I’ve been busy these last few weeks with all sorts of policy/political issues at work and have sadly negelected many things (the most worthwhile to neglect was housework, but I digress). But I was reading around a few things last night and came across an interesting book. So I checked the uni library and w00t! we have a copy. Okay, so it’s an e-book. Okay, so I can read PDFs no problem[1]. PDFs are pretty standard and quite handy for searching and finding information easily. I can deal with that.
Or can I? Last night, I was introduced to Adobe DRM. Yes, I can download the document. Yes I can open it (after a heap of faffing around and needing an older version of Acrobat reader[2] ). But, I can only print out 67 (of 337) pages per day. Or copy 17 selections per day. Not a real problem, I don’t want to print the document and I figure there’s only a few bits that I really need for the paper I’m working on. But. (You saw that coming didn’t you?) But, I can only have the document for ONE DAY. That’s right, I have a loan on the ‘book’ for one day.
If it was a physical book, I could have it for the whole semester if I wanted to. The library lets us have research loans and as this book would be good for my research, whole of semester would be really nice. But ONE DAY!!! There’s no way I can even contemplate reading it all in one day. It’s bizarre. I’m going to leave it open and see what happens as the ‘expiry date’ (minute?) ticks over. Will my computer crash? Will I be presented with a blank document that seems to be the case in every app that usually opens PDFs? Will the scientific method hold up to scrutiny?[3]
On the upside, this may spur me to write that other paper using Dr Seuss’s stories as a way of interpreting what’s wrong with some of our current practices concerning new media. Or Would you, Could you with a Book? Not unless you’re Big Business!
- On a side note, I found a really cool little app for my mac that helps me organise the huge number of PDFs I have called YEP!, I may actually have to purchase that [↩]
- it doesn’t work with the latest version, wtf? [↩]
- I’m not sure what this means, but it’s probably something that I really should be concerned about, but that’s another post. [↩]