[sailfast]

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

[ceayo]

- E-Books smell awful.

- It's fun to collect, to look at what you have.

- You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves.

- You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.

[gowld]

No one is stopping you from building your own library.

[TFNA]

> What’s wrong with e-books?

This article is about academic libraries. Research in many fields requires keeping multiple books open in front of you at the same time, because new research typically starts by synthesizing disparate previous research. That’s a workflow that most people find much less efficient with ebooks. Your segue into personal book ownership and impressing people is also not very relevant to the article.

[sailfast]

This article started about academics but mostly was about how the author likes to look at their own bookshelf and hasn’t actually read the books there, while ripping into people that read on other modalities.

[pibaker]

Do you actually own "your" ebooks?

From experience, when a college library offers access to an ebook, what they do is just providing an access token so you can log into some publisher's website and read it there. The publisher can theoretically withdraw a book or raise the price and the library will have no recourse because it doesn't own them.

[sailfast]

Some yes, some no. Just depends on how you want to do it. Calibre is great for managing this.

[toomuchtodo]

DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc).

If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.

[bentley]

DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>>What’s wrong with e-books?

>DRM

You're downloading them wrong.

[gowld]

> If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.

Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.

[toomuchtodo]

Please provide a citation supporting this assertion.