6 ms·

I hold fairly different opinions, though I agree that digital reading sources can make sense for completely new books read for pleasure. As a longtime physical

I hold fairly different opinions, though I agree that digital reading sources can make sense for completely new books read for pleasure. As a longtime physical product, paper has a lot of benefits. My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. On the other hand, I much prefer having searchable digital technical reference books. I find the flipping and index/table-of-contents referencing to be very "immersion-breaking" when I'm programming. For example, it's much quicker and easier to Ctrl+F for "XCHG" than it is to dig through the intimidating multi-thousand page Intel x86 Instruction Reference. When I was taking an OS course, I had to do this all the time, and I much preferred the pdf reference over the physical one.

derefr 11y ago
> My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. That's a problem with the current incarnation of ebooks as a set of cloud stores. Imagine e-books held—along with all the annotations made to them on your device—in something like a blockchain. Someone pushes you three bucks, and you push them a (license to a) book. Now the license, and the annotations, are in their account, accessible to all their devices.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  Why do people keep bringing up blockchains whenever they want to talk about generic digital ownership transfers where they don't really provide any benefit... It's the new "cloud", I swear.
  - derefr 11y ago
    It's not on a whim; I've actually thought for a while now that "non-partisan IP license store" is the perfect use-case for a blockchain—one much more fitting a blockchain's particular system of incentives than the exchange of monetary tokens. An account for holding IP licenses is, at minimum, just a bag of arbitrary tokens (UUIDs, say) signed by IP owners. To make them useful, the tokens might be, say, SHAs of files they are considered licenses to. The files themselves don't have to be attached to the system anywhere; in fact, the files don't even have to be available from the IP owners. Holding such a token effectively says "I, the IP owner, promise not to sue you for having a copy of this file on your hard drive." All the files themselves could be available on BitTorrent or whatever else—the tokens might-as-well-be scrips to participate in decriminalized piracy, much as doctor's notes allow one to participate in decriminalized marijuana consumption. But you can imagine an ecosystem of clients (or maybe OS-level features) that can collate licenses to IP-holder CDNs to get those files, maybe transmitting a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of the license to the CDN server in exchange for the file; and will remove shell-level access to the file when the license is removed from the store. (The file could be retained in an OS-protected cache and such in case the user regains a license to it; it just has to be made inaccessible to the user.) Now, consider the current products and services that a complete implementation of this sort of system would displace: any App Store (Apple's) or Game Store (e.g. Steam), any Music or Video store, potentially most streaming services, etc. A proper implementation would make "having content available to access" just an OS-built-in transparent side-effect of having the proper licenses. Tons and tons of middle-men would be put out. So, imagine building this thing in any way that's even slightly centralized. Imagine, just as a slight step away from a blockchain, that this was a Ripple/Stellar type thing: a set of ledgers extended such that each ledger account can hold a bag of bitstrings, rather than a bag of {currency_code, amount} pairs. Wouldn't it be in this service's interest to gain adoption by partnering with these IP middle-men? They'd say "let's get Valve to make it so that people's Steam games are listed in here, and then people can just move the licenses around using our wallet app! Win-win!" The potential partners, afraid of being displaced and commoditized, would go along, but at the same time, try to take control of the system. They would want the technology provider to allow them to impose business restrictions on how and when users could transfer things, or even charge a cost payable to the partner for doing so. The result wouldn't be a distributed zero-trust ledger of IP licenses at all; it'd just be a meta-store interface, with each store able to enforce its own policies on its licenses. Now, you could posit that there's some perfect organization (maybe the FSF? GNU Taler is a thing) that wouldn't fall for these tricks, even as its network absolutely fails to gain traction because nobody wants to be displaced by it. But it's much easier to just solve the problem by not having an organization running the network at all, so that there's "nobody there" to decide to partner with the IP owners or the current middle-men. Take the decision away; turn off the incentive structure. Just make it a blockchain. (The other convenient thing about such a structure being a blockchain, though, is the scaling story. A company like Stellar builds out a network and then has to pay to run its network until people start to join and peer with it and overwhelm the seed nodes; if Stellar were to run out of runway at any point, it would almost certainly be at the start, the costs of maintaining the seed network draining them dry before adoption picks up. A completely distributed ledger is initially run by idealist hobbyists, who will continue to run it without charging it rent each month until such a time as the system gains popularity enough to comprise commercially-run nodes as well. It's like parents taking care of their kids for free; it lets the network grow up until it's ready to support itself.) --- ...now, all that being said, yes, you can eliminate the "blockchain" part of this if you flip the problem on its head. If instead of the representation of ownership being the computed ledger account holder of a given token, the tokens themselves are self-describing documents that are signed and re-signed by each party as the token changes hands—then you can store these tokens anywhere: put them in a DHT, stick them in your OS's keychain store, wherever. People can just carry one to another computer via Sneakernet if they like. This quickly gets into problems with verifying that a license hasn't since been moved or revoked, though, which starts to look like an "ask the IP holder if it still wants you to be holding its license" sort of problem—like CA revocation is today. In fact, the whole system in that case would look like the current infrastructure for code-signing—and that's a problem, because that sort of system privileges IP owners (who can run CRL servers) at the expense of consumers (who can't or won't), making the whole thing just turn back into trusting the IP owner to say who currently owns a thing, and getting the IP owner to perform license transfers on your behalf, and all the rent-extracting problems that those two things generate. With a blockchain, everybody is up-to-date on who currently owns that thing. You don't have to think about key revocations or expiries; you don't have to worry about stale grants; each machine just computes current ownership after every new block, and if something is now gone from your account, all your devices know it (or know that they're offline and can't trust their database of ownership assertions.) But, if you have a system for broadcasting those self-describing documents—something that where everybody will be able to synchronize with it and then receive timely updates from it (Usenet, maybe?)—then yes, you get the same properties as a blockchain. But you've also just effectively recreated a blockchain. (And while you're recreating a blockchain, you might want that "proof-of-work" thing in there, too, so that people can't flood your newsgroup-ledger with pointless messages.)
- harshreality 11y ago
  The ebooks I buy are immediately stripped of drm and dumped into calibre. It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it works and the ebooks are mine forever no matter what happens to amazon, google, apple, or kobo, and they're trivially transferable. I will not buy ebooks from a store that uses DRM that's not immediately removable.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - skillachie 11y ago
    We are developing a platform that can be used as a Calibre alternative to organize, read, make highlights, bookmarks and notes and have them synced across all devices. Check us out at https://bookfusion.com/ https://bookfusion.com/ . We will be releasing an updated Android app and our IOS app soon. Feel free to send us some feedback at dc@bookfusion.com
    - douche 11y ago
      Does it read all the formats that Calibre supports and convert between them? That's the use case for Calibre - and where most alternatives fall down.
      - skillachie 11y ago
        We read all formats that Calibre support. We support natively EPUB and PDF. All other formats are converted to EPUB. How can I reach you to discuss further ?
    - NoahTheDuke 11y ago
      My Calibre library is 2 gigs. Do you really want me to upload 2 gigs? Is there an offline mode? How do I access my books if there isn't?
      - skillachie 11y ago
pasbesoin 11y ago
Additionally, human beings depend strongly upon spatial orientation. Printed materials dovetail with this. Many recount being able to recall information in part based upon its location within a printed text. IIRC, there was... I think it was a lengthy New Yorker piece, a number of years ago, that went into this. Including the "messy" professor's/researcher's office, until one has a conversation there with them and observes them quickly referencing all sorts of material based upon where they place it -- throughout the office and within specific piles. I wonder whether VR technology will enable us to better engage this in the digital landscape.
- viraptor 11y ago
  That sounds like poor man's tagging solution where location=tag. A better solution would be a global index: say "standard c99" and you'll get the document you want. It's better than physical location, because additional tags can narrow down the results to specific pages.
- snogglethorpe 11y ago
  For many words, I actually remember the location on the page, and the page's location in the book, and the book, where I first learned it! [I usually don't remember the exact page number, but some sort of general sense of the position in the book.] With a kindle book, I've found this effect to be much weaker, and for unpaged ebooks (e.g. many free books in html form), it's almost non-existant. It's important to me, at least, because this effect is one way I manage to recall the meaning of words I only half-remember. Maybe it sounds weird, but I think of the general concept I'm trying to remember, then the image of the page floats into view, and ... ok maybe it is weird. ><
  - douche 11y ago
    I do the exact same thing. Glad I'm not the only one with a strongly visual memory that works that way. Incidentally, this may be one advantage of PDFs over other formats. Responsiveness be damned, deterministic paging is also an important book property.
facepalm 11y ago
I used to worry about the dad thing (well handing books to my son, to be more precise). However - I don't read that many books from my own dad, so maybe my son won't be bothered that much. Also, many books will be in the public domain by the time he might want to read them. Or there will be subscription models where he can just read them for free. Or, I would just have to buy it for him a second time, again, realistically speaking it won't be that many books anyway. How many books do you own, and how often have you moved? Both numbers tend to increase with age, and usually don't increase the love for paper books.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I'm definitely sympathetic to the DRM and dad thing. And, in many ways, it applies more broadly to digital assets (whether DRMd or not) vs. physical ones. OTOH, I've spent way too much effort throughout my life lugging stuff around and I'm currently trying to, however slowly, systematically digitizing things I care about that are amenable to it.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    What I would like, in terms of the dad thing, is a nice UI to my library so that my kids have a chance to browse and discover good books in my collection. I don't think there is a solution for that yet. Maybe it would also be the future of book shops (same problem of serendipity).
- Nav_Panel 11y ago
  Nah, I understand -- though I'm still fairly young, I collected a lot of records in high school and college. I recently moved into a Manhattan apartment. Guess what? Most of my records are now in my parents' basement. Book-wise, most are also at my parents' house, though I have a couple of fairly large art/photography books lined up precariously on the floor of my apartment. I mostly brought up the dad thing because it actually happened a few months ago. I was visiting my parents and my dad, out of the blue, asks if I've read any Hemingway. I tell him I haven't, and he replies in a very out-of-character way that "Do you wanna be a Real Man? Real Men read Hemingway. Hold on..." He goes to the large bookshelf in another room, grabs a book of short stories, and plops it on the table. Out-of-character because the standard arrangement is me lending him sci-fi books for him to slowly read as he dozes off over the course of a few months. I've been slowly reading through the Hemingway stories on the train and I sometimes notice inscrutable/unreadable notes and underlines on some of the stories.
bhntr3 11y ago
I just wish I could put my e-books on a shelf to show how smart and well read I am. And how seriously people should take my opinion. Maybe I could just get a digital e-bookshelf for hacker news actually. Anyway, this is basically the blessing and curse of digital products. It started out as "Whoah! Copying is free. Distribution is cheap. Storage is practically infinite." Then we started to see the downsides. It's so easy to make copies and distribute them that publishers won't let us. There's no incentive to move inventory to free up space so there's limited depreciation. Digital interactions are still frustrating straightjackets that artificially trap our creativity in a box invented by a designer who never really got us in the first place and thinks designing for the lowest common denominator is the essence of simplicity. So we start to miss writing in the margins and flipping through discount record bins and handing down our movie collection to our children. I guess that last one was never likely. . . remember boxes of VHS tapes? Anyway, it's not really the product's fault. It's really the market that's changed. Well, it might partly be that designer's fault. I bet that guy was all into skeuomorphism til someone told him it was stupid. Jerk.
brandonmenc 11y ago
> My dad can give me a book he read in college My dad is in his 60s and lends me books Kindle-to-Kindle. Easy long-distance sharing, and talking about those books while he's alive, is more meaningful than looking at the dusty old one-of-identical-millions copy of Dune I jacked from his bookshelf.

derefr 11y ago

> My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. That's a problem with the current incarnation of ebooks as a set of cloud stores. Imagine e-books held—along with all the annotations made to them on your device—in something like a blockchain. Someone pushes you three bucks, and you push them a (license to a) book. Now the license, and the annotations, are in their account, accessible to all their devices.

Dylan16807 11y ago
Why do people keep bringing up blockchains whenever they want to talk about generic digital ownership transfers where they don't really provide any benefit... It's the new "cloud", I swear.
- derefr 11y ago
  It's not on a whim; I've actually thought for a while now that "non-partisan IP license store" is the perfect use-case for a blockchain—one much more fitting a blockchain's particular system of incentives than the exchange of monetary tokens. An account for holding IP licenses is, at minimum, just a bag of arbitrary tokens (UUIDs, say) signed by IP owners. To make them useful, the tokens might be, say, SHAs of files they are considered licenses to. The files themselves don't have to be attached to the system anywhere; in fact, the files don't even have to be available from the IP owners. Holding such a token effectively says "I, the IP owner, promise not to sue you for having a copy of this file on your hard drive." All the files themselves could be available on BitTorrent or whatever else—the tokens might-as-well-be scrips to participate in decriminalized piracy, much as doctor's notes allow one to participate in decriminalized marijuana consumption. But you can imagine an ecosystem of clients (or maybe OS-level features) that can collate licenses to IP-holder CDNs to get those files, maybe transmitting a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of the license to the CDN server in exchange for the file; and will remove shell-level access to the file when the license is removed from the store. (The file could be retained in an OS-protected cache and such in case the user regains a license to it; it just has to be made inaccessible to the user.) Now, consider the current products and services that a complete implementation of this sort of system would displace: any App Store (Apple's) or Game Store (e.g. Steam), any Music or Video store, potentially most streaming services, etc. A proper implementation would make "having content available to access" just an OS-built-in transparent side-effect of having the proper licenses. Tons and tons of middle-men would be put out. So, imagine building this thing in any way that's even slightly centralized. Imagine, just as a slight step away from a blockchain, that this was a Ripple/Stellar type thing: a set of ledgers extended such that each ledger account can hold a bag of bitstrings, rather than a bag of {currency_code, amount} pairs. Wouldn't it be in this service's interest to gain adoption by partnering with these IP middle-men? They'd say "let's get Valve to make it so that people's Steam games are listed in here, and then people can just move the licenses around using our wallet app! Win-win!" The potential partners, afraid of being displaced and commoditized, would go along, but at the same time, try to take control of the system. They would want the technology provider to allow them to impose business restrictions on how and when users could transfer things, or even charge a cost payable to the partner for doing so. The result wouldn't be a distributed zero-trust ledger of IP licenses at all; it'd just be a meta-store interface, with each store able to enforce its own policies on its licenses. Now, you could posit that there's some perfect organization (maybe the FSF? GNU Taler is a thing) that wouldn't fall for these tricks, even as its network absolutely fails to gain traction because nobody wants to be displaced by it. But it's much easier to just solve the problem by not having an organization running the network at all, so that there's "nobody there" to decide to partner with the IP owners or the current middle-men. Take the decision away; turn off the incentive structure. Just make it a blockchain. (The other convenient thing about such a structure being a blockchain, though, is the scaling story. A company like Stellar builds out a network and then has to pay to run its network until people start to join and peer with it and overwhelm the seed nodes; if Stellar were to run out of runway at any point, it would almost certainly be at the start, the costs of maintaining the seed network draining them dry before adoption picks up. A completely distributed ledger is initially run by idealist hobbyists, who will continue to run it without charging it rent each month until such a time as the system gains popularity enough to comprise commercially-run nodes as well. It's like parents taking care of their kids for free; it lets the network grow up until it's ready to support itself.) --- ...now, all that being said, yes, you can eliminate the "blockchain" part of this if you flip the problem on its head. If instead of the representation of ownership being the computed ledger account holder of a given token, the tokens themselves are self-describing documents that are signed and re-signed by each party as the token changes hands—then you can store these tokens anywhere: put them in a DHT, stick them in your OS's keychain store, wherever. People can just carry one to another computer via Sneakernet if they like. This quickly gets into problems with verifying that a license hasn't since been moved or revoked, though, which starts to look like an "ask the IP holder if it still wants you to be holding its license" sort of problem—like CA revocation is today. In fact, the whole system in that case would look like the current infrastructure for code-signing—and that's a problem, because that sort of system privileges IP owners (who can run CRL servers) at the expense of consumers (who can't or won't), making the whole thing just turn back into trusting the IP owner to say who currently owns a thing, and getting the IP owner to perform license transfers on your behalf, and all the rent-extracting problems that those two things generate. With a blockchain, everybody is up-to-date on who currently owns that thing. You don't have to think about key revocations or expiries; you don't have to worry about stale grants; each machine just computes current ownership after every new block, and if something is now gone from your account, all your devices know it (or know that they're offline and can't trust their database of ownership assertions.) But, if you have a system for broadcasting those self-describing documents—something that where everybody will be able to synchronize with it and then receive timely updates from it (Usenet, maybe?)—then yes, you get the same properties as a blockchain. But you've also just effectively recreated a blockchain. (And while you're recreating a blockchain, you might want that "proof-of-work" thing in there, too, so that people can't flood your newsgroup-ledger with pointless messages.)
harshreality 11y ago
The ebooks I buy are immediately stripped of drm and dumped into calibre. It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it works and the ebooks are mine forever no matter what happens to amazon, google, apple, or kobo, and they're trivially transferable. I will not buy ebooks from a store that uses DRM that's not immediately removable.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- skillachie 11y ago
  We are developing a platform that can be used as a Calibre alternative to organize, read, make highlights, bookmarks and notes and have them synced across all devices. Check us out at https://bookfusion.com/ https://bookfusion.com/ . We will be releasing an updated Android app and our IOS app soon. Feel free to send us some feedback at dc@bookfusion.com
  - douche 11y ago
    Does it read all the formats that Calibre supports and convert between them? That's the use case for Calibre - and where most alternatives fall down.
    - skillachie 11y ago
      We read all formats that Calibre support. We support natively EPUB and PDF. All other formats are converted to EPUB. How can I reach you to discuss further ?
  - NoahTheDuke 11y ago
    My Calibre library is 2 gigs. Do you really want me to upload 2 gigs? Is there an offline mode? How do I access my books if there isn't?
    - skillachie 11y ago

pasbesoin 11y ago

Additionally, human beings depend strongly upon spatial orientation. Printed materials dovetail with this. Many recount being able to recall information in part based upon its location within a printed text. IIRC, there was... I think it was a lengthy New Yorker piece, a number of years ago, that went into this. Including the "messy" professor's/researcher's office, until one has a conversation there with them and observes them quickly referencing all sorts of material based upon where they place it -- throughout the office and within specific piles. I wonder whether VR technology will enable us to better engage this in the digital landscape.

viraptor 11y ago
That sounds like poor man's tagging solution where location=tag. A better solution would be a global index: say "standard c99" and you'll get the document you want. It's better than physical location, because additional tags can narrow down the results to specific pages.
snogglethorpe 11y ago
For many words, I actually remember the location on the page, and the page's location in the book, and the book, where I first learned it! [I usually don't remember the exact page number, but some sort of general sense of the position in the book.] With a kindle book, I've found this effect to be much weaker, and for unpaged ebooks (e.g. many free books in html form), it's almost non-existant. It's important to me, at least, because this effect is one way I manage to recall the meaning of words I only half-remember. Maybe it sounds weird, but I think of the general concept I'm trying to remember, then the image of the page floats into view, and ... ok maybe it is weird. ><
- douche 11y ago
  I do the exact same thing. Glad I'm not the only one with a strongly visual memory that works that way. Incidentally, this may be one advantage of PDFs over other formats. Responsiveness be damned, deterministic paging is also an important book property.

facepalm 11y ago

I used to worry about the dad thing (well handing books to my son, to be more precise). However - I don't read that many books from my own dad, so maybe my son won't be bothered that much. Also, many books will be in the public domain by the time he might want to read them. Or there will be subscription models where he can just read them for free. Or, I would just have to buy it for him a second time, again, realistically speaking it won't be that many books anyway. How many books do you own, and how often have you moved? Both numbers tend to increase with age, and usually don't increase the love for paper books.

ghaff 11y ago
I'm definitely sympathetic to the DRM and dad thing. And, in many ways, it applies more broadly to digital assets (whether DRMd or not) vs. physical ones. OTOH, I've spent way too much effort throughout my life lugging stuff around and I'm currently trying to, however slowly, systematically digitizing things I care about that are amenable to it.
- facepalm 11y ago
  What I would like, in terms of the dad thing, is a nice UI to my library so that my kids have a chance to browse and discover good books in my collection. I don't think there is a solution for that yet. Maybe it would also be the future of book shops (same problem of serendipity).
Nav_Panel 11y ago
Nah, I understand -- though I'm still fairly young, I collected a lot of records in high school and college. I recently moved into a Manhattan apartment. Guess what? Most of my records are now in my parents' basement. Book-wise, most are also at my parents' house, though I have a couple of fairly large art/photography books lined up precariously on the floor of my apartment. I mostly brought up the dad thing because it actually happened a few months ago. I was visiting my parents and my dad, out of the blue, asks if I've read any Hemingway. I tell him I haven't, and he replies in a very out-of-character way that "Do you wanna be a Real Man? Real Men read Hemingway. Hold on..." He goes to the large bookshelf in another room, grabs a book of short stories, and plops it on the table. Out-of-character because the standard arrangement is me lending him sci-fi books for him to slowly read as he dozes off over the course of a few months. I've been slowly reading through the Hemingway stories on the train and I sometimes notice inscrutable/unreadable notes and underlines on some of the stories.

bhntr3 11y ago

I just wish I could put my e-books on a shelf to show how smart and well read I am. And how seriously people should take my opinion. Maybe I could just get a digital e-bookshelf for hacker news actually. Anyway, this is basically the blessing and curse of digital products. It started out as "Whoah! Copying is free. Distribution is cheap. Storage is practically infinite." Then we started to see the downsides. It's so easy to make copies and distribute them that publishers won't let us. There's no incentive to move inventory to free up space so there's limited depreciation. Digital interactions are still frustrating straightjackets that artificially trap our creativity in a box invented by a designer who never really got us in the first place and thinks designing for the lowest common denominator is the essence of simplicity. So we start to miss writing in the margins and flipping through discount record bins and handing down our movie collection to our children. I guess that last one was never likely. . . remember boxes of VHS tapes? Anyway, it's not really the product's fault. It's really the market that's changed. Well, it might partly be that designer's fault. I bet that guy was all into skeuomorphism til someone told him it was stupid. Jerk.

brandonmenc 11y ago

> My dad can give me a book he read in college My dad is in his 60s and lends me books Kindle-to-Kindle. Easy long-distance sharing, and talking about those books while he's alive, is more meaningful than looking at the dusty old one-of-identical-millions copy of Dune I jacked from his bookshelf.