Tag: ebooks

don’t own your textbooks, rent them!

Posted on by jessamyn

Princeton University is experimenting with textbooks that have Digital Rights Management embedded in them. They have a lot of nerve calling a textbook that expires in five months “universal”. The press release states that students “save money” though it does seem to be comparing apples and oranges. Sure, textbooks are expensive and can be of limited use once classes are over but at least you own the darned things and can resell them or do whatever you want with them. And if you don’t have your own computer just make sure you can use the same one in the lab every time you visit because you can only load your textbook on to one computer, period. No returns. Not accessible via dial-up. How dare they say “the information is the same as the print version” although I guess as a profession we haven’t had to deal with information that expires now have we? Perhaps it’s time we start.

update: it’s not the school it’s the bookstore that is running this DRMed ebook experiment according to an update on the post. Different thing, different import. Ed Felten, who works at Princeton posted some comments “I don’t object to other people wasting their money developing products that consumers won’t want. …The problem with DRM is not that bad products can be offered, but that public policy sometimes protects bad products by thwarting the free market and the free flow of ideas. The market will kill DRM, if the market is allowed to operate.”

Jenny uses her librarian superpowers for good

Posted on by jessamyn

I talked to Jenny a bit at ALA about Digital Rights Management and the ListenIllinois project. I was concerned, as she was, about the interoperability of the ebooks that the program provides, and the fact that their books won’t play on iPods, among other platforms and hardware device options. Luckily for ListenIllinois patrons, Jenny was in a prime position to do something about it. Her solution, though admittedly imperfect, is a glorious example of a librarian seeing a problem or an inequality of access, deciding that it needs to be fixed and setting policy to address that inequality: libraries that join the ListenIllinois contract now need to purchase at least one MP3 player to circulate audiobooks to patrons. I applaud her decision, her plan, and her dedication to explaining it and trying to err on the side of inclusivity and access instead of shrugging and saying “well, what can you do?”

It’s a proven fact that libraries help bridge the digital divide, and now we need to step up and help bridge what is a growing digital audiobook divide. It’s simply unethical to say you’re not going to circulate players because it would be too much of a hassle for your staff. This is the future format of audiobooks, and we need to make them available to everyone, especially because there are some titles that are available exclusively in this format. There are so many reasons to circulate your own players right now that it’s almost a crime not to. If you look at it from a PR standpoint, do you really want to be the one standing up in front of the microphone explaining why you couldn’t spend $70 on one measly player for those patrons that don’t have one of their own?

DRM and Libraries, what is useful to know

Posted on by jessamyn

Proprietary formats — whether it’s Windows or Mac — are one of the big issues with ebooks and, therefore, ebooks in libraries. Here is one patron’s response to their library system going with Windows Media format ebooks that won’t play on Macs or Linux machines. He worked out a song with a friend: Your Audio Book Sounds Silent to Me [listen to it, it’s short and fun]. Phil works on digital divide and digital minorities generally. I happen to have read his notes about the song the day he also posted Trying to Update this Site from a Computer at a Public Library. Fascinating.

Do you know who is getting the shortest end of this stick? The tenants in affordable housing units in Northern Virginia where GNU/Linux computer labs have been set up for them to use. Many of these tenants are hardworking immigrant families. Could the adults and children in these families benefit from greater access to audio books? You tell me. “Sorry, buster, you’re a digital minority. No audio books for you. Here, let me relieve you of your taxpayer dollars all the same.” How about this for irony — one of the books currently inaccessible? Martin Luther King, Jr., On Leadership: Inspiration & Wisdom for Challenging Times, by Donald T. Phillips. I hear it’s a good book.

[tametheweb]

learn more about DRM

Posted on by jessamyn

Teleread makes the assertion that it’s not writers [or some writers] who are pushing DRM for e-books, it’s publishers. No surprise there. If you want, contrast these three “What is DRM?” pages: wikipedia, Microsoft, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a very odd amalgam of ideas of what people think it is.

…my own thinking is that without DRM the e-book business would be at least ten times its present size, now a miserable $50 million or less in annual global sales. But forget about that. Let’s just carry the clueless authors’ paranoia to its logical conclusion. Maybe books should appear only on stone tablets. To guard against piracy, Famous Writers can specify that their precious masterpieces be chiseled only on tablets above a certain weight.