Cursing DRM

I curse DRM

DRM Screws Users Again: eBooks About To Disappear Due To DRM Provider Shut Downfrom the don't-buy-anything-with-DRM dept.

Around here, it's basically preaching to the choir, so most of you probably recognize this already, but buying anything with DRM on it is basically asking for trouble down the road. The latest example? An eBook seller named Fictionwise has realized that one of the companies that provides DRM for some of its books has announced that its shutting down at the end of the month. Because that DRM has to check in with an authentication server that's no longer going to be there, everyone who "bought" (really: incorrectly thought they bought) eBooks that used this DRM will discover that the books they paid for no longer work (Update: as noted in the comments, this DRM doesn't authenticate every time -- just any time you try to move the content to a new device. Also, Fictionwise is working to get replacements and has done so for many of the eBooks impacted already).It's as if a publisher could retroactively erase the text from within a physical book that you bought. Since Fictionwise is just passing on the eBooks from third party aggregators, it has no means of replacing the "disappeared" eBooks. Has anyone found any thing that DRM is actually good for yet?

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Exclusive reading

Among cultural studying people, there appears to be a marked decline in habits of solitary, exclusive reading.

They know less and less of literature by heart. They read against a musical background or in company. Almost instinctively, they resent the solipsism, the egotistical claims on space and silence implicit in the classic act of reading. They wish to shut no one out from the emphatic tide of their consciousness. Being something we can listen to personally yet share fully with others at the same moment and in the same place, Hypertext, far more than books, meets the present ideal of participatory response. It is not the 'dog-eared volume' we find in the walker's pocket, but the e-smartphone.