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Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
In this day and age ownership of digital media is often an illusion. When you buy a book or movie there are severe restrictions on what you can do with these files. In some cases, purchased content can simply disappear overnight. These limitations keep copyright holders in control, but they breed pirates at the same time.
[...] Millions of people have now replaced their physical media collections for digital ones, often stored in the cloud. While that can be rather convenient, it comes with restrictions that are unheard of offline.
[...R]esearchers examined how the absence of the right to resell and lend affects people's choice to buy. They found that, among those who are familiar with BitTorrent, roughly a third would prefer The Pirate Bay over Apple or Amazon if they are faced with these limitations.
These rights restrictions apparently breed pirates.
"Based on our survey data, consumers are more likely to opt out of lawful markets for copyrighted works and download illegally if there is no lawful way to obtain the rights to lend, resell, and use those copies on their device of choice," the researchers concluded.
The paper in question is two years old by now, but still very relevant today. While we don't expect that anything will change soon, people should at least be aware that you don't always own what you buy.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/you-dont-really-own-that-movie-you-bought-but-pirates-180915/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 19 2018, @01:31AM (15 children)
I regard dead tree books as a good investment.
I might buy an eBook reader and some technical books if I travel for work, but that's the only scenario I can imagine that would lead me to do so.
I store nothing in the cloud. I'm able to prevent doing so accidentally by refusing to log in to iCloud. That results in endless pestering by login dialogs but I am very determined.
A day or two some Soylentil posted his admiration for Apple because they are so respecting of everyone's privacy. Guess Again:
If you store it in iCloud, Apple will hand it over to the Polizei.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Wednesday September 19 2018, @09:29AM (6 children)
I buy pulp fiction on a kindle, this isn't stuff I'm going to be re-reading in years to come, it's like a soap opera.
I used to buy them as real books - and have problems disposing of them later, but after a trip to Sydney was extended by 10 days I'd run out, so bought a book to read on my tablet.
Since having the book available on my phone I read far more now, as I can read a chapter while I'm waiting for a train, or whatever. This has the side affect of meaning I spend less time rotting my brain on social media (which is what would normally fill those gaps). Yes I could carry a book round with me, but the reality is I don't.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @10:52AM
you still write "affect" instead of "effect", so I suggest you spend even less time on social media.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:26AM (4 children)
Another good use for ebooks is textbooks. It's nuts to make kids carry around 30 lbs of dead tree in their backpacks. Loading everything up onto a large tablet makes much more sense.
Textbook publishers, however, will never go for that, so we ought to shift our education culture to use open source textbooks instead. There are only so many ways to teach the quadratic formula, and my experience with textbook explanations is that they have gotten worse over the decades as math and tech phobes have gained more control of education.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)
They're slowly coming around. Either that or my recent instructors are just picking books that tend to have ebook versions. Got my last ~$200 text book for $30 as a pdf (legally) and not some nonsensical "e-rental."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:34PM
yeah with fucking drm included which is what this article was about to begin with...people who pay taxes and send their kids to slave indoctrination centers and still have no rights to the books they bought are ridiculous fucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:14PM
I've taken a bunch of courses now with ebooks online
I can't access any of them anymore
Complete BS
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:21PM
Textbooks, manuals, and other reference material are the one thing I prefer real books for. Ebooks don't make it easy or convenient to find what you want in a large work. Hopefully this will improve, but trends in UI seem to be toward less utility rather than more so I'm not holding my breath. The kindle is great for novels, but I have a hard time with anything useful.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:51AM
So did I until there was no more room in the house for books. Then we had to move to a smaller place. The books in a storage cell are not very useful, and having to pay for storage is a liability.
I read ebooks a lot now. They're the ones I can get copies of easily. And, yes, I back them up. and I don't use a kindle, so Amazon has little power over my library.
Where ebooks often don't work is for mathematics. In the middle of a paragraph, I suddenly encounter "Recall formula 6.43." And I have to page around awkwardly to find it and then I've lost my place and I can't recall why I needed to recall it. That's a flaw in the book formatting and the ebook reader of course, but it's still a problem. Less of a problem with modern browsers and html, but that's not how e-math s published.
Also art reproductions aren't great in ebooks, but this is really a problem with display technology.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:07PM
Paper wears out. I don't know how many books I've discarded over my life because the spine broke. With correct archiving I'm not worried about bit rot.
Paper can burn. Unless you like photocopied 'backups'... Every ebook I own is backed up and stored offsite.
Paper has bulk. Size required to store 200 novels? Maybe 6000 in^3. Size required to store 200 ebooks? 1 microSD, about .5 in^3.
I love paper too, but for all my novel reading give me ebooks. Ones where I own the file and they, are not DRM'd, and while I like my e-Readers I can read them on any machine that can run Calibre.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:37PM (3 children)
Neither did I... Until I did.
I used to think the same way, but changed about 10-15 years ago. I started buying technical books from O'Reilly. They really are beneficial IMO.
Gone is trying to read the book while on the can... Lets face it, one of the few times that you actually have time to read in today's world. Now this is only possible with ebooks if you are ok using a tablet in there.
I'm a big guy... but ebooks are a lot easier to bring around. All of them can fit on a single thumb drive... I used to be able to fit no more than 3 or 4 technical books in a laptop bag. Only 1 or 2 for the heftier books with a 2 inch or wider spine. It is now easy to bring my entire tech book collection around with at all times either on the previously mentioned thumb drive, or with plenty of room to spare on my laptop's hard drive. Not to mention a cloud back up on a free dropbox account.
Some ebooks are great with wonderful layouts including linked chapters and indexes that bring you to the location you need to read with a single click. That is much easier than on a dead tree edition. Even if the ebook scrimped and does not have links within the contents, most readers have a search function to bring you to relevant text.
After years with technical books, I am now fine with fiction as well. While I used to want to read a paper page instead of the screen, now I am ok with either, and honestly I have a monitor in front of my face all the time now so I am used to that medium even more.
I even have Dungeons and Dragons books in pdf form now. Humble Bundle has had multiple ebook specials featuring Pathfinder pdfs. (These are watermarked with my email address, but unrestricted as well.)
The only real benefit to paper books now is that they still work in a power outage.
Note: I only get ebooks with unrestricted pdfs. I can make my copies and backups and not worry about having them taken away.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:28PM (1 child)
I have a similar story. I maintain that I only read DRM free ebooks, and thanks to sources like the Humble Bundle those books do exist.
One exception to DRM free: I will play the DRM game when borrowing books from the library. With my Kobo, that means using Adobe to load the book to my device. The book will be unreadable after the checkout duration. I'm not thrilled about it (and some people may use Calibre to strip the DRM), but I feel supporting my library when I cannot find a DRM free book elsewhere is a noble cause.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 19 2018, @05:40PM
Calibre doesn't strip DRM. Some independently produced plugins for Calibre do; they are likely illegal in the United States. Please don't imply that Calibre is a scoff-law; I don't want anyone to start restricting its use. It's bad enough that it is happening with Kodi, which is also being unjustly called a lawbreaker.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday September 21 2018, @04:58PM
There are waterproof ebook readers -- ones that allegedly can survive for two hours under two metres of water. My youngest daughter reads her Kobo Aqua in the bath. No problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @02:53PM (1 child)
I've tried to buy ebooks a few times. Something always gets in the way.
No, I won't give my credit card to google.
No, I won't give out my DOB.
No, I won' t pay more for an ebook than I would pay for an actual book.
There's a bunch of books I'd love to have in epub format but they just don't sell them.
I won't install a special app on my phone just to be able to read a book. Fuck off. epub or another open format or die.
Perhaps I will never purchase an epub file in my lifetime. At this rate it is likely.
Their competition is selling books for free. Think about that for a moment and compare it to the Netflix model.
Wash rinse repeat for Audio books.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday September 21 2018, @04:53PM
There are a few publishers with a policy of no DRM on their ebooks. TOR and Baen come to mind. Perhaps their customers are technical enough to appreciate it.
And a few authors, mostly indie authors who need to establish a reputation. Even if those books are copied illegally, they help towards a reputation.