased movies.

But beyond that, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that you'll get perpetual access or a refund. The fact that Microsoft is dishing out refunds since that's cheaper than getting sued by every customer they've ever sold a book to is not a given - imagine if Valve were to go bankrupt and simply shut down their servers one day. That's where DRM should have a sort of mandatory living will.

sjy6• 7 years ago

DRM caused this problem, and if you want to convince me that the solution is more advanced DRM that somehow fails open when the company that built it goes out of business, you'll need a stronger argument than "it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay."

Abolishing copyright wouldn't eliminate all creative works. It would eliminate a lot of the funding, but there would still be plenty of people willing to create things for free and other creators working on a patronage or cross-subsidisation model. It's not obvious to me that the world would be a worse place under these conditions. I'm prepared to give up the certainty of the next Marvel movie being produced if it means giving everyone free access to all the other creative works that have already been published.

mikenew• 7 years ago

Every piece of DRM'd content will end up like this. Every book, movie, show, album, and game will be dead in a few decades (or sooner) if it relies on some company maintaining it's servers.

It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.

judge2020• 7 years ago

Take this with a grain of salt, but Steam support says there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies [0]. (Not to mention that it's trivially easy to remove Steam DRM with existing tools)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...

wishinghand• 7 years ago

Unfortunately we'll have to see it to truly believe it. I don't doubt Valve would do that, but it's easy to say that now.

Luckily, we still have torrents to help backup old games.

tremon2• 7 years ago

there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies

What about when Steam gets gobbled up by $other_industry_giant?

DEADBEEFC0FFEE• 7 years ago

Much of this discourse would make more sense if we use the term ebook, instead of book. When we say book, it conjures the notion of atoms. When we use the term ebook, we understand there's a technical dependency. Surely nobody expects any technical service to run forever funded by a once off payment.

The much bigger problem with DRM content is that I cannot give them to my children. My kids can browse my many bookcases, and might be curious to read one of hundreds of book they may not choose to buy. That cannot happen with DRM ebooks.

Nomentatus• 7 years ago

When Amazon switched Canadian kindle customers to a Canadian site, all the magazines they had purchased, and not yet read "stopped working." No refund.

gtirloni• 7 years ago

They could have offered non-DRM copies of the books to people who purchased them and then closed shop. Giving refunds seems to be much more expensive than the alternative?

jacobwilliamroy• 7 years ago

This book DRM thing also means that the online courses at my local college are more expensive than the normal ones. Because they use copy protected materials that self destruct at the end of the semester, there is no way to avoid paying full price by borrowing, buying used, reselling or stealing.

cheez• 7 years ago

What I do when I want a book or movie is I buy it somewhere, then pirate my preferred format.

kevin_b_er• 7 years ago

GNU's The Right to Read sounded utterly and totally laughable to me in circa 2000 when I first read it. A fanciable dystopia. It has come too close to reality in more recent years since.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

Despite having some fairly questionable social views, Stallman has been living 40 years in the future for the past 40 years. Every time I read him, I'm saddened that nobody listened.

3xblah• 7 years ago

If you look up the word "browse" in a dictionary, you will see that it now has an entry relating to computer networks.

When we browse items in a library, we can see context, we can see neighbouring items. Even some of the library database software today allows you to do this on the computer, simulating the physical experience.

Maybe some of you can remember searching an item then going to retrieve it from the stacks and ending up just browsing the neighbouring items and discoevring even better items. I often discovered the best items through just browsing in a section, in the stacks.

This is one element that is missing from today's web. It is probably one reason why a search engine can become the most popular site on the web. The search engine controls the user's view of the web. The user cannot see the "stacks". Nor can she browse them as she would in a library to discover what is there.

Libraries impose an order that is missing from the web. Something like a Dewey Decimal classification system where a number reveals something about what is found in that location. IP addresses reveal almost nothing to us about the item(s) that may be found there; and whatever they reveal is not intentional. These numbers are in turn "hidden" behind potentially ambiguous names that sidestep the trademark system, another proven classification system, that serves to eliminate ambiguity and deception of consumers.

In the past I have seen some sites that listed the entire IP address space in numerical order where it was possible to browse at least some minimal information on each network number. These always seem to go offline eventually, as if they are breaking some rule.

Imagine going into a library where you were not allowed to visit the stacks or see neighbouring items, where the ordering of the items was a secret and all you could do is perform "keyword" searches. Imagine the results would not be ordered alphabetically, chronologically, or even by a known method of determining relevance (that too is secret). Imagine you could not sort the results or get a quick copy of all of them for reference. Imagine the library set the order of the results according to some "secret" methodology and preferred that you only view the first 5-10 items.

CrankyBear• 7 years ago

DRM is censorship.

javchz• 7 years ago

I have a Kindle for a few years now, and I love it... but the weird thing it's that most of the books I have read on the platform, haven't been acquired through Amazon. All of this it's thanks to me being afraid of this kind of practices, plus the weird pricing doesn't help (like some hard covers being cheaper than digital books).

I kinda like the humble bundle approach to this, where I can buy bulks of books DRM free in my PC, that are easy to use thanks to software like Calibre. I hope soon the e-book industry have an equivalent to gog in games, or bandcamp to music.

Yeah the subscription model it's cool, comfy and all, but what happen when the company behind decides to shutdown the product because didn't reach the desired metrics? I mean I can see Google having their own Stadia for books, and a few years go by and then they GoogleReaderIt/PlusIt, and that's it, my library of started books with their literally bookmarks and notes are gone.

anotherevan• 7 years ago

Anything with DRM is not sold, it is leased. My bugbear is that they still have "Buy Now!" buttons and such, which to my mind is fraud.

I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?

swalladge• 7 years ago

People need to be made aware that "purchasing" something with DRM means that you aren't purchasing the item, you're only purchasing a revokable license to access the item though software controlled by the vendor.

In a way, it's good that we're actually seeing the predicted issues with DRM (losing books, etc.). Hopefully it will help raise awareness.

marvin• 7 years ago

In the case of Kindle, you're usually paying more for the revokable license than you'd pay by moving your mouse 2 centimeters to the right and selecting a physical copy instead.

nikofeyn• 7 years ago

while i understand the general sentiment, this type of outcry and little quip is kind of silly, because it's too late. everyone knew what they were signing up for, and people still know what they're signing up for with kindle, itunes, netflix, and every other "you're just buying a temporary license" service. meanwhile, libraries in the u.s. are struggling despite being one of our greatest ongoing services. libraries are awesome, but they are having to redefine themselves (not necessarily a bad thing along some vectors) because people aren't using the books that are there. so in effect, the books already stopped working, but that doesn't make for good twitter hype.

and as far as killing off services go, giving full refunds is pretty rare and should be applauded.

ptah• 7 years ago

paper books are better and you can get them cheaper than ebooks most of the time

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

I think that if something is DRMed like this the seller should be legally required to use the word rent instead of buy. And place the length of rental(licensing), which will require them to operate the server until that point.

reeves23423• 7 years ago

RMS has been warning this for a long time https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Simon_says• 7 years ago

I have Twitter blocked. Is there another source?

pcvarmint• 7 years ago

Apprentice Alf's DeDRM tool may come to the rescue. [1]

I don't condone piracy, but if you buy an ebook, you should be able to read, store and personally transport it freely.

[1] https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

“The books will stop working.”

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