As I mentioned last year sometime, I stepped down from MetaFilter. I’ve been casting around to find a few small jobs that equal one big job. I’m a lucky person in that I’m pretty employable in a general sense. But I also have a lot of smaller commitments to my local job and spending a big chunk of time away over the summer that I’m not looking for regular work per se. I had a gig writing for The Open Standard which vanished in a weird gamer-gate-related political thing (not having to do with me personally, I was just collateral damage) and I picked up some work writing for Medium which is part “platform” and part “community” in a weird way. Anyhow, I like it there so far. I wrote a piece about DRM that I am very proud of. It’s here.
Things That Make the Librarian Angry
I’ll be noodling around with my year-end lists like I usually do but I figured on the off chance you hadn’t seen this, you’d probably like it.
I’ve experienced the same anger & angst that you have over the DRM dilemma. We both know it boils down to someone making money. What doesn’t??? I know how to use the work arounds in the article, which adds to my frustration I guess. I could quietly mention them to patrons but most of them aren’t computer savvy enough to figure them out without step by step instruction . For that matter, neither are most of my fellow small-town librarians and I don’t think I can ethically have classes on them in the library. :) We can only hope that someday the publishers will realize they are only antagonizing their customers and change the way they do things. You would think they would know that any time you limit access to something that someone will figure out a way around it anyway.
Happy New Year! Keep up the great posts. I always find them useful and thought provoking.