hoopla and other apps that make digital books worse than physical ones
- 3 minutes read - 508 wordsI have mixed feelings about the digital library app hoopla—which offers access to ebooks, electronic comics, and other media that my library doesn’t necessarily carry in physical format—but it’s so dang useful that I keep using it despite some hesitations (see this post for some recent complaints). Tonight, though, as I tried to wrap up the introduction to the English translation of Jacques Ellul’s Théologie et technique (which I ought to just buy in French-language physical format, since its publishing house offers 5€ shipping to the U.S.), I noticed something that really made me mad.
The app hasn’t allowed copying text straight from a book for as long as I can remember, but I’ve long used a workaround of taking a screenshot of interesting text and then using iOS’s native text recognition feature to strip text out from the screenshot and paste it into my journaling app or wherever else I’m storing that passage. I use the same workaround for the Amazon Kindle app (yes, ugh, but I have a collection of books there that I’m not willing to give up on) or for the iOS Books app, because both automatically add crude citations at the end that aren’t really useful for me but let those companies reassure publishers that they’re doing everything they can to stop scary pirates from copying text out of their ebooks.
Anyway, I can’t remember the last time I’ve tried this on hoopla, but when I tried to do that tonight, I found that the current version of the app disables taking screenshots so as to prevent this workaround. This is really dumb and really frustrating: A(nother) perfect example of how publishers and developers actually make ebooks more locked down than physical books even though it should be the opposite. U.S. copyright law has something to say about copying the whole book, but it clearly allows for the copying of small passages, which is all I wanted to do.
If this were a physical book, I could easily snap a picture of a passage that I’d like to remember. Heck, even the Amazon Kindle and iOS Books apps don’t go this far in actively restricting what the user can do (though I’m still annoyed by the Books app, since I mostly read DRM-free books in there, so it’s just Apple inserting copyright concerns in there, not the immediate publisher). Whatever sympathy I have for publishers’ and developers’ concerns about copyright and loss of revenue because of copying from digital books quickly disappears when I run into things like this.
The ease of copying (from) digital books ought to be a feature, not a bug. Ellul interests me for a number of reasons (critique of technology and Christian anarchist theology), and so naturally I want to copy down some of the things that I read. Being able to do so with a cursor and an operating system function is so much easier than having to retype (or handwrite) the passage in question, and I’m very upset at hoopla for getting in the way here.
- macro
- Myself
- hoopla
- libraries
- copyright
- fair use
- DRM
- alienation of ownership
- iOS
- Amazon Kindle
- Jacques Ellul
- Theology and Technique
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