News3 mins ago
ebooks from public libraries - will it ever happen?
5 Answers
With ereaders such as the Sony one becoming cheaper and DRM more efficient, will public libraries provide digital downloads?
The author gets their payment, the library is not losing money with lost/stolen/damaged books nor constrained by the number of books it can hold and the technology is there to stop unauthorised duplication and to ensure deletion after a set time.
Will this ever happen? It will make taking my holiday reading away so much easier and I find it easier to read electronic books.
The author gets their payment, the library is not losing money with lost/stolen/damaged books nor constrained by the number of books it can hold and the technology is there to stop unauthorised duplication and to ensure deletion after a set time.
Will this ever happen? It will make taking my holiday reading away so much easier and I find it easier to read electronic books.
Answers
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Not in the current implementation.
DRM is an evil in the software would that will eventually go away.
People are beginning to realise that business practices that have worked for the past century just won't work when things become easy to copy. It reduces their value, almost to zero. This goes for books, films and music. Anything that may be considered some form of what some people call 'intellectual property' (I dislike the term).
For books that are copyright-free, there's already the gutenberg project website, which will work on eReaders such as Sony's.
Mark Pilgrim has an excellent explanation for why the current implementation won't work:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/th e-future-of-reading
The technology to do the things you say won't work. Think about it -- why should it be like that? Imagine you're a slow reader and only get half way through the book before it gets automatically deleted. This isn't acceptable.
The idea is great. But apart from the technical limitations (you want a roughly 200dpi screen with sub-pixel aliasing; the iPhone has one of the best right now, at 160dpi), the concepts that book publishers are trying to enforce will stop any real progress being made.
DRM is an evil in the software would that will eventually go away.
People are beginning to realise that business practices that have worked for the past century just won't work when things become easy to copy. It reduces their value, almost to zero. This goes for books, films and music. Anything that may be considered some form of what some people call 'intellectual property' (I dislike the term).
For books that are copyright-free, there's already the gutenberg project website, which will work on eReaders such as Sony's.
Mark Pilgrim has an excellent explanation for why the current implementation won't work:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/th e-future-of-reading
The technology to do the things you say won't work. Think about it -- why should it be like that? Imagine you're a slow reader and only get half way through the book before it gets automatically deleted. This isn't acceptable.
The idea is great. But apart from the technical limitations (you want a roughly 200dpi screen with sub-pixel aliasing; the iPhone has one of the best right now, at 160dpi), the concepts that book publishers are trying to enforce will stop any real progress being made.
1 to 5 of 5
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