What if your eBook aggregator or perhaps the publisher with whom you now own over 5,000 eBook titles went belly up next week? What if OCLC and EBSCO never purchased NetLibrary, where would your titles have gone? Perhaps the 100 titles you’ve bought for your personal Kindle are no good when the device disappears due to newer technology. Are you concerned about accessing the eBook content you’ve purchased in perpetuity? Is the lack of eBook archiving preventing you from purchasing eBooks? Are Portico, LOCKSS, or CLOCKS suitable solutions for archiving eBooks? I’m looking for your opinions and concerns on eBook archiving for a Charleston Conference presentation on this very topic. Please leave your comments or send me a direct email at sue.polanka at wright.edu
Editor’s Note: this is something that I have posted about before and, in my opinion, is a serious concern. It may be the Achilles’ Heel of ebooks and digital archiving in general. At least with paper we have the technology to preserve the medium almost indefinitely. PB
This is why DRM is a bad thing. If I own it, I have not problem ripping the DRM off of the files just in case.
This is yet another reason why DRM is a disaster and why the present software setup that keeps the reader so remote from his eBook files is also a potential disaster.
I wonder if the publishers have much concern … they may be delighted at this situation as it will force people to keep buying additional copies of books they may wish to reread five years later…
Is teleread interested in starting a campaign against DRM supported by it’s readers ?
This kind of thing is what kept me from the e-world in the first place, and why I never buy anything in e-format that I don’t mind losing.
I just hope that, if Amazon stops supporting their DRM’d mobi files, that someone will come along with a DRM-cracker right soon.
This has already happened to me with the sort-of demise of Fictionwise. Half the titles I purchased I can no longer download, and those that I do have on my device no longer work properly. The e-Reader app for iPhone drops the last few words from every page, rendering the books unreadable. Since Fictionwise does not answer support emails, and the service is clearly on the way out, I’m not sure what to do.
Hard lesson to learn about the permanence of e-books…
I don’t like DRM either. However, I am less worried about Amazon going belly-up than some of the others like Fictionwise and potentially B&N. So for that reason, am glad that I have a Kindle as opposed to something else.
This is why standards are so important. In this case the format, DRM and the protocol to interact with an archive or catalog should be standardized. This will not give you perpetual life for your content, but its life will be much longer. Moreover, with standards you have a much greater chance that continuity will be taken care of in case of technological evolution, which is slower anyway.
This has happened before with the demise of various ebook stores. Thank goodness DRM is easily removed.