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Old 12-15-2013, 07:33 AM   #124
Jdschi
Connoisseur
Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.Jdschi is far more humble than you.
 
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Posts: 51
Karma: 109342
Join Date: Aug 2013
Location: Germany
Device: Nexus 7.2, PW2
I love books, whether they are ebooks or paper. This means that I want to keep them around, indefinitely. I do reread books I like 2-4 times, 5-10 years apart. I really can't remember what happened in books I read 10 years ago, so I can enjoy them anew without spending anything.
With paperbooks, you just have to lug them around and store them somewhere, but then you can take a book out of its shelf once in a while and read at your leisure.
Now come DRM ebooks. With them, you have to hope that the format they're in does not become obsolete in the next decades and that the seller storing your "license" will still be around during the next decades.
I seriously doubt that. Digital things change FAST (anyone still remembers video tapes? LOL), and I highly doubt that many ebook retailers today will still be around in 30-40 years. But in 30-40 years, I still want to enjoy the books I've bought. Books are timeless. Without DRM, I can have as many backups of the stuff I want, in any format I want, so if the retailer I bought them from goes out of business, I still have my copy. If the format they're in does not match the device I read on, I can simply convert them.
I also don't think that it's valid to say one could simply rebuy the ebooks if your "license" becomes void one day - because just as books go out of print and become unavailable, ebooks might too if no one was interested in selling them. There is no guarantee that my favorite authors of today will still be read by anyone except me in 30 years, so there is no guarantee that I will be able to replace unusable ebooks by buying new "licenses" in the future. Of course it might happen that ebook readers got out of fashion in 30 years and I wouldn't be able to get a device to read them on - but I highly doubt that. As long as I can convert the files, I'm sure there will always be a way to read ebooks.

TL;DR: If DRM couldn't be broken, I would only buy cheap ebooks of which I knew that I wouldn't want to reread them or buy/read DRM free. I would go back to paperbooks for everything else. In fact, this is exactly what I did before I learned of the Apprentice, I think I bought exactly two ebooks before that and read only free classics on the reader. Only since I know of the Apprentice do I spend a substantial amount of money on ebooks, because I know that I will hopefully be able to keep them around indefinitely (or at least as long as my backup(s) holds out).
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