27 ms·

“The books will stop working.”

1044 points by _Microft 7y ago

HarryHirsch 7y ago
I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". With all that electronic junk that no one knows how to archive properly that statement needs to be revisited.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". ...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone. You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works. Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets and some funeral documents were preserved simply by lasting a long time. Others, like many religious documents, were preserved in some form or another by expensive, tedious, completely manual copying. Some information (both fiction and nonfiction) was only ever verbally communicated, as it wasn't deemed worth the expense and difficulty of putting it onto paper. Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies. It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets Mesopotamian clay tablets are incredibly robust. We have many times more than we have the manpower to translate, not to speak of the ones still buried in more or less unknown locations. Funnily enough, they survived much better in cities that were destroyed -- and burned, firing the tablets -- than in cities that weren't, where the tablets might eventually fall below the water table and dissolve. But anyway, we don't have "a small number" of durable tablets; we have an extremely large number, including some entire royal libraries. > Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies. This is not the case; China had extensive markets in printed popular works for centuries beforehand. Most of that work doesn't survive because of lack of interest. The fate of almost all printed material is total disappearance, because we can only maintain so much material, and printed material is a subset of all material. From the introduction to Record of the Listener ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ ): > At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record [夷坚志] had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it was not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country. Much of the Record was nonetheless lost as early as the Yuan Dynasty [less than 100 years later], an indication of the traumatic effects of the Song-Yuan transition. The current 207-chapter editions are based on post-Song redactions and later manuscripts by traditional and modern scholars. Note that this is a famous work considered relevant today. Contrast the countless printed popular works that nobody thought were worth preserving in the first place. The ability to make copies is not relevant in the slightest. The number of copies made is relevant, but only weakly. Information is preserved when people devote effort to preserving it, and lost otherwise.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. And that is exactly how I've interpreted it in all of my comments. > The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether As I point out in response to your sibling comment, Mesopotamian works, which had to be copied by hand 3000 years ago, have been much better preserved than Chinese works that were mass produced 1000 years ago, simply because clay tablets are much more robust than paper is. If you want your text to last, inscribe it high on a cliff: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription is still around and almost as good as new. Though note that after the cultural upheaval brought by Islam, the Persians forgot how to read that inscription, which is a different form of book loss.
_Microft 7y ago
Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose. It's so sad that this is necessary.
- EuAndreh 7y ago
  Take a look at ArchiveBox [0] if you're thinking on automating this work ;) [0]: https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
- gdulli 7y ago
  I have a collection of over 1000 faved tweets that's one of my favorite possessions. I noticed that one would occasionally get deleted by the author so I wrote a script to screenshot them all with a Python package called Splinter.
  - porker 7y ago
    Would you mind publishing it? I'm in the same situation
    - gdulli 7y ago
      Sure, here you go: https://pastebin.com/iXzscHW6 https://pastebin.com/iXzscHW6
  - asdff 7y ago
    I get so frusterated when anonymous reddit users overwrite their posts with some script in the name of privacy. Just leave out personal details from the public internet, it's not hard. Plus, if I really wanted to, there are at least a half dozen different ways to look at a cached copy of your overwritten reddit comment.
- asdff 7y ago
  firefox singlefile extension is pretty nice for this but still not perfect given how much dynamic bullshit gets shoveled on top of every website
hyperman1 7y ago
I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.
- luisaguimaraes 7y ago
  Let's just wait for who's it gonna be! And how will it look when "books stop working".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  The UK Consumer Rights Act (CRA) appears to anticipate this as it has no absolute date beyond which goods should remain suitable for purpose. Digital goods should last infinitely, so a digital good that 'expires' should be fixed or the cost fully refunded (fully as there are still an infinite number of years of use left available; and that should be accounting for inflation too).
  - knd775 7y ago
    They are fully refunding all purchases, though.
    - NegativeK 7y ago
      I don't understand how publishers are going to continue pushing DRMed media if they have to keep every sale as a liability on their books.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- afandian 7y ago
  I feel the legality should surround the description. This isn't "selling" it's "lending".
EdwardCoffin 7y ago
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle. The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address. They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decommissioned, so if I wanted to license any new computers to use the book I should do so then. I've not been able to replace that book either, so it's not like the refund they finally begrudgingly gave me could be put towards a replacement - that book has never been republished in any form that I have been able to find (Vinge's annotated version of his book A Fire Upon the Deep).
- headcanon 7y ago
  Principle of the thing aside, is the annotated version worth reading? I read the book and it was quite good, curious what the annotations add to it.
  - owenversteeg 7y ago
    I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.
    - johncalvinyoung 7y ago
      I wouldn't rank it among the best ever written, but fascinating enough in its own right. I've read it several times, and loaned/given it to friends too. Now I'm wondering about the annotated edition!
  - EdwardCoffin 7y ago
    I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text. The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc. I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc. [1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...
hokus 7y ago
I've always considered the internet (in its current form) to be histories biggest book burning event. Hoarding rss feeds I often reached a point around 35 000 subs where the number of new ones I find is roughly equal to the deleted websites. I'm sort of stuck in a mental loop thinking of book burning.
- logifail 7y ago
  > histories biggest book burning event If you've not been to Bebelplatz in Berlin to see Micha Ullman's sunken library installation[0], do try and get there. It's one of the most upsetting art installations I've ever seen, but it absolutely should be on everyone's list. [0] https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelplatz https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelpla...
ajuc 7y ago
This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.
- deleted 7y ago
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- lazyjones 7y ago
  > This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. It's also simply an inferior technical solution due to its unnecessary complexity and dependence on servers, corporate entities/departments/decisions.
- la_barba 7y ago
  Have you found a solution to piracy that doesn't involve DRM? What was its success rate? I'm sure the publishers would love to switch to a better system if it exists.
  - mdpopescu 7y ago
    For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)
    - la_barba 7y ago
      I don't know if you know this, but DRM is a core part of Netflix. No studio would ever have signed up with them if they couldn't control distribution. >See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales I am not familiar with that example. Any link to the data?
      - mdpopescu 7y ago
otakucode 7y ago
There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is. Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).
- uryga 7y ago
  > If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. idk, spotify et al seem to be doing alright...
docker_up 7y ago
I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/european-commission-accused-of-burying-controversial-piracy-report/#7903304e7e1d https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ... I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
      - la_barba 7y ago
blakesterz 7y ago
Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)
- dmix 7y ago
  > Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse. It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.
  - klez 7y ago
    Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)
ForHackernews 7y ago
Another case of "Stallman was right": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- bitL 7y ago
  What's RMS up to these days? Haven't heard from him for a while...
  - fooblitzky 7y ago
    He seems to travel a lot giving speeches about Free Software. If you get the FSF bulletin, you get updates each quarter, e.g. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms
- delecti 7y ago
  We need someone to be the Carl Sagan for Stallman's philosophy. He's right a lot, but he's also abrasive and doesn't package his arguments in a publicly digestable way.
  - beagle3 7y ago
    But Carl Sagan did not have a horde of anti-Sagans from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon etc to ridicule him. Really, this is the crux of the matter. I have been to several Stallman talks and have had a chance to speak with him privately. He is weird in his manners, to put it lightly, and he is uncompromising in his positions, but he is very clear, very eloquent, very factual, and has a great track record at predicting the future. You have hundreds of Carl Saganesque people fighting against big tobacco, hardly making a dent. The problem with Stallman is not that he is abrasive, it is that he is outnumbered by people trying to make money.
0815test 7y ago
"The books will stop working"? They were never "working" properly in the first place! There's a reason why DRM systems are said to be "defective by design"; DRM is inherently anti-consumer (in denying entirely lawful rights, such as format shifting and copying for the purpose of fair use under copyright law) and DRM-encumbered media of any sort should always be regarded as fake media.
rbreve 7y ago
In a way paper books "stop working" after 10 years or so when the paper turns yellow and dusty
- scandox 7y ago
  I read Don Quixote in a 4 volume edition printed in 1796. It had been sitting on a shelf in a house my parents bought for 200 years quite readable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jumelles 7y ago
  Books are much more resilient than you think, especially if the publisher used good materials.
- SCdF 7y ago
  "or so" is doing a heavy lifting in this sentence. 10 years is an absurdly short time for a book to last.
  - Raphmedia 7y ago
    In fact, the majority of books you will find in most libraries are at the very least 10 years old.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Is readable = TRUE? Book working = TRUE Next
- adtac 7y ago
  Even ignoring the fact that physical books last for much longer than a decade, the alternative to DRM'd books isn't physical books. It's digital, non-DRM'd books. And the lifetime of a DRM-free digital copy of a book is practically infinite.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  I've got hundred year old books on my shelf that aren't even particularly fragile. I'd estimate that maybe 5% of my shelves are younger than 10 years.
jdonaldson 7y ago
The books still work if you drink a verification can. Just make sure nobody else is in the room and trips the antipiracy measures.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I don't suppose anyone ever cracked the DRM on Microsoft books such that the De-DRM utilities for Calibre would work to scrub them before they're rendered inaccessible?
user17843 7y ago
I'm so shocked about this, my Iphone almost slipped out of my hands while I googled the Microsoft ebook store, but then I asked Alexa and she said everything will be ok. My Tesla is now driving me to an analogue bookshop to show my full support against dependence on digital platforms over my daily life, I might even upload a protest video to Youtube.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Tesla's software in the car is probably phoning home on a regular base. What happens if they pull the plug on those servers? You didn't buy that softare, you're only licensing it, after all.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    That was the joke.
sergiotapia 7y ago
It's why I only buy games from Gog now. I just install the .exe and it works. I no longer tolerate DRM.
- deleted 7y ago
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- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  But you tolerate Windows?
aaron695 7y ago
OUYA stopped working this week. Games lost (hacks available to get around it do exist though, like you could hack the Microsoft books) even 100% free apps stopped working correctly. For all OUYAs extreme self-righteous about open source they became the worst. Perhaps a middle ground is needed
AnssiH 7y ago
They will fully refund all purchases, seems reasonable to me.
- the_af 7y ago
  Imagine if one day you went to find your well-thumbed, most loved book in your bookshelf, maybe to re-read your favorite chapter, and the physical book was missing, replaced by a note from the publisher: "this book no longer works, but worry not: we've refunded you!"
  - AnssiH 7y ago
    But this is not a physical book, so it is not a "unique" copy. All of my e-books are entirely replaceable by buying them again from a different store (or as a physical book).
    - jmiserez 7y ago
      Books go "out of print", and curiously enough this even happens to eBooks. Usually it's because the rights got sold or expired. If you only read bestseller list books then yes, but anything older or niche/technical may really not be available for sale anymore.
    - the_af 7y ago
      It doesn't matter whether it's unique. I'd find it outrageous if a book disappeared from my bookshelf on a publisher's whim even if the physical book was otherwise unimpressive -- even if, in fact, it wasn't a very good book to begin with. The book is mine. The publisher cannot decide when it stops working. Only a force of nature, like a fire, can take my books away from me. If you're content in the knowledge that you can buy your e-books again whenever a publisher decides to make them stop working for you, good for you. Me, I'm not happy letting publishers win and trample my rights. In fact, much like the original tweet, I find the notion outrageous.
    - cyphar 7y ago
      Deleting books is a form of virtual book-burning. Yes, you can always buy another copy of the book (assuming that it's still being "printed"). But, that isn't the point. I do find it interesting that Amazon decided to name their book reader "Kindle", of all things.
Causality1 7y ago
I forget which store it was, but back in the day when I bought e-books to read on my PDAs they came encrypted, with the credit card number I used to buy them being the decryption key, so I was completely independent of the store to read them and could share them with anyone I trusted with my card number. It seems like a quaint solution to modern sensibilities but thoroughly satisfying on a moral level. These days I buy the digital version on Amazon but don't download it. I pirate the copy I'm actually going to read and archive.
- jmiserez 7y ago
  Some (few) stores offer DRM-free PDF versions, usually with a personalized watermark. I feel like that's a good compromise, I get a DRM-free PDF and I can only share it with people I trust not to put it online. And the watermark is a non-issue because it doesn't bother/impact me.
logifail 7y ago
My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young [1] It was first published in 1924
- jgtrosh 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure I'll happily recite The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
  - Nikaoto 7y ago
    Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    The real tragedy of this is that nobody will know who Mister Rogers is by that time.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded. Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?
teekert 7y ago
All my ebooks get their DRM removed instantly and I back up my kindle every now and then. This shit is not ever happening to me.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  How do you strip Kindle DRM? asking for a friend.
  - amaccuish 7y ago
    Search for DeDRM plugin for calibre. There's several ways to do it. If you have a physical kindle, you can download the books from your amazon account, and plug the serial number of your kindle into DeDRM. If you have the Kindle for PC or Mac app, DeDRM can pick up the relevent keys. I recommend getting the books in the AWZ3 format rather than KFX.
    - Sirened 7y ago
      I couldn't make the desktop application ripping mechanic work. Apparently you need to download an ancient version which still uses AWZ3 since KFX wasn't support. I got lucky since I had an old gen one kindle on my account so I was able to download the files from my account portal but I think I would've been out of luck otherwise.
      - teekert 7y ago
        Ah yes,I have kindle keyboard (it won't die!) so maybe one will have problems with the newer versions? After installing Calibre plugins, simply double clicking to download books to my local library automatically strips the DRM.
ar_lan 7y ago
> Remember: Free with DRM is not the same thing as free. I agree with him the whole way that this is weird, but this particular tweet made no sense to me. It seems akin to "Hey, we'll allow you to rent something for some duration for free", and it sounds like he's saying that that situation is also not free.
- peteretep 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
- ekingr 7y ago
  I understand it as two slightly different meanings for the word 'free'. In French we have separate words for (a) 'free' as something we don't pay for (gratuit) and (b) 'free' as your have the freedom to use it as you wish (libre).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rchaud 7y ago
Back in 2005, my undergrad school gave students access to the then newly legit Napster. Everything was DRM-d WMA files, but there was a third party tool that stripped it out and let you play it on any device that played WMAs natively. I'm reminded of that occasionally when I see files with "noDRM-$Artist-$Title" pop up in the File Manager. Does Napster even exist anymore?
nknealk 7y ago
A similar thing happened with Ultraviolet's movies service: https://www.myuv.com/ https://www.myuv.com/ There's also a great story regarding "right of first purchase" in the USA where Redbox literally purchases DVDs at retail so that they can rent them out to customers because Disney would not sell directly to them: https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-disney-movies-ba-1820925295 https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-d...
- xtracto 7y ago
  Worthy of the DRM Graveyard (a subreddit I created just for this, thanks!)
- B-Con 7y ago
  Yep. This is why I don't have a cloud-based digital library. UV offered a way to migrate to other providers, but will the next one? I don't know that they're legally allowed to. What if the other provider doesn't have the content, am I SOL? I so badly wish I could buy a license to get a specific piece of content, get a copy to play on my own computer, then also have the ability to "upload" (aka, unlock) that content on a cloud streaming service of my choice.
paul 7y ago
I’m more disturbed by the fact that they can also edit or remove books that I’ve already purchased. How long until Amazon is forced to “deplatform” something offensive? Those old books contain a lot of words and ideas that have no place in 2019. It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.
ojagodzinski 7y ago
All ebook sold in Poland are without DRM, You just pay and download epub+mobi+pdf versions and thats all. It's the only one working system...
smsm42 7y ago
That's why you should never buy DRM-ed anything if you intend to keep it long term. Companies change, businesses get bought & sold, collapse, disappear - thinking that your particular DRM scheme would be supported for 20 years is insane. For a movie that you'll forget in the next 2 days it's ok, for a book that you intend on re-reading years late - no reason to "buy" DRM-ed version of anything. Or, at least, if you have no other options, strip DRM from it immediately and export into a common format.
nabla9 7y ago
This is why when I buy a DRM ebook, I also get the pirated copy and put it into my Calibre. Buying a ebook is just for the payment.
- salutonmundo 7y ago
  Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!
  - ggm 7y ago
    Depends on your economy. Specifically what he does is of course illegal but the general principle of removing drm from your own purchase isn't That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
    - sjy 7y ago
      The general principle of removing DRM is forbidden, at least in the US, which is presumably why DRM removal tools are distributed through the same shady web sources as pirated content. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
      - ggm 7y ago
        https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/20-contracting-out/technological-protection-measures https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/20-contracting-out/tech... I assumed it passed. Looks like it didn't pass, because of the US laws.
      - modsiw 7y ago
        But if it is circumvented then it wasn’t effectively controlling access; therefore, this isn’t applicable. A savvy lawyer might argue that’s not what’s meant by effectively, but it’s at least a little ambiguous.
shmerl 7y ago
How many times does this need to happen, for people stop paying for DRMed junk? Buy digital goods DRM-free only. Vote with your wallet, otherwise it's pointless to complain.
dangus 7y ago
I'm astonished that Microsoft is apparently just refunding the original purchase price of (everybody's?) books. What's most mind boggling is the realization that apparently nobody sat down and planned this situation out - because if they did, the idea that someone could get an okay from their boss on the idea that even a mildly unsuccessful result and end of life of the product would end in full refunds for everybody. What's the point of even doing business? Am I misunderstanding this outcome? That means anyone who used this product got free book rentals for whatever they wanted to read? ... Let's talk about DRM now. DRM in itself as a concept is not bad (IMO), and it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay. However, I think what we fail to talk about is how there's no agreed upon standard regulating the end of life and transferral procedures involved with works sold under DRM. I suspect that book publishers would not agree to allow Microsoft to say "the store is closed, your books can be unlocked once you follow this procedure." Even if they're okay with that, Microsoft probably didn't even have the foresight to implement that sort of thing on a technical level. So, what we need in the digital goods industry is some kind of statement to the customer that's set in stone regarding what will happen with your content if the business ceases to exist and the platform is canceled. There's some semblance of this concept around. For example, Ultraviolet is shutting down in July - so, you have the option to transfer movies to other services for most movies on that platform (it should be all movies). MoviesAnywhere is also a DRM service making an attempt at avoiding platform lock-in for digitally purchased movies. But beyond that, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that you'll get perpetual access or a refund. The fact that Microsoft is dishing out refunds since that's cheaper than getting sued by every customer they've ever sold a book to is not a given - imagine if Valve were to go bankrupt and simply shut down their servers one day. That's where DRM should have a sort of mandatory living will.
- sjy 7y ago
  DRM caused this problem, and if you want to convince me that the solution is more advanced DRM that somehow fails open when the company that built it goes out of business, you'll need a stronger argument than "it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay." Abolishing copyright wouldn't eliminate all creative works. It would eliminate a lot of the funding, but there would still be plenty of people willing to create things for free and other creators working on a patronage or cross-subsidisation model. It's not obvious to me that the world would be a worse place under these conditions. I'm prepared to give up the certainty of the next Marvel movie being produced if it means giving everyone free access to all the other creative works that have already been published.
mikenew 7y ago
Every piece of DRM'd content will end up like this. Every book, movie, show, album, and game will be dead in a few decades (or sooner) if it relies on some company maintaining it's servers. It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Take this with a grain of salt, but Steam support says there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies [0]. (Not to mention that it's trivially easy to remove Steam DRM with existing tools) https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...
  - wishinghand 7y ago
    Unfortunately we'll have to see it to truly believe it. I don't doubt Valve would do that, but it's easy to say that now. Luckily, we still have torrents to help backup old games.
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      right... like what if Valve actually even intends to do it, but it requires someone to throw a switch and the last guy that knows how to (or even just to) do that dies suddenly just before Valve suddenly goes bankrupt.
      - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
        Not even that - what if they're bought out by another company who doesn't share their philosophy? (EA?)
  - tremon 7y ago
    > there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies What about when Steam gets gobbled up by $other_industry_giant?
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
Much of this discourse would make more sense if we use the term ebook, instead of book. When we say book, it conjures the notion of atoms. When we use the term ebook, we understand there's a technical dependency. Surely nobody expects any technical service to run forever funded by a once off payment. The much bigger problem with DRM content is that I cannot give them to my children. My kids can browse my many bookcases, and might be curious to read one of hundreds of book they may not choose to buy. That cannot happen with DRM ebooks.
Nomentatus 7y ago
When Amazon switched Canadian kindle customers to a Canadian site, all the magazines they had purchased, and not yet read "stopped working." No refund.
gtirloni 7y ago
They could have offered non-DRM copies of the books to people who purchased them and then closed shop. Giving refunds seems to be much more expensive than the alternative?
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
This book DRM thing also means that the online courses at my local college are more expensive than the normal ones. Because they use copy protected materials that self destruct at the end of the semester, there is no way to avoid paying full price by borrowing, buying used, reselling or stealing.
cheez 7y ago
What I do when I want a book or movie is I buy it somewhere, then pirate my preferred format.
kevin_b_er 7y ago
GNU's The Right to Read sounded utterly and totally laughable to me in circa 2000 when I first read it. A fanciable dystopia. It has come too close to reality in more recent years since.
- cyphar 7y ago
  Despite having some fairly questionable social views, Stallman has been living 40 years in the future for the past 40 years. Every time I read him, I'm saddened that nobody listened.
3xblah 7y ago
If you look up the word "browse" in a dictionary, you will see that it now has an entry relating to computer networks. When we browse items in a library, we can see context, we can see neighbouring items. Even some of the library database software today allows you to do this on the computer, simulating the physical experience. Maybe some of you can remember searching an item then going to retrieve it from the stacks and ending up just browsing the neighbouring items and discoevring even better items. I often discovered the best items through just browsing in a section, in the stacks. This is one element that is missing from today's web. It is probably one reason why a search engine can become the most popular site on the web. The search engine controls the user's view of the web. The user cannot see the "stacks". Nor can she browse them as she would in a library to discover what is there. Libraries impose an order that is missing from the web. Something like a Dewey Decimal classification system where a number reveals something about what is found in that location. IP addresses reveal almost nothing to us about the item(s) that may be found there; and whatever they reveal is not intentional. These numbers are in turn "hidden" behind potentially ambiguous names that sidestep the trademark system, another proven classification system, that serves to eliminate ambiguity and deception of consumers. In the past I have seen some sites that listed the entire IP address space in numerical order where it was possible to browse at least some minimal information on each network number. These always seem to go offline eventually, as if they are breaking some rule. Imagine going into a library where you were not allowed to visit the stacks or see neighbouring items, where the ordering of the items was a secret and all you could do is perform "keyword" searches. Imagine the results would not be ordered alphabetically, chronologically, or even by a known method of determining relevance (that too is secret). Imagine you could not sort the results or get a quick copy of all of them for reference. Imagine the library set the order of the results according to some "secret" methodology and preferred that you only view the first 5-10 items.
CrankyBear 7y ago
DRM is censorship.
javchz 7y ago
I have a Kindle for a few years now, and I love it... but the weird thing it's that most of the books I have read on the platform, haven't been acquired through Amazon. All of this it's thanks to me being afraid of this kind of practices, plus the weird pricing doesn't help (like some hard covers being cheaper than digital books). I kinda like the humble bundle approach to this, where I can buy bulks of books DRM free in my PC, that are easy to use thanks to software like Calibre. I hope soon the e-book industry have an equivalent to gog in games, or bandcamp to music. Yeah the subscription model it's cool, comfy and all, but what happen when the company behind decides to shutdown the product because didn't reach the desired metrics? I mean I can see Google having their own Stadia for books, and a few years go by and then they GoogleReaderIt/PlusIt, and that's it, my library of started books with their literally bookmarks and notes are gone.
anotherevan 7y ago
Anything with DRM is not sold, it is leased. My bugbear is that they still have "Buy Now!" buttons and such, which to my mind is fraud. I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?
swalladge 7y ago
People need to be made aware that "purchasing" something with DRM means that you aren't purchasing the item, you're only purchasing a revokable license to access the item though software controlled by the vendor. In a way, it's good that we're actually seeing the predicted issues with DRM (losing books, etc.). Hopefully it will help raise awareness.
- marvin 7y ago
  In the case of Kindle, you're usually paying more for the revokable license than you'd pay by moving your mouse 2 centimeters to the right and selecting a physical copy instead.
deleted 7y ago
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nikofeyn 7y ago
while i understand the general sentiment, this type of outcry and little quip is kind of silly, because it's too late. everyone knew what they were signing up for, and people still know what they're signing up for with kindle, itunes, netflix, and every other "you're just buying a temporary license" service. meanwhile, libraries in the u.s. are struggling despite being one of our greatest ongoing services. libraries are awesome, but they are having to redefine themselves (not necessarily a bad thing along some vectors) because people aren't using the books that are there. so in effect, the books already stopped working, but that doesn't make for good twitter hype. and as far as killing off services go, giving full refunds is pretty rare and should be applauded.
ptah 7y ago
paper books are better and you can get them cheaper than ebooks most of the time
JamesBarney 7y ago
I think that if something is DRMed like this the seller should be legally required to use the word rent instead of buy. And place the length of rental(licensing), which will require them to operate the server until that point.
reeves23423 7y ago
RMS has been warning this for a long time https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Simon_says 7y ago
I have Twitter blocked. Is there another source?
pcvarmint 7y ago
Apprentice Alf's DeDRM tool may come to the rescue. [1] I don't condone piracy, but if you buy an ebook, you should be able to read, store and personally transport it freely. [1] https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

1044 points by _Microft 7y ago

I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". With all that electronic junk that no one knows how to archive properly that statement needs to be revisited.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". ...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone. You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works. Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets and some funeral documents were preserved simply by lasting a long time. Others, like many religious documents, were preserved in some form or another by expensive, tedious, completely manual copying. Some information (both fiction and nonfiction) was only ever verbally communicated, as it wasn't deemed worth the expense and difficulty of putting it onto paper. Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies. It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets Mesopotamian clay tablets are incredibly robust. We have many times more than we have the manpower to translate, not to speak of the ones still buried in more or less unknown locations. Funnily enough, they survived much better in cities that were destroyed -- and burned, firing the tablets -- than in cities that weren't, where the tablets might eventually fall below the water table and dissolve. But anyway, we don't have "a small number" of durable tablets; we have an extremely large number, including some entire royal libraries. > Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies. This is not the case; China had extensive markets in printed popular works for centuries beforehand. Most of that work doesn't survive because of lack of interest. The fate of almost all printed material is total disappearance, because we can only maintain so much material, and printed material is a subset of all material. From the introduction to Record of the Listener ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ ): > At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record [夷坚志] had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it was not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country. Much of the Record was nonetheless lost as early as the Yuan Dynasty [less than 100 years later], an indication of the traumatic effects of the Song-Yuan transition. The current 207-chapter editions are based on post-Song redactions and later manuscripts by traditional and modern scholars. Note that this is a famous work considered relevant today. Contrast the countless printed popular works that nobody thought were worth preserving in the first place. The ability to make copies is not relevant in the slightest. The number of copies made is relevant, but only weakly. Information is preserved when people devote effort to preserving it, and lost otherwise.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. And that is exactly how I've interpreted it in all of my comments. > The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether As I point out in response to your sibling comment, Mesopotamian works, which had to be copied by hand 3000 years ago, have been much better preserved than Chinese works that were mass produced 1000 years ago, simply because clay tablets are much more robust than paper is. If you want your text to last, inscribe it high on a cliff: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription is still around and almost as good as new. Though note that after the cultural upheaval brought by Islam, the Persians forgot how to read that inscription, which is a different form of book loss.

_Microft 7y ago

Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose. It's so sad that this is necessary.

EuAndreh 7y ago
Take a look at ArchiveBox [0] if you're thinking on automating this work ;) [0]: https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
gdulli 7y ago
I have a collection of over 1000 faved tweets that's one of my favorite possessions. I noticed that one would occasionally get deleted by the author so I wrote a script to screenshot them all with a Python package called Splinter.
- porker 7y ago
  Would you mind publishing it? I'm in the same situation
  - gdulli 7y ago
    Sure, here you go: https://pastebin.com/iXzscHW6 https://pastebin.com/iXzscHW6
- asdff 7y ago
  I get so frusterated when anonymous reddit users overwrite their posts with some script in the name of privacy. Just leave out personal details from the public internet, it's not hard. Plus, if I really wanted to, there are at least a half dozen different ways to look at a cached copy of your overwritten reddit comment.
asdff 7y ago
firefox singlefile extension is pretty nice for this but still not perfect given how much dynamic bullshit gets shoveled on top of every website

hyperman1 7y ago

I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.

luisaguimaraes 7y ago
Let's just wait for who's it gonna be! And how will it look when "books stop working".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
The UK Consumer Rights Act (CRA) appears to anticipate this as it has no absolute date beyond which goods should remain suitable for purpose. Digital goods should last infinitely, so a digital good that 'expires' should be fixed or the cost fully refunded (fully as there are still an infinite number of years of use left available; and that should be accounting for inflation too).
- knd775 7y ago
  They are fully refunding all purchases, though.
  - NegativeK 7y ago
    I don't understand how publishers are going to continue pushing DRMed media if they have to keep every sale as a liability on their books.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
afandian 7y ago
I feel the legality should surround the description. This isn't "selling" it's "lending".

EdwardCoffin 7y ago

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle. The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address. They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decommissioned, so if I wanted to license any new computers to use the book I should do so then. I've not been able to replace that book either, so it's not like the refund they finally begrudgingly gave me could be put towards a replacement - that book has never been republished in any form that I have been able to find (Vinge's annotated version of his book A Fire Upon the Deep).

headcanon 7y ago
Principle of the thing aside, is the annotated version worth reading? I read the book and it was quite good, curious what the annotations add to it.
- owenversteeg 7y ago
  I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.
  - johncalvinyoung 7y ago
    I wouldn't rank it among the best ever written, but fascinating enough in its own right. I've read it several times, and loaned/given it to friends too. Now I'm wondering about the annotated edition!
- EdwardCoffin 7y ago
  I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text. The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc. I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc. [1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

hokus 7y ago

I've always considered the internet (in its current form) to be histories biggest book burning event. Hoarding rss feeds I often reached a point around 35 000 subs where the number of new ones I find is roughly equal to the deleted websites. I'm sort of stuck in a mental loop thinking of book burning.

logifail 7y ago
> histories biggest book burning event If you've not been to Bebelplatz in Berlin to see Micha Ullman's sunken library installation[0], do try and get there. It's one of the most upsetting art installations I've ever seen, but it absolutely should be on everyone's list. [0] https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelplatz https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelpla...

ajuc 7y ago

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lazyjones 7y ago
> This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. It's also simply an inferior technical solution due to its unnecessary complexity and dependence on servers, corporate entities/departments/decisions.
la_barba 7y ago
Have you found a solution to piracy that doesn't involve DRM? What was its success rate? I'm sure the publishers would love to switch to a better system if it exists.
- mdpopescu 7y ago
  For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)
  - la_barba 7y ago
    I don't know if you know this, but DRM is a core part of Netflix. No studio would ever have signed up with them if they couldn't control distribution. >See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales I am not familiar with that example. Any link to the data?
    - mdpopescu 7y ago

otakucode 7y ago

There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is. Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).

uryga 7y ago
> If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. idk, spotify et al seem to be doing alright...

docker_up 7y ago

I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free. So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.

zamadatix 7y ago
It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.
- la_barba 7y ago
  As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/european-commission-accused-of-burying-controversial-piracy-report/#7903304e7e1d https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ... I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
    - la_barba 7y ago

blakesterz 7y ago

Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)

dmix 7y ago
> Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse. It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.
- klez 7y ago
  Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)

ForHackernews 7y ago

Another case of "Stallman was right": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

bitL 7y ago
What's RMS up to these days? Haven't heard from him for a while...
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  He seems to travel a lot giving speeches about Free Software. If you get the FSF bulletin, you get updates each quarter, e.g. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2018/fall/on-the-road-with-rms
delecti 7y ago
We need someone to be the Carl Sagan for Stallman's philosophy. He's right a lot, but he's also abrasive and doesn't package his arguments in a publicly digestable way.
- beagle3 7y ago
  But Carl Sagan did not have a horde of anti-Sagans from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon etc to ridicule him. Really, this is the crux of the matter. I have been to several Stallman talks and have had a chance to speak with him privately. He is weird in his manners, to put it lightly, and he is uncompromising in his positions, but he is very clear, very eloquent, very factual, and has a great track record at predicting the future. You have hundreds of Carl Saganesque people fighting against big tobacco, hardly making a dent. The problem with Stallman is not that he is abrasive, it is that he is outnumbered by people trying to make money.

0815test 7y ago

"The books will stop working"? They were never "working" properly in the first place! There's a reason why DRM systems are said to be "defective by design"; DRM is inherently anti-consumer (in denying entirely lawful rights, such as format shifting and copying for the purpose of fair use under copyright law) and DRM-encumbered media of any sort should always be regarded as fake media.

rbreve 7y ago

In a way paper books "stop working" after 10 years or so when the paper turns yellow and dusty

scandox 7y ago
I read Don Quixote in a 4 volume edition printed in 1796. It had been sitting on a shelf in a house my parents bought for 200 years quite readable.
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jumelles 7y ago
Books are much more resilient than you think, especially if the publisher used good materials.
SCdF 7y ago
"or so" is doing a heavy lifting in this sentence. 10 years is an absurdly short time for a book to last.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  In fact, the majority of books you will find in most libraries are at the very least 10 years old.
ddingus 7y ago
Is readable = TRUE? Book working = TRUE Next
adtac 7y ago
Even ignoring the fact that physical books last for much longer than a decade, the alternative to DRM'd books isn't physical books. It's digital, non-DRM'd books. And the lifetime of a DRM-free digital copy of a book is practically infinite.
pessimizer 7y ago
I've got hundred year old books on my shelf that aren't even particularly fragile. I'd estimate that maybe 5% of my shelves are younger than 10 years.

jdonaldson 7y ago

The books still work if you drink a verification can. Just make sure nobody else is in the room and trips the antipiracy measures.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

I don't suppose anyone ever cracked the DRM on Microsoft books such that the De-DRM utilities for Calibre would work to scrub them before they're rendered inaccessible?

user17843 7y ago

I'm so shocked about this, my Iphone almost slipped out of my hands while I googled the Microsoft ebook store, but then I asked Alexa and she said everything will be ok. My Tesla is now driving me to an analogue bookshop to show my full support against dependence on digital platforms over my daily life, I might even upload a protest video to Youtube.

hyperman1 7y ago
Tesla's software in the car is probably phoning home on a regular base. What happens if they pull the plug on those servers? You didn't buy that softare, you're only licensing it, after all.
- cyphar 7y ago
  That was the joke.

sergiotapia 7y ago

It's why I only buy games from Gog now. I just install the .exe and it works. I no longer tolerate DRM.

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lone_haxx0r 7y ago
But you tolerate Windows?

aaron695 7y ago

OUYA stopped working this week. Games lost (hacks available to get around it do exist though, like you could hack the Microsoft books) even 100% free apps stopped working correctly. For all OUYAs extreme self-righteous about open source they became the worst. Perhaps a middle ground is needed

AnssiH 7y ago

They will fully refund all purchases, seems reasonable to me.

the_af 7y ago
Imagine if one day you went to find your well-thumbed, most loved book in your bookshelf, maybe to re-read your favorite chapter, and the physical book was missing, replaced by a note from the publisher: "this book no longer works, but worry not: we've refunded you!"
- AnssiH 7y ago
  But this is not a physical book, so it is not a "unique" copy. All of my e-books are entirely replaceable by buying them again from a different store (or as a physical book).
  - jmiserez 7y ago
    Books go "out of print", and curiously enough this even happens to eBooks. Usually it's because the rights got sold or expired. If you only read bestseller list books then yes, but anything older or niche/technical may really not be available for sale anymore.
  - the_af 7y ago
    It doesn't matter whether it's unique. I'd find it outrageous if a book disappeared from my bookshelf on a publisher's whim even if the physical book was otherwise unimpressive -- even if, in fact, it wasn't a very good book to begin with. The book is mine. The publisher cannot decide when it stops working. Only a force of nature, like a fire, can take my books away from me. If you're content in the knowledge that you can buy your e-books again whenever a publisher decides to make them stop working for you, good for you. Me, I'm not happy letting publishers win and trample my rights. In fact, much like the original tweet, I find the notion outrageous.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    Deleting books is a form of virtual book-burning. Yes, you can always buy another copy of the book (assuming that it's still being "printed"). But, that isn't the point. I do find it interesting that Amazon decided to name their book reader "Kindle", of all things.

Causality1 7y ago

I forget which store it was, but back in the day when I bought e-books to read on my PDAs they came encrypted, with the credit card number I used to buy them being the decryption key, so I was completely independent of the store to read them and could share them with anyone I trusted with my card number. It seems like a quaint solution to modern sensibilities but thoroughly satisfying on a moral level. These days I buy the digital version on Amazon but don't download it. I pirate the copy I'm actually going to read and archive.

jmiserez 7y ago
Some (few) stores offer DRM-free PDF versions, usually with a personalized watermark. I feel like that's a good compromise, I get a DRM-free PDF and I can only share it with people I trust not to put it online. And the watermark is a non-issue because it doesn't bother/impact me.

logifail 7y ago

My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young [1] It was first published in 1924

jgtrosh 7y ago
I'm pretty sure I'll happily recite The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
- Nikaoto 7y ago
  Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  The real tragedy of this is that nobody will know who Mister Rogers is by that time.
linuxftw 7y ago
I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.
- cyphar 7y ago
  Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded. Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?

teekert 7y ago

All my ebooks get their DRM removed instantly and I back up my kindle every now and then. This shit is not ever happening to me.

Johnny555 7y ago
How do you strip Kindle DRM? asking for a friend.
- amaccuish 7y ago
  Search for DeDRM plugin for calibre. There's several ways to do it. If you have a physical kindle, you can download the books from your amazon account, and plug the serial number of your kindle into DeDRM. If you have the Kindle for PC or Mac app, DeDRM can pick up the relevent keys. I recommend getting the books in the AWZ3 format rather than KFX.
  - Sirened 7y ago
    I couldn't make the desktop application ripping mechanic work. Apparently you need to download an ancient version which still uses AWZ3 since KFX wasn't support. I got lucky since I had an old gen one kindle on my account so I was able to download the files from my account portal but I think I would've been out of luck otherwise.
    - teekert 7y ago
      Ah yes,I have kindle keyboard (it won't die!) so maybe one will have problems with the newer versions? After installing Calibre plugins, simply double clicking to download books to my local library automatically strips the DRM.

ar_lan 7y ago

> Remember: Free with DRM is not the same thing as free. I agree with him the whole way that this is weird, but this particular tweet made no sense to me. It seems akin to "Hey, we'll allow you to rent something for some duration for free", and it sounds like he's saying that that situation is also not free.

peteretep 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
ekingr 7y ago
I understand it as two slightly different meanings for the word 'free'. In French we have separate words for (a) 'free' as something we don't pay for (gratuit) and (b) 'free' as your have the freedom to use it as you wish (libre).
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rchaud 7y ago

Back in 2005, my undergrad school gave students access to the then newly legit Napster. Everything was DRM-d WMA files, but there was a third party tool that stripped it out and let you play it on any device that played WMAs natively. I'm reminded of that occasionally when I see files with "noDRM-$Artist-$Title" pop up in the File Manager. Does Napster even exist anymore?

nknealk 7y ago

A similar thing happened with Ultraviolet's movies service: https://www.myuv.com/ https://www.myuv.com/ There's also a great story regarding "right of first purchase" in the USA where Redbox literally purchases DVDs at retail so that they can rent them out to customers because Disney would not sell directly to them: https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-disney-movies-ba-1820925295 https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-d...

xtracto 7y ago
Worthy of the DRM Graveyard (a subreddit I created just for this, thanks!)
B-Con 7y ago
Yep. This is why I don't have a cloud-based digital library. UV offered a way to migrate to other providers, but will the next one? I don't know that they're legally allowed to. What if the other provider doesn't have the content, am I SOL? I so badly wish I could buy a license to get a specific piece of content, get a copy to play on my own computer, then also have the ability to "upload" (aka, unlock) that content on a cloud streaming service of my choice.

paul 7y ago

I’m more disturbed by the fact that they can also edit or remove books that I’ve already purchased. How long until Amazon is forced to “deplatform” something offensive? Those old books contain a lot of words and ideas that have no place in 2019. It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.

ojagodzinski 7y ago

All ebook sold in Poland are without DRM, You just pay and download epub+mobi+pdf versions and thats all. It's the only one working system...

smsm42 7y ago

That's why you should never buy DRM-ed anything if you intend to keep it long term. Companies change, businesses get bought & sold, collapse, disappear - thinking that your particular DRM scheme would be supported for 20 years is insane. For a movie that you'll forget in the next 2 days it's ok, for a book that you intend on re-reading years late - no reason to "buy" DRM-ed version of anything. Or, at least, if you have no other options, strip DRM from it immediately and export into a common format.

nabla9 7y ago

This is why when I buy a DRM ebook, I also get the pirated copy and put it into my Calibre. Buying a ebook is just for the payment.

salutonmundo 7y ago
Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!
- ggm 7y ago
  Depends on your economy. Specifically what he does is of course illegal but the general principle of removing drm from your own purchase isn't That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
  - sjy 7y ago
    The general principle of removing DRM is forbidden, at least in the US, which is presumably why DRM removal tools are distributed through the same shady web sources as pirated content. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
    - ggm 7y ago
      https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/20-contracting-out/technological-protection-measures https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/20-contracting-out/tech... I assumed it passed. Looks like it didn't pass, because of the US laws.
    - modsiw 7y ago
      But if it is circumvented then it wasn’t effectively controlling access; therefore, this isn’t applicable. A savvy lawyer might argue that’s not what’s meant by effectively, but it’s at least a little ambiguous.

shmerl 7y ago

How many times does this need to happen, for people stop paying for DRMed junk? Buy digital goods DRM-free only. Vote with your wallet, otherwise it's pointless to complain.

dangus 7y ago

I'm astonished that Microsoft is apparently just refunding the original purchase price of (everybody's?) books. What's most mind boggling is the realization that apparently nobody sat down and planned this situation out - because if they did, the idea that someone could get an okay from their boss on the idea that even a mildly unsuccessful result and end of life of the product would end in full refunds for everybody. What's the point of even doing business? Am I misunderstanding this outcome? That means anyone who used this product got free book rentals for whatever they wanted to read? ... Let's talk about DRM now. DRM in itself as a concept is not bad (IMO), and it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay. However, I think what we fail to talk about is how there's no agreed upon standard regulating the end of life and transferral procedures involved with works sold under DRM. I suspect that book publishers would not agree to allow Microsoft to say "the store is closed, your books can be unlocked once you follow this procedure." Even if they're okay with that, Microsoft probably didn't even have the foresight to implement that sort of thing on a technical level. So, what we need in the digital goods industry is some kind of statement to the customer that's set in stone regarding what will happen with your content if the business ceases to exist and the platform is canceled. There's some semblance of this concept around. For example, Ultraviolet is shutting down in July - so, you have the option to transfer movies to other services for most movies on that platform (it should be all movies). MoviesAnywhere is also a DRM service making an attempt at avoiding platform lock-in for digitally purchased movies. But beyond that, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that you'll get perpetual access or a refund. The fact that Microsoft is dishing out refunds since that's cheaper than getting sued by every customer they've ever sold a book to is not a given - imagine if Valve were to go bankrupt and simply shut down their servers one day. That's where DRM should have a sort of mandatory living will.

sjy 7y ago
DRM caused this problem, and if you want to convince me that the solution is more advanced DRM that somehow fails open when the company that built it goes out of business, you'll need a stronger argument than "it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay." Abolishing copyright wouldn't eliminate all creative works. It would eliminate a lot of the funding, but there would still be plenty of people willing to create things for free and other creators working on a patronage or cross-subsidisation model. It's not obvious to me that the world would be a worse place under these conditions. I'm prepared to give up the certainty of the next Marvel movie being produced if it means giving everyone free access to all the other creative works that have already been published.

mikenew 7y ago

Every piece of DRM'd content will end up like this. Every book, movie, show, album, and game will be dead in a few decades (or sooner) if it relies on some company maintaining it's servers. It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.

judge2020 7y ago
Take this with a grain of salt, but Steam support says there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies [0]. (Not to mention that it's trivially easy to remove Steam DRM with existing tools) https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...
- wishinghand 7y ago
  Unfortunately we'll have to see it to truly believe it. I don't doubt Valve would do that, but it's easy to say that now. Luckily, we still have torrents to help backup old games.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    right... like what if Valve actually even intends to do it, but it requires someone to throw a switch and the last guy that knows how to (or even just to) do that dies suddenly just before Valve suddenly goes bankrupt.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      Not even that - what if they're bought out by another company who doesn't share their philosophy? (EA?)
- tremon 7y ago
  > there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies What about when Steam gets gobbled up by $other_industry_giant?

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago

Much of this discourse would make more sense if we use the term ebook, instead of book. When we say book, it conjures the notion of atoms. When we use the term ebook, we understand there's a technical dependency. Surely nobody expects any technical service to run forever funded by a once off payment. The much bigger problem with DRM content is that I cannot give them to my children. My kids can browse my many bookcases, and might be curious to read one of hundreds of book they may not choose to buy. That cannot happen with DRM ebooks.

Nomentatus 7y ago

When Amazon switched Canadian kindle customers to a Canadian site, all the magazines they had purchased, and not yet read "stopped working." No refund.

gtirloni 7y ago

They could have offered non-DRM copies of the books to people who purchased them and then closed shop. Giving refunds seems to be much more expensive than the alternative?

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

This book DRM thing also means that the online courses at my local college are more expensive than the normal ones. Because they use copy protected materials that self destruct at the end of the semester, there is no way to avoid paying full price by borrowing, buying used, reselling or stealing.

cheez 7y ago

What I do when I want a book or movie is I buy it somewhere, then pirate my preferred format.

kevin_b_er 7y ago

GNU's The Right to Read sounded utterly and totally laughable to me in circa 2000 when I first read it. A fanciable dystopia. It has come too close to reality in more recent years since.

cyphar 7y ago
Despite having some fairly questionable social views, Stallman has been living 40 years in the future for the past 40 years. Every time I read him, I'm saddened that nobody listened.

3xblah 7y ago

If you look up the word "browse" in a dictionary, you will see that it now has an entry relating to computer networks. When we browse items in a library, we can see context, we can see neighbouring items. Even some of the library database software today allows you to do this on the computer, simulating the physical experience. Maybe some of you can remember searching an item then going to retrieve it from the stacks and ending up just browsing the neighbouring items and discoevring even better items. I often discovered the best items through just browsing in a section, in the stacks. This is one element that is missing from today's web. It is probably one reason why a search engine can become the most popular site on the web. The search engine controls the user's view of the web. The user cannot see the "stacks". Nor can she browse them as she would in a library to discover what is there. Libraries impose an order that is missing from the web. Something like a Dewey Decimal classification system where a number reveals something about what is found in that location. IP addresses reveal almost nothing to us about the item(s) that may be found there; and whatever they reveal is not intentional. These numbers are in turn "hidden" behind potentially ambiguous names that sidestep the trademark system, another proven classification system, that serves to eliminate ambiguity and deception of consumers. In the past I have seen some sites that listed the entire IP address space in numerical order where it was possible to browse at least some minimal information on each network number. These always seem to go offline eventually, as if they are breaking some rule. Imagine going into a library where you were not allowed to visit the stacks or see neighbouring items, where the ordering of the items was a secret and all you could do is perform "keyword" searches. Imagine the results would not be ordered alphabetically, chronologically, or even by a known method of determining relevance (that too is secret). Imagine you could not sort the results or get a quick copy of all of them for reference. Imagine the library set the order of the results according to some "secret" methodology and preferred that you only view the first 5-10 items.

CrankyBear 7y ago

DRM is censorship.

javchz 7y ago

I have a Kindle for a few years now, and I love it... but the weird thing it's that most of the books I have read on the platform, haven't been acquired through Amazon. All of this it's thanks to me being afraid of this kind of practices, plus the weird pricing doesn't help (like some hard covers being cheaper than digital books). I kinda like the humble bundle approach to this, where I can buy bulks of books DRM free in my PC, that are easy to use thanks to software like Calibre. I hope soon the e-book industry have an equivalent to gog in games, or bandcamp to music. Yeah the subscription model it's cool, comfy and all, but what happen when the company behind decides to shutdown the product because didn't reach the desired metrics? I mean I can see Google having their own Stadia for books, and a few years go by and then they GoogleReaderIt/PlusIt, and that's it, my library of started books with their literally bookmarks and notes are gone.

anotherevan 7y ago

Anything with DRM is not sold, it is leased. My bugbear is that they still have "Buy Now!" buttons and such, which to my mind is fraud. I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?

swalladge 7y ago

People need to be made aware that "purchasing" something with DRM means that you aren't purchasing the item, you're only purchasing a revokable license to access the item though software controlled by the vendor. In a way, it's good that we're actually seeing the predicted issues with DRM (losing books, etc.). Hopefully it will help raise awareness.

marvin 7y ago
In the case of Kindle, you're usually paying more for the revokable license than you'd pay by moving your mouse 2 centimeters to the right and selecting a physical copy instead.

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nikofeyn 7y ago

while i understand the general sentiment, this type of outcry and little quip is kind of silly, because it's too late. everyone knew what they were signing up for, and people still know what they're signing up for with kindle, itunes, netflix, and every other "you're just buying a temporary license" service. meanwhile, libraries in the u.s. are struggling despite being one of our greatest ongoing services. libraries are awesome, but they are having to redefine themselves (not necessarily a bad thing along some vectors) because people aren't using the books that are there. so in effect, the books already stopped working, but that doesn't make for good twitter hype. and as far as killing off services go, giving full refunds is pretty rare and should be applauded.

ptah 7y ago

paper books are better and you can get them cheaper than ebooks most of the time

JamesBarney 7y ago

I think that if something is DRMed like this the seller should be legally required to use the word rent instead of buy. And place the length of rental(licensing), which will require them to operate the server until that point.

reeves23423 7y ago

RMS has been warning this for a long time https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Simon_says 7y ago

I have Twitter blocked. Is there another source?

pcvarmint 7y ago

Apprentice Alf's DeDRM tool may come to the rescue. [1] I don't condone piracy, but if you buy an ebook, you should be able to read, store and personally transport it freely. [1] https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/