Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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Digital storage is far more unreliable ... when we'll have content that survived in digital form for thousands of years (or heck, I would be happy with 20 years), then we'll be able to compare apples to apples.

Also, even though I have a child at home, I never had a book that "broke" - as there's nothing that some glue can't fix. The only real danger for the preservation of books in physical form is fire.

> by centralizing many books to one physical object, you risk losing much more content as you lose that physical object

No, you got it wrong. The far bigger danger is that the eBook reader is a device running on integrated circuits and battery, which will break in only a couple of years and those B&N servers will not be online forever (I would be quite surprised if they are still online in 10 years), it's only a question of when that will happen.

And making this whole thing defective by disallowing people to backup their books however they want is the most evil and stupid thing I've ever seen. DRM is defective by design and no matter how much you try painting this crow, it's still a crow.

> The only real danger for thhe preservation of books in physical form is fire.

Also water.

If we are talking about valuable books, then content can be recovered at least partially from a wet book, depending on how good the printing ink and paper were and how long that book stayed under water.

Fire is more dangerous than floods and historically we've lost more books by fire than from anything else, although I'm pretty sure there are effective methods to recover content partially from books that are only partially burned.

The durability of physical books is amazing and the only thing going for digital content is that the cost of copies is zero, which means you can easily make backups in multiple places of this world instantly and retrieve those backups with whatever device you happen to have in front of you. Unfortunately that's exactly what DRM is trying to prevent.

Also bugs.

Also rodents.

My 15 month old daughter has started being a little destructive to books as well.

So aside from fire, water, rodents, bugs and children, what could possibly happen to a physical book?

Other than loss and theft of course.

Dust, and dust removal, and dust prevention, present risks to old books.

(http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/what-we-do/what-we-protect/c...)

(http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/servlet/file/store5/item3780...)

Some oppressive regimes will confiscate some books. I don't know what happens to that book afterwards.

"The far bigger danger is that the eBook reader is a device running on integrated circuits and battery, which will break in only a couple of years and those B&N servers will not be online forever (I would be quite surprised if they are still online in 10 years), it's only a question of when that will happen."

But you knew this when you bought the e-book. If companies were selling DRM-protected e-books but labeling them as DRM-free, that would be fraud. But (AFAIK) they're not.

I personally know about it, that's why I rarely buy DRM-protected content in general and I only do so for content I only want to watch / read / hear once or twice. Good movies, good books, good music - these are things for which I want to keep a personal library and so I stay away from DRM.

Unfortunately from what I've seen, the public has no idea what DRM is, as the technical details are hard to understand. When buying a DRM-protected copy of something, that copy is not yours, you don't own your copy in any way, your only right is time-limited access to that copy, you know like renting with a public library subscription (it's actually even worse, since when renting something you usually have a contract that guarantees availability for a specific time period, whereas with DRM you never know for how long it will last).

And I disagree with your point on advertising - because buying something DRM-protected is really renting, customers should be informed of this.

Jeff Bezos has said in interviews that he doesn't believe in books, only reading. Reading changes you, and you don't need to have an artifact. That was his argument for the Kindle.

Should charge by the word read perhaps? Though I'd get charged extra at night when I wrestle with the same paragraph repeatedly before passing out.

Not so. AFAIK none of the major ebook retailers go out of their way to mention this, and they target their marketing towards consumers who are not savvy enough to know to ask. They will only inform you of the DRM when you run into one of the limitations it imposes.

EDIT: Actually, I should clarify. One ebook retailer does make this explicit — Google. But I wasn't counting them because they don't "own" a market segment and you'd probably be pretty savvy to be buying from them anyway.

Good point. Not sure if it's still applicable, but wasn't it such that you couldn't carry your iTunes library over international borders?

If it's DRM'd then I'd expect to pay far less for it. I've got a Kindle, and I won't buy any books for it - because I feel so uneasy about where I stand on this. Which is a shame really. Add to that, that paper copies are somehow cheaper a lot of the time, and that I can pass /sell them on, after reading. Prevents me from becoming spineless.

Amazon used to have DRM-free mp3 advertisements.

And cool t-shirts.

Don't Restrict Me!

I don't know about B&N but you can easily go though the Amazon checkout process without any mention of DRM. Most people only learn about it when DRM prevents them from doing something they would otherwise assume they could do like read there book on a nook.

Who is buying a kindle book and expecting to read it on nook?

I do. I use Calibre to remove DRM and convert. The Nook is a superior device for reading (though haven't compared it to the Paperwhite yet.)

so why don't you just buy from b&n?

But wouldn't it be so much nicer if there was no DRM on e-books. That's a law worth lobbying.

And for the record. Norwegian law states that you can freely distribute anything you own to a few friends and also make backups of it. DRM is technically illegal in Norway, but no one has brought a case to court over it yet.

IANAL but I would imagine that DRM per se isn't illegal but any anti-circumvention clause in the EULA would not be enforceable in a court provided that copies were made for the purposes of backup.

Not so fast. Anti-circumvention laws are everywhere, we aren't talking about EULAs here.

The DMCA act in the USA prohibits DRM removal, under all circumstances, even if we are talking about your own content for which you own the copyright.

In Canada bill C-61 also made DRM circumvention illegal. In Europe too. It is unclear to me how these fare to the DMCA, because it might be that only providing the tools and information for doing that is illegal. But in Europe, even if we are talking only about the tools being illegal, if you end up removing the DRM protections from some content, it can be argued that's changing the format, which is a different thing but also illegal.

It is worth pointing out that pieces of software, like CloneCD [1], are illegal even in Europe, even though this software only makes exact copies and does not change the format (it does not remove DRM).

And the US, being the 800-pound gorilla that it is, is constantly pushing others for copyright reforms similar to the DMCA.

Also, whenever you're talking about "fair use", you're always in a gray and dangerous area, as fair use clauses are intentionally ambiguous, so sentences are passed based on subjective reasoning based on context and in the US on precedents. If fair use is your defense, then more often than not you're screwed if you can't afford competent lawyers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD

I meant specifically norway (though admittedly I don't know what the law actually is there) but the GP suggests that the law allows one to make backup copies of your files.

Norway is not an EU member state, so normal european laws will not necessarily apply there.

Here in the UK I'm not aware of any specific laws that would make owning software like CloneCD illegal, though it could be used in ways that might be considered illegal.

Well, the situation might be different within members of EU, as EU directives are more like agreements for achieving an end-result, without specifying exactly how the law must be implemented locally. So for instance fair-use clauses might or might not hold.

What I don't like is that the US has so much leverage that they are able to efficiently push dumb and evil reforms (e.g. ACTA) and the representatives of many countries simply sign agreements without blinking or thinking about it.

You don't have to go so far as to outlaw DRM. Books are usually exempt from sale taxes and VAT, right? Make it so only e-books without DRM protection have the same exemption.

I don't think most consumers have really thought the whole thing through. Anecdotally I would say most people don't back up files without DRM, e.g. digital photos. I'm sure for everybody reading this comment it seems really obvious that you would want to back up your photos. If the average consumer doesn't understand the very real possibility of total data loss and losing all of those photos, why would they even consider the downsides of purchasing and downloading e-books onto a single device?

Granted I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here, but I think it's entirely silly to expect people to know things that are very firmly technical knowledge and not common sense. The person you replied to might have known that their eBook reader is prone to failure but what about the vast majority of consumers?

What? Do B&N tel you that you can't backup their ebooks on their marketing material?

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