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Originally Posted by stonetools
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christmas" was originally recorded on 78 rpm vinyl platters-a media form that was obsolescent before I was born and is obsolete today.
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But when cassettes became popular, 78 RPM was still fairly common (at least on record players, if not commonly sold), and anyone could convert their 78's to the new music format, with all-legal materials. People could tell each other how to arrange their tape recorders and the wiring necessary to get a good conversion.
You can't as easily convert a 6-year-old Adobe DRM'd ebook to something readable on a new device. The software to do so is widely available--if you're willing to deal with being on the shady side of the DMCA.
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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.
...Culture will still continue to be recorded and passed down in different ways, regardless of whether DRM or even ebooks survives.
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Culture will continue just fine. Ebooks will remain a fringe hobby to literature until there's a way for them to be legitimately shared with friends at random. The gap between "legit ebook purchased use" and "underground filesharing" will continue to grow as long as publishers & authors refuse to find a way for people to treat ebooks the way they've always treated books.
People are willing to be reasonable; they know there's a difference between "share with a friend or two" and "post contents to my facebook for my 4,000 followers to download." But right now--both of those are legally the same. Until that changes, there's no incentive to *only* post to a friend or two; if you're going to be guilty of something that might have a $150,000 penalty, why not make a *lot* of people happy first?
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Besides which, of course, even DRMED ebooks can be legitimately shared in numerous ways. More about that on my next post.
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"Numerous?" This I gotta see.
I know of two:
You can share them with up to 6 people who have access to your book-buying account, and have no separate account (on that device) of their own.
You can loan some books, one time for two weeks, to another person with the same kind of ebook software.
You know of others? Last I heard, ebook device sellers were saying it's illegal (or at least against the TOS) to sell the device with books still on it; you can't even share them by getting rid of your entire collection.