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t raises no obstacles to me, other than slightly limiting my book choices. I won't buy or used DRM'd ebooks... woe is me; my reading selection is limited to just a bit more than 40k options at Smashwords, 160k+ works at ArchiveofourOwn, 100k+ from Gutenberg, and something like 2 million books from Google. Oh no. How will I ever cope.
It does, however, raise obstacles for ebooks as long-term replacements for paper books. Literary culture *cannot* shift to ebooks if they can't be shared; children don't learn to love books by being limited to what their parents buy them. They borrow from uncles, from neighbors; they buy fifty-cent books at yard sales; they mark their favorite passages and hand the marked-up versions around to their friends. DRM makes it obvious that a collection-of-data is not a "book" as normal people understand books.
DRM is a minor nuisance today. If books are a form of short-term entertainment, DRM is perfectly reasonable. If, however, books are a repository of culture, a container for potentially generation-spanning truths, DRM is an abomination.
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This is a problem that goes far beyond DRM and ebooks and applies to electronic media in general. Electronic media has ALWAYS had a problem with shifts in technology leading to obsolescence in earlier forms . Bing Crosby's " White christmas" was originally recorded on 78 rpm vinyl platters-a media form that was obsolescent before I was born and is obsolete today.
During the time I started collecting music, the form in which music was recorded went from vinyl to 8 track to minicasette to CD to MP3. And its not just music. Punch cards anyone? How about floppy disks? Betamax? Photographic plates? 35 mm film?
Ebooks are just as good -or as bad- at being a cultural repository as any other form of electronic media and are just as subject to change.
Yet people still can enjoy Bring Crosby singing " White Christmas" today, and I can still listen to the first songs that I ever bought - just in a different format.
Culture will still continue to be recorded and passed down in different ways, regardless of whether DRM or even ebooks survives.
Besides which, of course, even DRMED ebooks can be legitimately shared in numerous ways. More about that on my next post.