No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings. →
On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.
Publishing’s ongoing war on libraries over ebooks, as detailed by Jessamyn West, is one reason why I don’t feel guilty about the fact that when I have library loans expiring on my Kindle, I simply leave off the device’s wifi and keep reading at my leisure.
On the server end, the expiring book still gets released back into the library’s queue for the next reader with a hold on it, but my device doesn’t delete it; library-loan Kindle books aren’t flagged with any sort of automatic expiration date or deletion process. (Technically, if you always transfer via USB and never use wifi, you could “return” titles on the web from your Overdrive account right after borrowing them, immediately putting them back into the holds queue, while still having a local copy on your device.)
If publishers are going to make it tougher for libraries to be libraries, I’m not going to argue for outright piracy but I’ve got no qualms about using loopholes in the technology that just happen to thwart publishers’ licensing terms for libraries.
Referring posts
Originally published to write.house by Bix Frankonis. Comments and replies by email are welcome.