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Should be a requirement that MS send a decent paper copy at the very least to the “owner”. Or transfer each account’s titles to Kindle etc.
Imagine a kid’s favourite book disappearing.
Maybe it’s time to refuse buying e-books with DrMIA, and require perma-copies.
When you make something worthy of respect, people tend to treat it well and recognise authors’ rights, and pay.
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It’s the DivX shutoff all over again.
It never got cracked because it wasn’t worth cracking.
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It’s not exactly legally “in the green”, but I tend to buy physical copies of things (CD’s and books mainly), and then pirate the DRM free versions to use as I please. Ethically, I’ve paid for it and the creators will see that revenue.
When I can, I will pay the creator directly for a DRM free digital version.
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I buy both ebooks and physical books. Not all ebooks have DRM; I’ve bought a large number of them in epub format, which I read either as an epub on an ipad or I convert in calibre and read on a Kindle.
One advantage is that I can back them up. I have a copy of my calibre library on two hard drives locally and in cloud storage. I’m also unlikely to run out of reading material while I’m traveling (without having to haul around a bunch of books); battery life is a concern but that hasn’t been an issue with the Kindle.
Backing up physical books is difficult to do without buying multiple copies. I am currently trying to find my copies of a couple of Gene Wolfe novelswithout any luck; I suspect I gave them away or sold them by mistake (or they could have been lost in the move).
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I have two great library systems within biking distance, but regularly find myself looking for books outside their stock. Now a lot of the time the obscure books aren’t e-books either, but when they are it is great.
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The Internet Archive has a great e-library system!
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There’s also nothing like a stack of real books in your backpack when travelling. That’s why I have five shells of books and an Ebook reader. Alone the huge collection of SF magazines from the 1950s to 1980s in the public domain was worth the price of it. No DRM there, of course. The fact that physical books are a great thing is no reason to get all Luddite over it, IMO.
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The prophet Doctorow has foretold of this.
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Thank you for the reminder that I need to strip the DRM from my Kindle books. And I have time to do it this weekend. Nice.
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That’s true. It has been a while since I couldn’t get the book I wanted at the library, but it has happened. We are fortunate to have a very good library system for our size town, but I know that’s not the case for many.
We can also get a pretty good selection of ebooks through our system.
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I have lots of physical books, but I think I need to pare down my collection to just the ones I really enjoy in a physical format, and that are not mere commodity books that I can easily replace.
As much as I’d like to be above such things my book shelves have way to many books I’ve kept because they are aspirational, books I feel I ought to read, rather than books I have read. On my e-readers I can hide the fact that I don’t read much literary fiber…
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When I’m at the library, I use my kindle “samples” collection as a shopping list. Sometimes the books are there, sometimes they aren’t.
My library, and it’s a well funded system with hundreds of thousands of volumes, tends to miss
- Minor genre fiction-- they don’t collect every cozy imaginable
- Academic works.
- Older books by established authors.
- Recent computer books. (which my kindle messes up anyways)
Alas, academic works and recent computer books tend to be horribly expensive, which is probably why my library doesn’t spend money on buying them.
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We don’t carry academic works, because fistfights would break out over the one copy we could afford (first student to get to the library borrows book for most of semester, hilarity ensues) and next semester, a new edition would have the chapters rearranged, making our previous edition mostly obsolete. We try to keep up with computer books, but again, they become obsolete fairly quickly.
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I’m not interested in textbooks-- but, for instance, this kind of stuff is on my kindle list.
I do the same thing. And when I buy eBooks from Amazon (I have sight issues, so having an eBook where I can enlarge the font at will is very important), I run the files through Calibre and strip the DRM. Early on, Amazon removed a book from my Kindle because of some kind of publisher fight, and I decided right then if they got any more of my book dollars, it would be after I found a way to keep what I buy. Enter Calibre.
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Excellent recommendation! Calibre’s library is also better-organized than most readers’, in my opinion. It’s significantly better than most paid competitors, to be frank.
Of note: Calibre automatically backs up every book to its library, while leaving the original wherever you put it. This may sound simple and obvious but it’s NOT a common feature, and it has saved my ass several times during storage failures, in between my normal periodic backups =o.
For companies that pull this kind of crap with ebook DRM, there’s LibGen (sorry, no link due to piracy; slap a search engine on that =) ). I wouldn’t use 'em for anything I personally consider “legit”, mind you, but THIS kind of malarkey = instant rage + LibGen to me.
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Using or distributing such would be a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201. Thanks DMCA!
“doing it right” would be giving me the damn DRM-free copy of the work I paid money for in the first place, so that I can play it however I prefer. The music industry eventually wrapped their heads around the idea that DRM only hurts the people who are actually paying for music. It’s a shame the film/TV and eBook industries haven’t made the same realization.
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Yeah, that ship sailed long before UV became a thing. You never owned the movies. You’re paying for the “privilege” of accessing them whenever you like without additional charge, but only at the pleasure of the content providers. This is why I chuckle at people who scoff at my physical media collection. I enjoy my UV collection, but know not to rely on it, and have never “purchased” a cloud movie, only redeemed codes for discs I’ve bought. The only ownership that is meaningful is physical ownership. Anything else is an illusion of “ownership.”
That said, if there was a crack for UV DRM, I’d be all over it, because fuck the DMCA.
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