Count me in also. I have reread many books many times. You also don’t have to reread a whole book all the time. Revisiting the end of Moby Dick can be a weekend read, bypassing a lot of the blubber boiling.
Rereading the sections of the Plague,by Camus where they are discussing the perfect sentence is fun.Searchable ebooks make this easy.
“One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”
I would not have paged through a paperback to find that exact part. And I dare anyone to commit that to memory.
Early adopter of e-books here. I lost a heartbreaking amount of material on my old palm pilot; purchased from eReader/Peanut Press. Shortly after they went down, I think there was a way to recover if I’d been aware they’d made a deal with B&N/Nook, but I missed the memo.
I crack the DRM on everything I buy now that has it. If there’s not a way to do that, I don’t buy it. No way I’m going through that twice.
You must not read any George R. R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss. It’s so long between sequels that you have to re-read those books every year or so just to remember where you left off.
I can’t say I’m too surprised that going up against Amazon and Apple went poorly for them(Hey guys! We’ve got negligible footing in genuinely portable devices; let’s start a fight with the guys who practically give away barely adequate tablets and have the cheapest e-ink and the guys who make tablets people actually like; and lets make sure that our browser that everyone loves is involved and the fight involves selling something where portability is a major selling point!); what is more surprising is that they apparently couldn’t be bothered to keep the lights on just for form’s sake and to avoid tainting their other attempts at getting into app-store by association.
Yeah, this isn’t the first time they’ve done something like this(“Playsforsure” was a classic of the genre); but this time they clearly have a much stronger desire for their precious app store to succeed; though very limited success on selling people on its merits; and I would, perhaps naively, have imagined that; between the foundation of the app store very much remaining in place(you can avoid it if you stick to LTSB versions; but you can practically feel the hatred for people who do that, and it requires an enterprise license) and the RMS/IRM DRM components that they are definitely keen on selling for ‘compliance’ and security purposes to the corporate customers; the cost of keeping a minimum effort ebook store online would be tiny; and worth it just to avoid stories like this.
There’s so much stuff they aren’t abandoning that this is just a very low bandwidth special case of that the engineering costs seem like they’d be low in any remotely sane environment(maybe that’s the issue); and one would expect that publishers could, mostly, be induced to offer terms not markedly worse than those other vendors get(and, if relatively few are buying that aspect matters less anyway); so turning off the lights and actually refunding people, even counting the ones who will only get scrip, seems like a strange choice.
I don’t reread the majority of my books, but I have multiple books that I have read not only more then once, I have read them more then five times. I have other books that I may or may not have actually read once, but I refer to sections of them multiple times (“textbook” type books - I know, I can look up how to do B*Trees on wikipedia, but…). I own RPG rulebooks (and adventures) in electronic form, they too get the “use N times as reference” treatment.
I generally do not prefer paper and ink. It isn’t around when I have 10 minutes free here and there. I don’t carry a 300+ page hardbound RPG rulebook to the bank. Nor softcover (if you treat a big softcover like that it falls apart). I do however have my phone. Same for smaller fiction books (although “game of thrones all five volumes” isn’t a small book…but it is on my phone).
…and back to the “reference” type books, I find “search in book” (or “search in PDF”) so much faster then flipping around looking for “that one section”.
…and RPG adventures? I can’t get past defacing physical books, but I feel free to make tons of annotations on ebooks. Also: I can read my typing after the fact. I frequently can’t read my writing.
Good reasons to prefer eBooks. “no longer being able to read them after the seller goes away” is a good reason to prefer non-DRM’ed ebooks.
When you’ve run out of brick-and-mortar rents to seek, you try to mine rents from content itself. Given time and technological process, this will end with rent seeking people’s health.
That really depends on the DRM. For example iPhone applications are DRMed, and they don’t call home to validate. Apple can push a black list (either of individual apps, developers, or enterprise certs), but if they don’t any already deployed application will continue to run, even if Apple removes it from the store, removes it from the database of apps that ever existed, or if in fact Apple goes away and nothing ever lives on network 17 to validate anything an iPhone ever asks for again (although they will all think they are in a captive WiFi portal because www.apple.com won’t serve a specific text file…)
Likewise in the past I worked for one ebook vender that DRM’ed books (as well as non-DRM’ed books), and the books were decrypted as they were downloaded, and encrypted with a per user key. That key lived on the user’s device. If you turned the network on your phone off forever the books would be readable until the hardware died. (if you had the phone on you might get a forced upgrade of some set of books, and that could in theory actually remove them, although I don’t think that was actually a goal of that part of the design, it was intended to update automatically scanned books, and correct actually invalid data…but I’m sure it could be abused, or do something bad due to a bug)
The validity of your point notwithstanding…Apple already has a DRM’ed bookstore. As does Google. Both have for a fair number of years.
I don’ t know about Apple’s, but Google’s lets you download the non-DRM’ed books in some sort of non-DRM format. Google’s also has some sort of “transfer Google’s DRM book into some sort of Adobe standard DRM blob that may or may not work somewhere else” that I don’t really understand.
(and the same general argument would apply to movie and TV show purchase and download type stores that multiple companies run…although streaming ones seem far more popular now)
That’s my objection to ebooks. You don’t own them. You don’t even have the right to use them if the company arbitrarily decides you shouldn’t have them. Something like this happened when my mother-in-law passed a little while ago. She wanted her Kindle books to be part of the estate and go to my brother-in-law or my wife. Amazon said “Sorry, but we won’t do that. When she dies the account dies. When the account dies the books evaporate. No hundreds of books for you.”
I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them.
talk about waste. I don’t like print. You can’t search by keyword, needs massive amounts of space, needs care, can be destroyed easily (fire, flooding). Too many headaches associated with it. Not a fan.
When dad passed I ended up with his kindle, still tied to his account. Mum has no idea what his password is, or the password for his gmail account to reset it. So, it still “Bryan’s Kindle”, and it will stay that way for as long as it keeps going, because I can still download the many and varied books dad had bought directly via the kindle, and sideload anything I’ve bought subsequently (after a quick flick through calibre). It’s a weird yet enjoyable window into how he spent his last few years when the cancer had left him unable to do much else.
