[sarcasm mode on] And this article shows how ebooks, especially from Microsoft, can never be destroyed.[/sarcasm mode off]
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Being someone who is a very heavy reader and has personally re-read Terry Pratchett’s entire book library through at least 8 times over the past 10 years or so, you couldn’t be more wrong i’m afraid 
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B&N is mostly a US-only thing so no B&N for me. I buy non-DRM ePubs when possible and only buy DRMed when I can deDRM it like I can with Amazon’s Kindle ebooks using Calibre and the appropriate plugin. I’d honestly like to be able to stop feeding the Amazon & buy elsewhere like from Apple but until their DRM is easily broken I refuse to make my Books/Music/Videos unreadable some time in the future.
Look into Calibre and the deDRM plugin to convert protected Kindle books into unprotected ePubs.
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Why are you using the future tense? Do you live in one of them commie countries that doesn’t already have the world’s greatest and most cost effective* healthcare systems arranged according to free market* principles?
That’s really the tragedy of (most, commercial) stabs at ebooks.
One shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of proper digital archiving; we have professionals that do it full time for a reason; but the problem has the virtue of at least being solvable in principle: copying is a virtually free and nondestructive operation and a variety of integrity mechanisms and checksums and such are available.
Physical archivists get the bonus that the stuff they work on will often be at least partially usable after a period of egregious neglect; but can only slow the inevitable march toward death.
DRMed digital media, though, are outright designed for the worst of both worlds: most of the good digital preservation strategies are forbidden; while the system is intended to cause any extant copies to fail hard and sudden when the conditional access system so wishes it.
It is to library science what antivaxxers are to medical science.
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8 times in 10 years? Me, too. Glad I’m not the only one. 
Well, yes. And that’s exactly what Marx predicted for “late-stage capitalism”, point of fact. IIRC (it’s been many years ^^’) he even used the word “feudalism” many times when describing the endgame, especially when referring to landlords.
The old saw, “Everything Marx said about communism was wrong, but everything he said about capitalism was correct,” is pretty much spot-on…
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A philosopher Sir Alan once said, “the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum, what may be right for you might not be right for some.” It’s a good thing that there’s different strokes that move the world.
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Whatchoo talkin’ 'bout, @ficuswhisperer?
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I’m a human being, gawd damnit!
I’m as mad as hell…!
You can pry my books from my cold dead hands!
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According to this site, Microsoft gives an additional $25 credit if you’ve annotated or highlighted your books. So get annotating!
Also, I don’t know if you have access to your files or if they’re stored in the cloud, but the DeDRM software for ms .lit files is Convert-LIT. Disclaimer: haven’t used it myself, but it’s where the Calibre website points.
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How is that a waste? They didn’t ship them so they could throw them away. Sounds rather the opposite.
Print, like all other tangible things will take up physical space—this cannot be avoided, true. But digital text files are more like vapor, can be changed without your consent, revoked, often come laden with DRM as impediments to sharing.
These aren’t vague or imaginary concerns: they actually happen. But once a real book hits the press and is purchased, it remains fixed.
In certain cases they are more convenient, but the accessibility and permanence of paper is unchallenged for a reason.
Also, has everyone forgotten what an index is when it comes to text searches?
My point was that anything which requires a rigamarole of finagling in order to read a text file without impediment is not more convenient than print.
I don’t mind tinkering, but there’s a time and a place for that—my wanting to read a book is reading time, not tinker time.
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Nope. But an index ain’t so hot for searching hyperlinks, and why NOT use a direct search, if one is available?
I still prefer the experience of print media a great deal, mind you, but only until I have to move said media. I’m right sick of that crap, to be frank! I also can (and do) carry thousands of ebooks around with me, on my phone. Let’s see YOU get on the bus with that! Again, not ideal, no, but perfectly acceptable and extremely convenient.
Of note: Many ebooks require zero finagling, because they possess zero DRM. If you can read a text, .mobi, , .lit, .pdf, or w/e format file, you’re good to go.
Right.
Index. It’s in the back of the book. Includes keywords and page numbers by occurrence, doesn’t have any hyperlinks—it doesn’t need them.
And has anyone else accidentally discovered something interesting/important just by reading reference material while looking for something else? Never seems to happen to me while punching up PDFs.
Yeah, I do feel that. I have to tier our library by importance whenever we move (which is more than I’d like), critical books get moved first, everything else can wait or even be stored).
I don’t even have anything valuable (unless game books count, not sure), but I must needs some of these stacks to be within easy reach.
I appreciate the attempt, but I can see where the tinkering required on my part in that sentence.
It’s just not as simple as crackin’ open a tome, and won’t ever be.
Err… Ebook reader applications often read MANY, if not all extant formats. Calibre is a good free one for PC, for example, that reads just about every free ebook format, plus it can even help you “de-DRM” licensed content. It also has one of the only “library” functions that I’ve ever had much time for, rather than using my own organization under a folder/directory structure ^^’.
Another good reason to go with ebooks, by the way, is to use your local library’s “Overdrive” integration to borrow free ebooks (thus, nothing to return; they simply stop working after 2 weeks, or w/e). Amazon/Kindle also has a similar relationship with libraries, for free ebook borrowing.
Again, I’m not trying to imply ebooks are better, overall, than books; heaven forfend =o! But they very definitely have some extremely good uses, if you give them half a chance. It’s not like you can haul thousands of physical books around you every day in a pants pocket, ya know.
I’ll admit, however, that I’m biased, due to overly-fast* reading speed (~900 WPM at the age of 8, Lord only knows now =s). I simply burn through so much content in a sitting, there’s no real way to properly feed my habit with actual print media any more, and I also tend to read 2-5 things at once (ADHD is a pain in the butt). I end up reading cereal boxes, every silly warning on ladders, and other inane crap, because I can’t help myself! So I always have a bunch of real books about but I keep a few orders of magnitude more ebooks on my phone for…er…“emergencies,” I guess? lol
*Yes, literally “overly-fast”. I have excellent retention but it’s VERY difficult for me to slow down and properly enjoy books that I really like; I honestly wish I read somewhat slower! My biggest complaint is that I tend to lose some of the emotional impact unless I can drag my feet the whole way through the story. It’s also a very expensive habit to maintain, especially these days; heroin would be cheaper!
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Can someone explain to me how this doesn’t apply to Amazon Kindle. Cory says he refuses to sell through Audible for this reason, but he does sell through Kindle. As far as I can tell, Kindle books are DRM too. So should he not be selling through Kindle (and should I stop buying Kindle books?)
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True, but I don’t care. (It’s just orthogonal to my point.)
Every proponent of ebooks says something like this, but its not like I’ve ever wanted that on any ereader, either. I can only read a few books/files at a time anyway—even when reading through papers for a project.
It’s a use case for someone who needs to read all of the Gutenberg Project right now on this train or is going on a long trip away from civilization—but not me.
I would have thought that was something more in the publisher’s domain, not an author’s.
