Quote:
Originally Posted by bwana
I am intrigued by Elfwreck's statement that there is plenty of DRM free media around. Unfortunately I am a creature of the physical world and the people around me use the tokens of the mass media as reference points- my kids talk about Rihanna, Britney Spears, Linkin Park. The talk about TV shows. They talk about the Red Sox. All of these media are DRM controlled. ...
My point is that DRM free media are often not the mainstream. I would love for you to prove me wrong and show me the some of the many sources of DRM free media that your children enjoy.
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My kids watch TV, play video games--and head over to fanfiction.net to read stories about the TV shows & video games. (There is, apparently, quite a bit of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic. And Pokemon fanfic. I try not to think about it.)
Doctorow's
Little Brother is an award-winning Young Adult novel available as a free download in multiple formats. And he's got another one coming out soon.
Plenty of children's & YA classics are public domain & freely available. Fantasy stories, adventure stories, biographies, histories--the only area that's a bit weak is science & tech, because we've made a lot of changes in our understanding of science in the last eighty years. But there's plenty of opensource/creative commons scientific content available, at least for a parent who is able to spend some time finding stuff on topics their kids are interested in. If nothing else, there are blogs & rss feeds on all sorts of technical topics, ranging from basic overview to intensely detailed.
There's a new Alice in Wonderland movie--and hey, the original book is freely available. My older daughter watches Stephen Colbert, so I'm planning on getting her some Mark Twain. I'll put
Little Fuzzy on whatever ebook readers they wind up with. (I have a Rocketbook I'm having trouble getting to work properly with Vista, and I'm waiting for that elusive <$100 multi-format-reading non-eink device.)
The only barrier is getting them interested in reading instead of watching moving pictures. There is *endless* written material available, especially for a child who's still sorting out his or her interests.
There's plenty of free content; paid, non-DRM content is more limited only because it requires parental filtering. (I wouldn't exactly mind setting my kids loose at Smashwords, but I know they wouldn't be able to find stuff they liked.)