This company is a disaster. They are even too stupid to understand the concept of account deletion. "How to delete your Gumroad account: From your Advanced Settings page, scroll to the bottom of the page, then click Delete your Gumroad account? After you've deleted your account, if you try to log back in, Gumroad will make your account "live" once again. Therefore, if you really want to delete your account, click Delete your Gumroad account? and don't log in again. Just... just go." WTF? That's not DELETION, that's SCAM and a GDPR violation. https://help.gumroad.com/article/37-how-to-delete-your-gumro...
Not just that we expect to, we can. Back in the day you could download them as well, but it costs a lot of money: someone had to pay for the computer and phone line and then one computer per phone line was common. It also took a long time to download files at 300 baud, and often you were paying long distance rates to the phone company (which was far more expensive than long distance rates now despite inflation). Most of us were using audio cassettes to store our programs on, dreaming of a floppy disk that held 80k... (we knew hard drives existed, but they were so expensive that we didn't dare dream of them)
While it was possible to buy a multi-user computer, or a connection to the internet, we didn't even know such a thing existed. Not that it mattered, as practically the cost was far our of reach.
I never heard of that until much latter. There wasn't a dominate computer platform: as a kid I knew people with Apple II, C64, Atari, or TI. They were not compatible in general, so it doesn't really make sense to air such things. Even assuming the recording would work, my memory of cassette systems is they rarely worked. I typically saved everything to 3 different tapes to have a hope of reading back correctly eventually.
There wasn't a dominant platform in the UK either. We had multiple machines from Acorn (inc BBC Micro), Sinclair, Dragon and Amstrad plus the Commedores and Atari's you had too.
I don't think Apple really came to Europe until much later.
> we knew hard drives existed, but they were so expensive that we didn't dare dream of them
I was from a slightly later generation (I think); I got my first machine in 1984. I knew hard drives existed too - a 10 meg system would only cost about $8000.00 back then that would connect to my machine (TRS-80 CoCo 2). Sigh.
As far as "multi-user" was concerned - well, we had OS-9 - if one could afford it (plus you needed a dual-floppy system if you didn't want to be swapping all the time). It could support multiple users, but it needed some special hardware for it.
As a kid, I later got a CoCo 3 (sometime around 1987 or so) - and I ended up building a null-modem cable to connect both of them, so I could "share" programs from the floppy drive on my CoCo 3 to my CoCo 2. I also experimented around with BBS coding using that setup. It was my first "network", so to speak.
Not really in terms of just listings of code, but there are plenty of 'Learn Language X Through Games' type of books like 'Land of Lisp' or 'Automate the Boring Stuff in Python' that have the same feel.
It turns away more potential customers. The DRM has helped absolutely nothing to protect against copying. The book is already out there on the net as a now "DRM-free" PDF. It's a shame that illegally downloading it is currently the only way to get the format that many customers would be happy to pay for. If I were the author I'd hurry up and quickly put a DRM-free version on a service like Leanpub.
Absolutely. There are even studies [1, plus another recent one I can't find atm] suggesting that piracy can increase overall revenue due to larger exposure.
A digital watermark is automatically inserted customer information into a purchased product to restrict it's usage only to the buyer of that product. To me that's exactly like Digital Rights (Restrictions) Management. Calling something that contains digital watermarks DRM-free is deceptive to the customer. But long story short, if it contains watermarks I don't buy it.
The watermarks are discreet w/ no other information than your name. The PDFs require no passwords and can be loaded on up to 6 different devices. We have tried to come up with a solution that provides for the customer, but protects our authors' content as well. But certainly I can understand your point of view.
They don't protect anything. Probably 90% of your catalog is out there on the net and findable with a bit of googling. In the end it's just a bad business decision. You scare away potential customers and your stuff gets pirated anyway. You're degrading your own product and artificially creating a situation where the pirated product is actually a better one (one without a watermark) than the one you are legally selling. You've got to realize how insane that is.
O'Reilly, NoStarch, Packt and Leanpub books are fine since they're completely clean. But books from Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, Apress, Addison Wesley, Pearson and Sams are watermarked which I consider just as bad as DRM. I never buy digital books from publishers who watermark.
Watermarking puts the liability (maybe not legally) on the customer to protect the files from any third party access because there's always the risk that someone who gains access to them puts the files on the net with your name/email or user id on it. This is something no customer can realistically ensure and to me this is a huge restriction to the usage of the books. Second it's ugly as hell to have the watermark on every page. Third it sends the message to me as a customer that I'm not trusted. WTF dear publisher. I want to buy your ebook although I could find 90% of all ebooks for free on the net. Why do you think would I do that if I didn't want to support your business? You watermarking publishers need to realize that by watermarking you create a defective product. The people who pirate your books get a better product, one without a disgracing watermark. Whenever something like that happens, where the pirated product is better than the legally purchased one, it is a clear indication that the anti-piracy mechanism should be dropped. Big respect to Tim O'Reilly and Bill Pollock who are two of the few people who have fully understood that.
Ditto! This might be an unfair stance for me to take, but my thought is anyone opposed to them adding your name inside the book isn't using the book for a legitimate authorized use case most likely. It most certainly isn't a DRM to me in any normal sense and I'm perfectly ok with it.
Dammit, the epub format is such a disgrace for books, especially for those containing code snippets. I've yet to encounter a book that doesn't suffer from being published as epub. I prefer a well formatted pdf that just looks like the printed book, any time.
