[Yetanfou]

Don't rely on any 'official' solution to maintain your digital library as those are sure to stop working in one way (company goes bankrupt or gets bought) or another (planned obsolescence, forced upgrade, etc) in a few years time. Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app (https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=168132), possibly combined with Reader (https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/Reader+(ebook+rea...) for when you happen to be without a reader device.

Try to send the industry a signal by refusing to buy encumbered books (DRM, proprietary formats, etc). If you feel like you absolutely must have a book which is only available in an encumbered format I'd suggest you convert it to an open and unencumbered format as soon as you get your hands on it. Store it in this format, it should be usable in years to come.

Keep good backups, this is one of the advantages of a digital library which partly offsets its greater vulnerability to disaster compared to a physical library. It takes a lot of effort to destroy a physical library, but a simple rm -rf will do for a digital one. Store your backups in several locations, off-site, somewhere out on the 'net in an encrypted container file (free cloud storage accounts are handy for this purpose, just refresh them every now and then and don't rely on them as a single source).

[vidarh]

Second this. While I do occasionally buy Kindle books, I only buy them as long as the DRM is straightforward to remove. The moment they get aggressive about DRM, it'll be the last time I ever buy one.

I don't feel strongly enough about it to avoid books I want to read that are only available with DRM, but I do insist on having an unencumbered copy.

And when a book is available from a source I know are good about not using DRM, I will aim to buy from there, and buy direct in preference to buying from a DRM-friendly outlet - e.g. I prefer to buy from O'Reilly direct for that reason.

The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected.

[kefka]

>The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected.

And that also implies that you give up right of resale.

I can sell a physical book after I have it. I can choose to write my name in there... Or not. Having my name plastered as you indicate is OK, means giving up my own guaranteed rights of resale.

[PhasmaFelis]

I feel like right-of-resale is legitimately complicated for digital products. The right to resell a physical object doesn't give you the right to mass-produce it, but for digital products the two processes are identical.

[comex]

Not really. You can still legally sell a physical book if you've written your name in (if the buyer doesn't mind), and you can always remove your name from a non-DRMed eBook (though there may be more subtle forms of tracking left in).

The first sale doctrine is a legal matter, and unfortunately in the US it's been found essentially inapplicable to digital copies [1] whether there's a watermark or not. In other jurisdictions it may be applicable, but again probably regardless of the presence of a watermark.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDi....

[vidarh]

That's fine with me - I never resell my books.

But yes, you need to keep it mind.

[JoshTriplett]

> And that also implies that you give up right of resale.

I'd love to see that tested.

[z3t4]

is it not the copyright owners right to allow others to resell or not!?

[Silhouette]

That certainly wasn't the original intent of copyright law, and in most places it wouldn't be the default position. Copyright is normally about controlling the making of new copies, not retaining control over an existing one after sale. The difficulty is that copyright law has been extended in various ways over the years.

Some of those extensions might seem reasonable and in the spirit of the original law. For example, in some places buying a single private copy of a movie on DVD doesn't give you a legal right to show that work, for money, to the general public, even if it's still your physical DVD in the player.

Other extensions in the scope of copyright protection have been much more dubious. For example, just about anything in the digital world tends to be vulnerable to arguments about making copies in a computer's RAM while you're running the software, playing the movie, listening to the song, or whatever it might be. Some horrible law has been made in some places using this kind of argument, even though it's totally distorting the spirit of the original copyright principle since you're only enjoying the copy you lawfully possess and not really making further copies to redistribute to anyone else. Trying to limit resale rights is another hot topic.

Some places have rather more sane laws in these respects, and even some reasonable discussions among the governing and lawyerly classes about how digital works should be handled in the modern age and how to balance the intended protection of creators with the legitimate right for customers to enjoy what they paid for. But there is still a long way to go even in the more enlightened legal environments today, and plenty of first world countries are far behind in their thinking so far.

[kefka]

I absolutely have the right to buy a copy , watch it/read it, and sell it to someone else. First sale doctrine states that.

I don't have the right to make and sell copies. I do certainly have that right for the original.

[6stringmerc]

Part of the issue with this case, to me, is that the standing for bunnie does not adequately describe what is believed to be "paid for" content. As in, there is no differentiation between a streamed license or a purchased 'copy' in technical terms. To me this is a very important sticking point, legally, simply considering the nature of modern commerce.

[michaelmrose]

With physical items it most certainly is not on principal a digital item ought to be the same however I don't know how you enable that without drm.

Maybe the inherently absurd situation is best resolved by giving up the absurd notion of artificial scarcity.

[benologist]

I'd go one step further and build your own private cloud for a bunch of stuff. I did all this easily through a slick web interface for open source software and linux that Synology has created.

A lot of this stuff includes apps for phone/tv/etc that you can download for free in stores or even from their own site, and it can be available to everyone in your household for some pretty decent savings - if it still works in a year I'll have saved more than I spent on it ($290 + disks x4).

- cloud files almost directly equivalent to Dropbox, I haven't solved sharing files yet but I have versioning and undeleting for my work

- note server like OneNote with a browser extension to save pages, screenshots etc

- music streaming ala Amazon Music et al

- torrent downloading I guess is like seed boxes but never had one

- video streaming server like Netflix

- photo uploading like iCloud

- email server, didn't actually install this one yet but everything else is up and running

- dns server with network-wide ad/malware/tracker blocking

[Yetanfou]

That is exactly what something like Owncloud/Nextcloud (for which I made those book/publication-related tools) enables you to do: create a 'private cloud' (what a silly word it is, really... cloud). It does some of the things you mention 'out of the box' (file storage, photo uploading) or after installing some 'apps' (note server, music streaming, video streaming, email user agent (not a mail server)). Since it runs on *nix you get the rest (mail server, dns server) more or less 'for free', just configure it the way you want.

[benologist]

Same in principal, but Synology have built a lovely, multi-window web interface for a lot of linux and each of those apps, along with their own Android + iOS apps.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo

That consolidates a lot of different UIs, signins, permissions etc into a single coherent interface - even terminal commands like configuring firewall, network interfaces, user permissions, all that stuff.

To give you some examples it takes two clicks, a domain and any contrived email address to get a Let's Encrypt certificate. It takes three more clicks to assign it to a web app Synology is serving from that device. You can add SSL to your own reverse-proxied app, also effortless to add, just as easily and enable HSTS with a checkbox.

Their torrent software can watch RSS feeds and download straight into a folder where it's indexed for their video server. Their video client provides a nice interface for browsing but delegates the actual playback to VLC.

[eropple]

> cloud files almost directly equivalent to Dropbox

And when your electronics get trashed by water damage or the stray lightning strike? Cloud computing involves redundancy and fault tolerance and a box in your closet is neither. That goes particularly for "almost directly equivalent to Dropbox"; even setting aside sharing, "not having everything go up in smoke because my house burns down" is kind of a killer-app feature.

You can, of course, build a "private cloud". (I've done it for clients before!) But it will cost you.

[benologist]

It can also automatically sync whatever you want to any of dozens of archiving services... encrypted or not. Including Amazon Cloud Drive boasting unlimited space for $60/year, BackBlaze B2, S3, Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive etc.

It can keep a redundant NAS in sync too but not sure how seamless that would be in practice if you wanted redundancy for the software running on it.

However what really makes me optimistic about this stuff is the aligned interests:

- a great software experience for their hardware leveraging open source solutions (I think it's brtfs for the versioning/restoring, transmission for torrents etc)

vs

- Dropbox selling a blob of space for $10/month and trying to solve the "problem" of you not paying more by lying in their advertisements

[dublinben]

I would argue that it is more ethical to purchase a physical copy of the book you would like, then download a DRM-free copy from alternate sources. You have covered yourself ethically (and maybe even legally?) by purchasing a copy/license, without supporting the DRM-crippled offering. If more customers started to affect sales in this way, publishers might take a hint, and drop DRM.

[CharlesW]

> Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app…

Okay, so this is a whole new world for me. Thank you!

OPDS appears to be for electronic publications what RSS is to blogs and podcasts. There are feeds, there's content management software that generates them (like "OPDS catalog"), and there are reader-style apps to consume them and view the syndicated content. Yes?

But as someone with tons of Kindle purchases, I'm a little confused about where to go from here, and how to protect myself from what happened to throwaway1974. Is there an "OPDS for Dummies"?

[Yetanfou]

OPDS for dummies? There is the Mobileread wiki (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS) which gives some pointers to catalogs and software, but it doesn't really explain all that much.

What OPDS enables you to do is gain access to a collection from any OPDS client device. To test it you can just install an OPDS-compatible reader on a phone or tablet or some such device and point it at an OPDS catalog. If you install FBreader (for Android) you'll find a number of OPDS catalogues pre-configured for your perusal, it is also possible (and easy) to add your own. You'll be able to browse the catalog, search for publications (something which I have not implemented in my Owncloud/Nextcloud tools yet due to the (IMnsHO) lacking search infrastructure in Owncloud) and download publications to the device. So yes, in this way it works just like a feed reader, which makes sense as it is based on the same technology (RSS and Atom).

Kindle does, as far as I know, not support OPDS - I don't have one so I can not try. I do know that it has a (rudimentary) browser so that might be an option to get access to publications on a 'personal cloud server'. In the case of OPDS Catalog you can just point the browser at the library root in the Owncloud/Nextcloud 'Files' app to see the same files as those which are served through the OPDS feed, bar any filtering done on the latter (it can be configured to show only certain types of files and/or to skip certain patterns). You will not see the metadata which OPDS Catalog has collected on those publications, once Nextcloud matures I'll see if it is feasible to implement this as an addition to the Files app.

Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) is able to convert publications on the fly to a format understood by (unmodified= Kindle devices. It also contains a server which publishes in both OPDS as well as HTML, the latter would be useable on a Kindle. I think Calibre does a good job on the conversions but it is rather overweight and overly complex to use as a server. Of course there are other options, check that Mobileread wiki I linked to for some examples.

[CharlesW]

This is very helpful, thanks again!

[Natsu]

You make me wonder what I should do to preserve my Steam account now... Maybe there's some way to get a VM image of the computer in offline mode?

[Karunamon]

Steam DRM is even more trivially defeated than Amazon DRM. Drop 4 files in the game folder and run it.

[Natsu]

Which four?

[Karunamon]

I don't dare look this up on a work machine, but a google in the general direction of "Steamworks emulator" should get you going. The files in question are modified Steamworks DLLs (x86 and x64), an info file that holds the Steam metadata for the game, and a launcher to read it.

[Natsu]

Hrm. DDG shows one (unhelpful) result for that. Google sent me running in circles. Has this emulator been taken down?

[eatbitseveryday]

> Try to send the industry a signal by refusing to buy encumbered books (DRM, proprietary formats, etc).

This is what animal rights activists are advocating to do with meat products in the industry. Does the technique work, universally? Does it have success? It sounds reasonable, but requires a lot of people to change their behaviors.

[slavik81]

I think it's a lot easier for DRM than for animal welfare. For one, DRM directly affects your use of the product, while animal abuse occurs out-of-sight somewhere far away. DRM has no consumer benefit, which also makes agreement easier. Where each consumer draws the line for animal abuse varies considerably and it takes significant personal research to choose brands.

[zardo]

Boycotts can work because you are able to excersize social influence and slowly change the morals of your society. What you eat is going to be something that people you interact with learn about you.

How you interact with DRM isn't something many people are going to learn about you unless you make an effort to share it.