What if a book is just a URL? | Hacker News Reader

What if a book is just a URL?

radar.oreilly.com

5 pointsaundumla7 comments

I think this is what they are getting at:

I buy a book and get a unique URL which I can access the book at. Since I do not own the book, I assume it costs x dollars per month for continued access. While I am paying, this unique URL does not change thus I could send the URL to my friends to read the book on my dime. But as soon as I stop paying the unique URL no longer works.

I don't get this at all.

> If a book is a URL, it is fantastically easy for you to lend a book to a friend: you simply give up access to the URL while they have it.

Yes, it is "easy" for you to give up access, as long as access to that URL is controlled, and this control is done by someone besides you.

In which case, this is "better" than DRM, exactly how?

If I interpret it correctly, it's better than DRM because it more closely mimics a physical good. It's a one-user-at-a-time system, with a URL it's possible to use a simple mechanism to determine whether a user is actively reading or not, and then disallow other users while the "book" is in use. In that regard it becomes very similar to a printed book, although a little more flexible. You can loan a book to a friend and they can read it, then they can return it and you can read it, etc.

It's not a bad idea per se, but the problem with it is the problem with all DRM. It's an attempt to impose the limits of one medium on another medium in which they don't apply and are unnatural. Ultimately all such attempts are doomed to failure. What people should be using their creativity to come up with are not ways to pretend as if electronic books are identical to physical books (they aren't, nor should they be) but rather how to deal with the sea change of digital media in a robust way that will actually stand the test of time, and that doesn't impose arbitrary limits.

I agree that it's arbitrary, but this is a better implementation then most, BECAUSE of the link.

I don't actually mind the normal model of books... Sure, the reproduction costs are now tiny, but that shouldn't shrink the cost of the good to nothing.

The distribution of most pop goods has ALWAYS been cheaper, much cheaper, then the cost of the product. I don't see why the internet making it even cheaper nesscessarily means the product should become free, because as nice as that would be, free books won't keep their authors in anything but ramen. Maybe. If they're popular. And sponsored by people who make money not selling goods.

You can't 'give up access to a URL'. The contents of the page that URL points to, maybe. But not a URL.

This is NO different than any other DRM, except that it requires you to be online to use it. Other DRM schemes allow lending, etc.

I can't imagine why someone thought this was a good solution to a problem... Or what exactly they thought that problem was.

Personally, I buy DRM-free ebooks and don't share them. I buy them for my use, on any machine I want (or paper, if I choose) but when I bought them, the deal wasn't that I could copy them for friends. Lending is a possibility, but not something I've done yet. Generally, if they are that good, I simply encourage them to buy the book also. Or, you know, go to the library.

In fact, the last physical books I lent out never found their way home. Still a little upset about that.

What if you want to read offline?

$ wget <my book URL> -O filename

Isn't it now a file?

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