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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is on at least its third generation of DRM that broke old content. Doctorow mentions "Plays for Sure", which doesn't play any more. There was also "Zune", which doesn't play any more unless you downloaded the content before they pulled the plug. Then they had an "eBook store", which doesn't play any more. Not sure what they have now.

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> Doctorow mentions "Plays for Sure", which doesn't play any more.

Ironically, if you do want something that really does play for sure, get a pirated copy.

If memory serves this has been one of Doctorow's arguments the whole time:

When it's much easier to be a pirate than to behave, you turn everyone into a pirate.

Or physical. I buy CDs for my favourite music, and rip them for digital consumption. Shame there is no way to do this with books.

Just hope none those media companies tries to infect your PC...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Even physical CDs are not as easy to use as they used to be; this article https://www.databasesandlife.com/playing-a-cd-on-a-computer/ is from 2007: I bought a CD from a shop, a few months later tried to play it on my computer and the DRM had already somehow gone wrong in that short space of time. (At least CDs still work in CD players.)

If the DRM stopped it working then it was not a CD (aka "a defective CD), as a CD - as per the Red Book standard - does not support DRM. You should get your money back.

Right, I mean, I agree, but my point was: It looked like a CD, I bought it from a physical shop selling CDs, it was a modern release from a top 10 pop star at the time. So if you want to listen to music, the algorithm "just buy [what looks like] a CD from a shop, then you won't have to deal with DRM" was not true, at least in my case.

There are some pretty good OCR tools, and it might be interesting to build a fixture with some 80x20 rail and a digital camera, to quickly capture some books to bring on the go

https://linearbookscanner.org/

if nobody wants to rent at your pricing, you just "sell" places and apply robo-foreclosures...

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