[TML] PDFs (was Observation on Mongoose Traveller main book)

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 8/10/08 11:06 PM, "Ross Winn" <ross.winn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:00 PM, Jerry W Barrington
> <jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In addition to being a literal printed and bound book, the term book also
>> refers to the literary composition, whatever it's form.
> 
> That's the issue. Whether any RPG composition can be called a book.
> 
> PDFs can do hundreds of things books cannot. So calling them different
> things, and treating them differently may be exactly the point.

You can argue that all you want.

More to my original point, if I purchase an e-book and it has draconian DRM
of the sort that must call home to let me open, what happens when "home" is
no longer there to be called?  My e-book quits working, and I'm out my
money.  If home is the website that I bought from, or the publisher, all it
takes is for that company to go out of business.  Or get bought out, and the
new owner has no interest in paying to run a computer that lets me read my
old books.  Likewise, if some certificate authority holds the keys, they
will get progressively burden by more and more old books which nobody is
paying *them* to support anymore.

Many of the more burdensome DRM schemes only let you read your books on a
particular machine.  Even if they let you de-register that machine and
register a new one, sooner or later the system will screw up and you'll be
left with books you can't read anymore.

I understand that publishers want to protect their earnings.  On the other
hand, all the people pushing DRM learned little from the old days of
copy-protecting software.