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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

I heard Amazon might be allowing epub books from authors/publishers starting this fall, but I doubt they'll be converting all their existing ebooks to ePub, which is a shame.

And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.

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But from "fewer rights" it's a pretty big semantic leap to "attacking our freedom". Unless you're some kind of absolutist, which I understand Stallman to be.

I think the slow degrade of our freedom is meant. It is not an aggressive full-blown aggressive attack which we would probably oppose boldly, but a slowly creeping loss of rights and possibilities that people accept because "ah, I can live with THAT". It is hard to give a good title to that process so "attacking our freedom" sounds out of place.

But you don't have any fewer rights than you did before! Want to buy a physical book and lend it to your friend? Go buy it! Don't want to buy an ebook under the terms and conditions which apply to ebooks? Don't buy any damn ebooks!

I'd be out there complaining if actual capabilities were being taken away from me, but they aren't. Ebooks are a new class of product, and they work under slightly different rules from physical books.

The market might shift towards DRM'd ebooks. Just look at the PC gaming market. Most big games nowadays come with DRM.

I agree with him on those points. Where I disagree is when he suggests that taxes should be used to pay authors. It is difficult to justify that in the name of "freedom", imo.

It's also somewhat dangerous. I can't remember the details, but there are places where you, effectively, can't give away your own work for free because the government is trying to protect you.

It seems like this identical argument was made when the first tax-paid public libraries were opened, and yet very few people seem to be anti-public library today.

Actually, I have a harder time finding people that still see libraries as necessary. The internet has pretty much met everyone's need for the information and entertainment the library provided, and then some.

This probably depends on how arcane your research topic is. There are sources out there that have not been digitized, and this may require one to go hunting for some old, dusty tome. But this is all part of the evolution of how we get our information. More and more, I expect to see newer books go straight to digital formats, with dead-tree versions becoming a bit like vinyl records. Used book stores will sell things that are out of print, and things that were never converted into a digital format.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some libraries already offer borrowing of eBooks. So some of them have seen the direction of things, and instead of resisting, are adapting.

I completely disagree. Libraries, in the UK at least, are a fantastic resource for the poor and marginalised. To see our current government's attempts to shut them down is saddening.

"Our tax dollars are paying for WHAT?!" would, IMO, slowly (or even quickly) erode the list of "approved" topics and authors. And of course gaming the system would be worth a significant amount of money.

Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.

The sad thing is that we put a stop to this (and came up with first sale rights) when they tried all this crap with real books.

Now that books are digital, I guess we need to do it again.

I don't think that it is so simple; with physical books it is still illegal to make duplications, and with digital copies it is extremely difficult to allow people to transfer ownership of their copies without allowing for unlimited duplication and distribution that would destroy all motivation for anyone to purchase it to begin with.

Second hand sale and lending of physical books would have been outlawed if it destroyed the whole book sale economy. I always see comments on here and on reddit that imply that people are too dumb to realize that ebooks are analogous to physical books, but that is a seriously absurd claim since they are so trivially similar; the difference in their legal treatment is rational and pragmatic not an evil conspiracy by publishers.

That only works if one supposes that the only reason to pay authors is because one must do so.

That said, any company which treats their customers like thieves will turn some fraction thereof into such.

DRM is the problem here, not eBooks. eBooks themselves have a lot of potential, especially when you consider they don't ware down or degrade, they take no physical space, and that you have the option of changing things such as font size.

And speaking as someone who has owned some of his books for decades, I worry about the long term implications of owning a collection of books encumbered with DRM.

It's more than DRM though - there are no open ways of exporting annotations or bookmarks, on any of the major e-reading platforms. The Open Bookmarks project is an attempt to kick start this conversation, before it gets left behind.

http://www.openbookmarks.org/

"You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books." You may have fewer legal rights but you have more options and control, as long as the ebooks are pirated! Pirated books can be obtained anonymously, copied freely, and they cannot be revoked. Just as with software and DVDs, the pirated version is actually better than the for-pay version.

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