Below are posts associated with the “DRM” tag.
hoopla and other apps that make digital books worse than physical ones
I 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.
🔗 linkblog: Steam Finally Makes It Clear You Don’t Own Your Games'
Look, I like Steam, but it’s still a sucky business model, like so many others today,
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Unauthorized Bread, by Cory Doctorow
This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews.
This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups.
Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.
📚 spreading the word about the Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle 📚
Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner).
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow
I feel like I say this whenever I talk about Doctorow, but I love that his fiction reads like an op-ed. While waiting for this book to come out, I’ve been slowly reading his co-authored book Chokepoint Capitalism, and I feel like The Bezzle is all his (and Rebecca’s) critiques about large and greedy companies wrapped up in a fun, action-driven narrative.
Here’s the thing about me: I’m an academic, and I respect facts, reason, and citations.
🔗 linkblog: Chokepoint Capitalism can break you free from big tech and big content - The Verge'
It’s a long interview, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read made me want to read this book even more. I have a copy, I just need to open it up.
Wil Wheaton on general purpose computing
I am very near the end of Wil Wheaton’s updated/annotated memoir Still Just a Geek, which I bought over the summer on a short family trip. I have lots of thoughts—most of them positive—about the memoir and may write a bit more about it once I finally finish. For now, though, since I wrote last week complaining about companies like Apple and ClassDojo restricting hardware and software to support their bottom line at the expense of users, I was struck by a short passage Wheaton included making a case for general purpose computing:
Apple and artificial restrictions on file syncing
A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.
🔗 linkblog: Why none of my books are available on Audible | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com'
Doctorow convinced me years ago that Audible was terrible, but here, he showed me just how bad they are.
🔗 linkblog: You Don’t Own What You’ve Bought: Sony Removes 100s Of Movies Bought Through PS Store | Techdirt'
This is why I’m trying to buy more physical copies of things—or at least DRM-free stuff. I have lots of regrets about the size of my Kindle library, for example.