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Originally Posted by sirmaru
In 20 years we may be ABSORBING books from brain devices and reading with our eyes may be totally unnecessary.
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Or not. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't. (My money is on "not" - certainly not in any large-scale, worldwide way.)
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Our large collections of DRM stripped eBooks will be like papyrus books - so much dust without any value.
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If that happens, they're easy to delete and it's not like either the stripping or the storing takes all that much time and effort. If that doesn't happen, I'll have a nicely readable collection of DRM-stripped ebooks.
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The other reason NOT to collect eBook files is that in 40 years most of us here today will be DEAD.
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I don't plan to be. I might, but I won't even be 80 yet 40 years from now, so I'm rather hoping I'll go on a bit longer than that.
And 40 years is 40 years; I'm more concerned with my ebooks still being readable 5-15 years from now, which isn't at all guaranteed when they're DRM-infested. (Other than the watermarked ebooks / books protected by social DRM, that is, which inhibits casual sharing but allows backing up and converting to any other format, so I have no need to remove DRM protection from such books. Sadly that's just the Harry Potter books and all my Estonian ebooks.)
Sure, a lot can happen in 20 years - probably also things we can't yet imagine. But reading text, with eyes, from a visible medium of some sort, is probably going to stick around as long as I do, and again, unlike collecting various physical items, making sure one has a readable collection of ebooks is not particularly time- or space-consuming and if not needed any longer, can always be deleted with no trouble.
In the meantime, I'll have a lot of books to read.