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. [↩]
Hi Alison, it appears like you might still be following along with the DFLP course as this week Open Education Resources is one of the things we are looking at. You’ve touched on one of the most frustrating things about the alternative to open educational resources – commercially produced, published and controlled. Our course used to be hidden behind a password and log in and people had to enroll (sign a contract that says they will pay) before they could get a password and login. Apart from an ethical concern, the technical problems we had in getting people to simply access the course materials lead us to put it on the wiki. So now we are slowly replacing all the information and resources we use in the course with open resources. By open, I don’t just mean freely accessible, I also mean licensed in such a way that anyone can copy and rimix the resources. Someday we hope to be at a point were our students will want to interact with resources that much… so its open access, open source
Thanks for the post. I hope you are still with the course
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alison reply on April 20th, 2008:
Hi Leigh, yes, I’m very aware of the issues about putting everything behind a paywall and find it quite frustrating at times. We even have problems getting our tutors into the courses in time. It would be so much easier to have open access.
I’m still vaguely following along and will try to do some catch-up posts in the near future. It’s a very interesting course.
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Hi there,
You can read a lot in one day but you have two chances to read a book like that in one day. Recently I found a cool book on something I wanted to read and it would only let me read one page at time in ebook format. To print the whole thing would been 365 hits of the print button! NO THANKS.
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