DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks

bcrowell writes "The New York Times reports that textbook publishers are backing off somewhat on the level of DRM used in the electronic editions of their textbooks. They no longer become unreadable after a certain amount of time, as in RMS's famous essay The Right to Read. Even so, most students aren't interested, because the books can't be sold back; the solution, however, may be to make it impossible to return printed books either. No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free books."

Comments

Misinformed opinion about global warming

[technoextreme]

eople always ask why there should be cheap, low power ebook readers. This is why. The world needs them to teach its children without popping for several thousands of dollars per student to enrich paper mills and book publishers. And there's the small matter of losing our forests to this idiocy. Global warming is caused by an overabundance of CO2; the solution is TREES, as many as we can plant. That, and not killing the microplants living on the surface of the world's oceans, which produce half of the photsynthesis activity, but I digress.

No. The solution is not planting as many trees as we can. The solution has never been planting as many trees as we can. I remember Discover magazine did the math using the most efficient plant (I think walnut) and it pretty much equated to it doing squat diddly. Im not saying we have free rein to cut down all the forests though. It's just that your solution won't work.

Re:Like New

[hackwrench]

Please help 2,2,7,6,6,4

Help what? Why do other number combinations get displayed below the entry portion, and why is 1 27 displayed in the upper left hand corner?