I started my PhD last year and was shocked at how intentionally broken academic e-books are. A few examples of daily experiences that send me into fits of frustrated rage and incredulity.
- ebook substitute for a text that only allows online perusal and restrict download for offline use.
- ebooks that only allow access to one user per institution at a time (in an institution with 30k+ students)
- ebooks that can only be viewed by adobe digital editions.
- journal article pdf downloads that only display bitmap images of text so that copying quotes is impossible.
I'd much rather use electronic resources as physical storage of 200 texts per years is just nuts, but sadly, publishers would rather extract rent from a broken system.
You can generally solve the DRM problem through bookwarez. I have ~no problem pirating to format shift. I'm fortunate that all the academic stuff I care about is available as pdf preprints directly from the author (cs/crypto vs. bio, I guess)
I started my PhD last year and was shocked at how intentionally broken academic e-books are. A few examples of daily experiences that send me into fits of frustrated rage and incredulity.
- ebook substitute for a text that only allows online perusal and restrict download for offline use. - ebooks that only allow access to one user per institution at a time (in an institution with 30k+ students) - ebooks that can only be viewed by adobe digital editions. - journal article pdf downloads that only display bitmap images of text so that copying quotes is impossible.
I'd much rather use electronic resources as physical storage of 200 texts per years is just nuts, but sadly, publishers would rather extract rent from a broken system.