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User: vnvenkat

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  1. Re:I am a college professor on DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks · · Score: 1

    Thanks. I don't think *free* software exists for printing the material. You can get binary only flash plugins for Firefox, and those may work for *BSD. Still it is awful.

  2. I am a college professor on DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks · · Score: 5, Informative

    And for teaching a course on Compilers, I used the now-classic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201100886/sr=8-1 /qid=1145828128/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6472017-6203054?_ encoding=UTF8dragon book. The advertisement said that the new edition was revised, but not in the print copy; the new chapters were available online as an electronic book for anyone who purchases the book. The additional cost for this e-book was about $40 (not optional). To my horrid disappointment, when I went online (much later, after I started teaching the class), I found that the digital copy could only be viewed with some Macromedia-Flash like software on the browser, which would only allow you to view it page by page, no search, and no printing or saving the entire file either locally. There were no options to increase the font sizes for viewing the document comfortably either. I felt sorry for my students and apologized to them, and after the semester gets over, am planning to write to the authors of the text book to look into the matter.