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Putting the means of education in the hands of a corporation: a good idea by smart people
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Jul 1, 2019 18:34
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Unoriginal Name posted:Putting the means of education in the hands of a corporation: a good idea by smart people Youtube?
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Jul 1, 2019 18:47
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This is why you always pirate stuff and do any work you need on the pirated version. Treat the decision to pay the author as independent of the one to grab the book. I don't usually even bother downloading the legal copies of books I buy, they're usually strictly worse than pirated copies and also have copy protection. Goofus loses his annotations when microsoft decides to delete his books for the third time, Gallant knows not to trust the longevity of copy-protected files and grabs the book elsewhere in permanent form. This sort of poo poo is why I just buy everything I want to read in hard copy. Can't put DRM on a stack of paper now can you?
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Jul 1, 2019 19:10
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ToxicSlurpee posted:This sort of poo poo is why I just buy everything I want to read in hard copy. Can't put DRM on a stack of paper now can you?
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Jul 1, 2019 19:15
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Unoriginal Name posted:Putting the means of education in the hands of a corporation: a good idea by smart people Famous non corporations, the previous 3 centuries of commercial printing.  ToxicSlurpee posted:This sort of poo poo is why I just buy everything I want to read in hard copy. Can't put DRM on a stack of paper now can you? Congratulations on handing the publishers a bunch more of your money to spite them, I guess?
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Jul 1, 2019 19:22
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fishmech posted:Congratulations on handing the publishers a bunch more of your money to spite them, I guess?
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Jul 1, 2019 20:09
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Jul 1, 2019 20:18
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:It's probably still a good idea to pirate such things - things sometimes get destroyed or lost by things other than microsoft revoking DRM. Though I guess, in that case, you can just wait until that actually happens. I'm the kind of person whose hard drive is way more likely to fry then to ever lose one of my books, tbh
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Jul 1, 2019 20:38
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Youtube? Would you trust them to moderate a politics or history channel properly? Or, like, deliver educational content to children?
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Jul 1, 2019 20:38
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ryonguy posted:Congratulations on completely and utterly missing the point of their post, stay on brand you crazy diamond. I saw the point, the point was utterly moronic. All you do by insisting on buying on paper is hand publishers more money they don't deserve.
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Jul 1, 2019 21:05
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fishmech posted:I saw the point, the point was utterly moronic. All you do by insisting on buying on paper is hand publishers more money they don't deserve. Well, you get a physical product. For my birthday I got my mom a book of poetry and dog-eared/circled a few poems that I thought applied especially well to her, along with a nice note in one of the blank pages at the front. It'd be a headache to do that on an ebook. I did feel a bit guilty about it - not about giving a little extra money to the publisher, but about the carbon emissions and labor associated with making a physical book and bringing it to my door. And there's the battery and future-proofing issues. If you take an amazon kindle and a physical book and you throw them both in a box for a century, the kindle will probably not be usable. The book probably will be.
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Jul 1, 2019 21:19
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Well, you get a physical product. For my birthday I got my mom a book of poetry and dog-eared/circled a few poems that I thought applied especially well to her, along with a nice note in one of the blank pages at the front. It'd be a headache to do that on an ebook. I did feel a bit guilty about it - not about giving a little extra money to the publisher, but about the carbon emissions and labor associated with making a physical book and bringing it to my door. You are far more future proofed by (trivially) breaking the DRM on an ebook you purchased than you are by spending extra money to purchase a physical book. Leave it to libraries and other experts to preserve beyond your own lifetime, that's what you're paying taxes for anyway. In your own life you can back that file up in dozens of formats, spread it all over the internet for free to dirt cheap since we're talking only a few megabytes tops and you can also print it out and burn it at home on media like M-Disc that will last many many decades etc. Maybe you just didn't know but the ebook formats used today? They're just containers for HTML, XML, and standard image formats. Absolutely trivial to reuse once the simple encryption is defeated.
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Jul 1, 2019 21:45
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And people think Ubisoft invented bullshots...
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Jul 1, 2019 21:47
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fishmech posted:You are far more future proofed by (trivially) breaking the DRM on an ebook you purchased than you are by spending extra money to purchase a physical book. Leave it to libraries and other experts to preserve beyond your own lifetime, that's what you're paying taxes for anyway. In your own life you can back that file up in dozens of formats, spread it all over the internet for free to dirt cheap since we're talking only a few megabytes tops and you can also print it out and burn it at home on media like M-Disc that will last many many decades etc. Sounds about right. I was imagining a book bought on amazon and read on a kindle the way amazon intends, which is obviously a massively limited form of the technology
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Jul 1, 2019 21:53
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Sounds about right. I was imagining a book bought on amazon and read on a kindle the way amazon intends, which is obviously a massively limited form of the technology You didn't know they also read on your pc and your phone and basically 10 years of other devices? That's kinda shocking, it's not like they just started yesterday. Not talking anything unofficial, just stuff you see listed on Amazon itself.
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Jul 1, 2019 21:57
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There is never going to be a time anytime soon where you literally can't buy physical books for books you have some reason to need that. I read most stuff digitally but like, I am still allowed to buy hard copies of the books I want to give as gifts, or I want to have on a shelf to impress girls or give to my mom or artifacts where I want to support the author or show off what I like or whatever. No one is making me decide to only get one or the other. The idea that it's important to buy paper books because somehow specifically my specific media collection might get used to restart civilization after the fall of man or something is stupid. Most books aren't important. There is no risk harry potter or something is going to get lost to time no matter how I buy it. There are only a few books that matter if they "get lost" or if I can't pass them down and nothing is stopping me from having those books in whatever format works best for what I want to do with them.
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Jul 1, 2019 22:09
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Imagine if we needed to restart civilization and all that was let was an archive of these forums.
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Jul 1, 2019 22:13
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Imagine if we needed to restart civilization and all that was let was an archive of these forums.
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Jul 1, 2019 22:13
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Motronic posted:Imagine if we needed to restart civilization and all that was let was an archive of these forums.
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Jul 1, 2019 22:20
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fishmech posted:You didn't know they also read on your pc and your phone and basically 10 years of other devices? That's kinda shocking, it's not like they just started yesterday. Not talking anything unofficial, just stuff you see listed on Amazon itself. Well sure, but I don't see contemporary PCs and phones as very future-proofed (and then you can get into stuff about portability and screen/page size). Am I wrong in that? I'm imagining the plight of kids who find their grandpa's old iPad generation one where he kept all his books, and are completely unable to power it because the corresponding cable hasn't been manufactured in decades. Of course this is all just sentimentality and in very particular cases - ebooks are obviously a massive accomplishment that should phase out at least 99% of physical book printing. Maybe it's just on me, but I feel burned after I lost the entire A Song of Ice and Fire Series on my Ouya :-/ Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jul 1, 2019 |
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Jul 1, 2019 22:27
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fishmech posted:You are far more future proofed by (trivially) breaking the DRM on an ebook you purchased than you are by spending extra money to purchase a physical book. Leave it to libraries and other experts to preserve beyond your own lifetime, that's what you're paying taxes for anyway. In your own life you can back that file up in dozens of formats, spread it all over the internet for free to dirt cheap since we're talking only a few megabytes tops and you can also print it out and burn it at home on media like M-Disc that will last many many decades etc. Ahh yes sticking it to those dastardly publishers by buying the higher margin and often more expensive product....genius
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Jul 1, 2019 22:42
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Raldikuk posted:Ahh yes sticking it to those dastardly publishers by buying the higher margin and often more expensive product....genius Aren't ebooks higher margin but lower cost? I usually see ebooks for about $5-$10 less than physical books (when they presumably cost about 100% less to produce, although the cost of printing and shipping a book can't be that high in the first place)
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Jul 1, 2019 22:47
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"uh bluh digital media is just as good if not better and buying physical books is just giving the publishers more money"*doesn't understand bit-rot**doesn't understand future compatibility issues**doesn't understand ebook profit margins*
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Jul 1, 2019 22:51
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Well sure, but I don't see contemporary PCs and phones as very future-proofed (and then you can get into stuff about portability and screen/page size). Am I wrong in that? I'm imagining the plight of kids who find their grandpa's old iPad generation one where he kept all his books, and are completely unable to power it because the corresponding cable hasn't been manufactured in decades. Of course this is all just sentimentality and in very particular cases - ebooks are obviously a massive accomplishment that should phase out at least 99% of physical book printing. Yes you are wrong in that. Like jesus, "screen/page size" is by design not an issue for most any ebook format, because they're designed for constant reflow operations, since changing text sizes is a key aspect of the whole deal. Grandpa Tim deciding to only put his books on one specific device that broke isn't much different from say, Grandpa Tim putting his books in rental storage for a bit between moves at some point before he died and having forgotten where they went. This is especially true for ebooks of all things, as well, take a look:  This is a book I received from the University of Chicago's free monthly ebook program a few months ago. It's in a standard format and as you can see the contents of the book are literally just HTML and standard images. There was industry-standard DRM on it, but since I was copying it on the computer it was intended for, Calibre's deDRM plugins could simply read the key and remove the encryption. Amazon's current formats also are the same way, just with slightly different mechanics for removing the DRM as a purchaser. You can extract the contained files directly to a folder, stick it on some disks, and open that on a computer from 20 years ago. If you find it in the future, it is also highly unlikely that HTML et al will be unsupported. Particularly since these formats skip on having any kind of complicated Javascript or even a lot of CSS going on. Text is inherently about the most portable thing, and images are basically the next most portable. Civilized Fishbot posted:Aren't ebooks higher margin but lower cost? I usually see ebooks for about $5-$10 less than physical books (when they presumably cost about 100% less to produce, although the cost of printing and shipping a book can't be that high in the first place) Yes they cost less money, because Apple and the cabal of publishers who attempted to jack prices up got slapped down by the federal courts and Amazon's suits over the cartel activity. ryonguy posted:"uh bluh digital media is just as good if not better and buying physical books is just giving the publishers more money"*doesn't understand bit-rot**doesn't understand future compatibility issues**doesn't understand ebook profit margins* This is on par with believing books aren't viable because they actually rot, and also someone might not be capable of reading written language, duder.
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Jul 1, 2019 22:56
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fishmech posted:Yes you are wrong in that. Like jesus, "screen/page size" is by design not an issue for most any ebook format, because they're designed for constant reflow operations, since changing text sizes is a key aspect of the whole deal. You're misunderstanding - I meant that most modern phones have a screen that (in my opinion) is too small to allow for comfortable book-reading. And then portability is a concern with a lot of PCs. The existence of kindles and nooks shows that it's extremely possible to make an e-reader with a fine screen size and excellent portability, and enough of a battery that that's hardly a concern. I'm more interested in the future-proofing stuff - is it even possible to ensure that people 100 years from now will (probably) be able to pick up a dead electronic device, restore it to life, and read the books contained on it? Probably yes for some devices and no for others.
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Jul 1, 2019 23:03
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Civilized Fishbot posted:You're misunderstanding - I meant that most modern phones have a screen that (in my opinion) is too small to allow for comfortable book-reading. And then portability is a concern with a lot of PCs. The existence of kindles and nooks shows that it's extremely possible to make an e-reader with a fine screen size and excellent portability, and enough of a battery that that's hardly a concern. That sure is your personal preferences, but I don't see what point you are attempting to make with it. The professional and pirate ebooks alike are designed on the basis that they must be readable on screen sizes from an old 3 inch iPhone up to someone's big 30 plus inch computer monitor It's not worthwhile to make assumptions on the basis of society completely collapsing and losing all access to technology. And again I really must stress that it is inherently easiest to recover text and images out of an existing format with incomplete documentation, while you seem to be thinking in terms more akin to what is required for recovering a functional program, or a custom audio-video format.
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Jul 1, 2019 23:29
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ryonguy posted:"uh bluh digital media is just as good if not better and buying physical books is just giving the publishers more money"*doesn't understand bit-rot**doesn't understand future compatibility issues**doesn't understand ebook profit margins* Books have always been preserved through reprinting. There has never been a time where popular stories are kept alive by simply having everyone pass around the original printings. If you own some original copy of huckleberry finn or whatever that is real cool, and that is a neat historical artifact, maybe you can sell it to someone, or maybe a museum will want it but has no real meaning in keeping that story on the earth or accessible to people. You can name famous lost books, books by famous authors where no copies exist even less than a century latter and how cool it'd be to find a copy of that but all that points to is how paper is no better at preserving stories than anything else would be.
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Jul 1, 2019 23:31
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the rising waters will wipe out paper just as easily as electronics so this whole argument is null
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Jul 1, 2019 23:35
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ToxicSlurpee posted:This sort of poo poo is why I just buy everything I want to read in hard copy. Can't put DRM on a stack of paper now can you? Goodluck picking the lock on my diary, chump!
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Jul 1, 2019 23:38
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mandatory lesbian posted:the rising waters will wipe out paper just as easily as electronics so this whole argument is null https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/future-climate-change-flooded-new-york-city.html
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Jul 1, 2019 23:44
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fishmech posted:This is on par with believing books aren't viable because they actually rot, and also someone might not be capable of reading written language, duder.
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Jul 2, 2019 01:34
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ryonguy posted:ahahahhahaah holy poo poo you are seriously dumb as gently caress. Physical books typically don’t last very long. If you have very old book that is cool but it’s survivorship bias and every year less and less of that print run of the book still exist unless they are being actively preserved.
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Jul 2, 2019 02:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Physical books typically don’t last very long. If you have very old book that is cool but it’s survivorship bias and every year less and less of that print run of the book still exist unless they are being actively preserved. LOL
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Jul 2, 2019 02:08
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i've got a textbook on my rare book shelf which talks about the current president of the united states mckinley and what he hopes to achieve during his term regarding trade policy and tariff
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Jul 2, 2019 02:13
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Aren't ebooks higher margin but lower cost? I usually see ebooks for about $5-$10 less than physical books (when they presumably cost about 100% less to produce, although the cost of printing and shipping a book can't be that high in the first place) Ebooks now are usually cheaper than hardcovers (though that hasn't always been the case), but when I am shopping around for books it usually seems the paperback is cheaper than the ebook still. I think there's a place for both mediums to exist but unless you pirate all of your ebooks it certainly isn't really hurting them to be buying ebooks and stripping the DRM. Sure, if you asked their lawyers they would go ballistic, but the publisher's bottom line did just fine from it. I would say too that the necessity of breaking federal law to make your purchased goods halfway usable is an indictment over the current state of affairs. I doubt anyone would suggest that ebooks are always troublesome... they are however saying that DRM riddled stuff gated behind for-profit activation servers that will be taken down the second they aren't profitable (and this is key... they still make a profit, just not enough) enough to meet their internal rate of return required to keep shareholders happy. And while it may be trivial to strip the DRM off now, that doesn't mean it will always be the case for future incarnations. So if you value the viability of ebooks and enjoy using them, it's in one's best interest to advocate for DRMless solutions and push back against the march towards "more secure" DRM.
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Jul 2, 2019 02:29
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OOCC should get a tempban from the thread everytime they say something pants-on-head stupid.
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Jul 2, 2019 03:09
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luxury handset posted:i've got a textbook on my rare book shelf which talks about the current president of the united states mckinley and what he hopes to achieve during his term regarding trade policy and tariff I'm sure you do. But the fact it's on your rare book shelf instead of your common book shelf implies that most of those books are long gone and did not survive like that one did, every year there will be less copies of that book in the world till there is none at all. Your one book randomly surviving longer than average doesn't mean books are eternal things. Most copies of that book are long gone, and unless there is something special about that copy it too will be gone sometime too. Odds are very low that is the text book people are gonna be digging up like the dead sea scrolls or something a thousand years from now.
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Jul 2, 2019 03:57
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My glorious collection of text files on 3.5in floppies will last into the apocalypse. I'll show you all!!
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Jul 2, 2019 04:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm sure you do. But the fact it's on your rare book shelf instead of your common book shelf implies that most of those books are long gone and did not survive like that one did, every year there will be less copies of that book in the world till there is none at all. Your one book randomly surviving longer than average doesn't mean books are eternal things. Most copies of that book are long gone, and unless there is something special about that copy it too will be gone sometime too. Odds are very low that is the text book people are gonna be digging up like the dead sea scrolls or something a thousand years from now.  
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Jul 2, 2019 04:47
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Cool, a chart showing that digital books (in this case PDF) are incredibly easy to access. Kinda amazing that you missed that!
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Jul 2, 2019 04:49
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