Wednesday, March 9

who hates drm? librarians -good


The following was developed by a few librarians and is worth supporting. For those just joining, HarperCollins have capped their eBook loans at 26 times (further reading), Kindle owners can loan something for 2 weeks (on a book by book publisher opt-in, further reading) and Nook owners get to loan a purchased eBook once; there are all kinds of other fun rules and regs.
As readers of traditional print materials, we are already guaranteed all of these rights [below -ed.] -and we should not be denied them due to the medium in which we are reading.

The Readers' Bill of Rights for Digital Books:
1. Ability to retain, archive and transfer purchased materials
2. Ability to create a paper copy of the item in its entirety
3. Digital Books should be in an open format (e.g. you could read on a computer, not just a device)
4. Choice of hardware to access books (e.g. in 3 years when your device has broken, you can still read your book on other hardware)
5. Reader information will remain private (what, when and how we read will not be stored, sold or marketed)

That does not seem unreasonable...