NEVER suffer from the illusion that you “own” an ebook. Even without DRM to ENFORCE crazy contract terms; crazy licenses, takedown notices, unilateral accusations of piracy and the like can alienate you from your books. By all means, if you like usual ease of use, and carrying etc, get a reader or notebook or pad and pay to rent access from the publishers. But do so with yours eyes open and NO illusion that you “own” a copy with the balance of the rights between copyright owner and copy owner determined by copyright law and not the long license that you assented to but never read.
There is simply something great about holding an actual paper book in your hands. I don’t know what that is or how to describe it, but it is something I will not give up.
First sale doctrine applies so I can sell or give away my books when I have finished reading them, which means that I gain the pleasure of knowing that I have shared my enjoyment of a book with someone else.
Besides, trees are a renewable resource. Plastic, silicon, copper, gold, germanium, etc are not.
That’s an interesting statement from someone who’s avatar is a 3d-rendered image. 
I like paper books too, but I love my reader. It’s always with me, and it has the next book I want to read when I finish the book I’m reading.
And it has nothing on it with DRM, or that was loaded from the cloud. Everything I buy gets ripped through the kind efforts of Apprentice Alf and stored on my home server.
irretrievably broken the idea of DRM and region-controls for ebooks
is.
Ironically a physical DVD would encounter the same issue on a different region DVD player. DRM and region locking is shit in general, not just for ebook, but the entire idea.
That’s true but I think its particularly silly on ebooks because they are more likely than DVDs to be brought to different places. The reason I own a kindle is so I can conveniently carry several books with me while on vacation to other countries.
Yeah, I like both readers and physical books too, although living in an not particularly large apartment, I find ebooks more practical these days. I do have to wonder a bit at some of the over the top paeans to paper books, however – they remind me a lot of the sort of thing you used to see in The New Yorker in the mid 1980s about how computers would never have “that certain something” that typewriters did, plus typewriters never crashed or needed software and at least the manual ones didn’t need power either. All these things might be true, but thirty years on, not even the technophobes use typewriters but instead pride themselves on still using a laptop ten years old for their writing…
This exemplifies why we need a “digital bill of rights” that reflects the realities of modern technology. The balance between producer and consumer has gone out of whack, and needs to be restored. The distinction between “ownership” and restricted rights licenses is meaningless to your end user on a practical basis… and should be, “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck” is a totally reasonable standard. I had you money, you hand me product, I have every reasonable expectation that I own it.
The problem with DRM is that it only respects the rights of one party in the transaction. There is no technical reason why eBooks and other digital media can’t be freely bought and resold. If it works with Bitcoins, why not digital music? The real reason is that vendors hate competition from their prior sales, which sets a true “market clearing price”.
Losing access to literally thousands of dollars in digital media purchases simply because I cross a national border is absurd and obscene…what if my company assigns me to Singapore for two years? Being told I am SOL just doesn’t cut it.
The wonderful contradictions of being human 
I’m not against digital, I just like paper books better when it comes to reading. I don’t have an ereader yet, though it is on my list for some point in the future, and will be staying away from DRM.
When it comes to environmental issues, I do my best but will always weigh what I am getting at what cost. I will walk rather than drive, but will drive when I have to go farther than I can walk, bicycle or bus For books, I would rather be sustainable, but recognize that I cannot carry around all that many at once, especially when it comes to reference materials required for professional needs. Or when traveling.
If I take a Region 1DVD player and a collection of Region 1 DVDs on a trip with me, usually the DVD player does not decide that it must change regions mid trip.
my mom, who lives stateside now, has a UK kindle. As far as I know, she uses amazon UK to replenish it. It makes gift giving a bit more complicated.
I don’t seem to have any of those issues with pirated ebooks.
Amazon has a similar textbook rental service, but the interstate transport of rented books is a violation of contract.
We don’t need a digital bill of rights. We just need people to stop buying DRMed books.
The problem with a digital bill of rights is it can change at anytime. Today you had a right to something, tomorrow you don’t. If they have a way to enforce that you’re S.O.L. The only way I know to enforce that is DRM. If you have non-DRMed books as far as I can tell there’s not much they can do. I have my non-DRMed ebooks on all my devices and in my DropBox, and my email, and several others places.
Or to put it another way a digital bill of rights only makes sense if everything is DRMed. If your stuff is not DRMed you don’t need a digital bill of rights.
That . . . hurt my brain a little.
It’s like. . . layers of fundamental flaws, I’m not even sure how deep the rabbit hole goes anymore!
Mph! Yet another reason to use VPN. I use one here in Norway so that I can access Netflix’ full library among other things. Like privacy.
The Netflix thing is pretty annoying since I’m pretty sure I pay more than US customers, but have a much smaller library to choose from. Wonder what will happen when I go on vacation to Asia with my Netflix and HBO Nordic apps. Much changing of VPN settings I imagine.
When I buy something encumbered with DRM/region restrictions, I get on TPB or elsewhere and get a ripped copy. Or, if it isn’t a PITA, I remove the DRM myself. This way I ensure that the publisher, marketers, distributors, lawyers, and maaaaybe even the writers/artists/actors have gotten whatever their contracts say they get… And I get what I wanted as well.
Oh please - silicon? That stuff is as common as dirty. Literally. Also, copper, germanium and gold might not be renewable, but they are recyclable.
Yes, there is recycling. But there’s more than that. Energy consumption, damage from the mining, damage to watershed from logging, pollutants from the waste of refining and processing, etc. Heck, exhaust pollutants form the transportation of the raw materials, whether wood or mineral. They all have their impact. Even the recycling has an impact, whether you are recycling paper or plastic.
Btw, while silicon is very common, it comes in various forms and not all forms are usable. Ask any glass maker. So, what does it take to refine that silicon into a form that can be used to manufacture the chips and other components?
Maybe I’m reading into it, but this also seems like an effective way for a US enterprise to monopolize information from other places in the world. Digital imperialism!
