A story on SlashDot today mentioned that one of the bookstores at Princeton was now offering E-Books at a 33% discount to regular books to the students. The catch? After 5 months, the books automatically “shut down”, and can’t be used anymore. On the surface this seems harmless enough, but when you think about it a bit more you start to see how dangerous this can be.

  1. Aren’t textbooks supposed to double as reference-books after class is complete?
  2. Aren’t institutions, like universities, supposed to be the champions of education & the advancement of knowledge?
  3. A paper book can last 15 years or more, yet these e-books only last 5 months? And it’s only a 33% reduction in price?

The second one is the most disturbing. Universities are supposed to be championing the public’s ability to learn and read, the free (as in speech) exchange of information to further advance the public knowledge. By using these DRM‘ed textbooks, you’re ensuring that not only can students not refer to this knowledge after class, but attempts to do so are illegal under the DMCA. The federal government is already pressuring libraries to track checkouts of books containing “sensitive material”, in hopes of tracking terrorists. Librarians are surprisingly concerned about the public’s privacy and have fought this hard, unbeknownst to most of us sadly. But if DRM Books become more popular, it may become an inevitability controlled by the publisher, rather than the distributor.

For an example of the kind of stuff this could be leading to, Richard Stallman wrote an excellent piece called The Right to Read when the DMCA was first proposed. I highly recommend it.

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