The whole article is based on a paper vs ebook dichotomy, whereas the relevant distinction is between DRM-bound (some ebooks) and DRM-free (some ebooks & all paper) books. What a waste of words. Oh well, at least they're not on paper.
One could argue that even paper is not completely safe, especially if you bought a book from Banksy (but that's starting to get absurd).
If we eliminate the Banksy absurdity, I believe that there is some value to the argument: it's simply physically impossible to shut down a paper book because it's a piece of "technology" that's easy to understand and inspect. In contrast, an e-book is always just thousands or millions of bits that you usually don't physically inspect. HN readers may generally be tech-savvy enough to confidently tell which books or platforms are immune to remote-shutdown, but you may be giving too much credit to the proverbial grandma (or even mother, as my own mom definitely wouldn't have any idea).
I hadn't come across Popula before, but a glance at it doesn't lead me to think the proverbial grandma is its assumed audience.
FWIW, I much prefer paper books for many reasons (aesthetics, tactility, lack of temptations towards distraction, etc). But longevity isn't amongst those reasons - with backups etc I'm much more confident of hanging on to my epubs than I am my physical books.
A long time ago I worked for Amazon, coding on Kindle in various platforms. I'd been using ereaders like Kindle for years, but I'd never once electronically purchased a book and had no interest in doing so. I was amused to find that at Amazon it was taken for granted that the only way to use the reader was to buy a book. When I mentioned all of the stuff I'd put onto Kindles over the years, my colleagues blinked at me and said, "You mean you SIDELOAD?" as though that were the oddest, most puzzling thing imaginable.
There are endless legal sources of non-DRMed ebooks online. They aren't hard to find. I don't recommend anything else.
One of my favourite subreddits is r/aboringdystopia (about how we live in a boring dystopian world) and one recent trending post was about Microsoft shutting down their ebooks business, which means booka bought there will all stop working due to DRM. That was the phrase in the meme - "Due to corporate budget cuts, on April 2 the books will stop working". Very dystopic.
Paper books can however be "shut off" by a fire, by being misplaced, by a flood, by theft, by a mischievous child or pet. In contrast, an e-book linked to a user account is immune to all of those.
If the idea of losing access to some data is the "most grotesque and awful thing" the author can imagine, I suggest the author read some more imaginative books.
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[ 90.6 ms ] story [ 1082 ms ] threadIf we eliminate the Banksy absurdity, I believe that there is some value to the argument: it's simply physically impossible to shut down a paper book because it's a piece of "technology" that's easy to understand and inspect. In contrast, an e-book is always just thousands or millions of bits that you usually don't physically inspect. HN readers may generally be tech-savvy enough to confidently tell which books or platforms are immune to remote-shutdown, but you may be giving too much credit to the proverbial grandma (or even mother, as my own mom definitely wouldn't have any idea).
FWIW, I much prefer paper books for many reasons (aesthetics, tactility, lack of temptations towards distraction, etc). But longevity isn't amongst those reasons - with backups etc I'm much more confident of hanging on to my epubs than I am my physical books.
There are endless legal sources of non-DRMed ebooks online. They aren't hard to find. I don't recommend anything else.
If the idea of losing access to some data is the "most grotesque and awful thing" the author can imagine, I suggest the author read some more imaginative books.