Life In 19x19

palapiku wrote:

Bantari wrote:

palapiku wrote:Even that won't help you when dealing with a closed format. You may pirate a copy but you won't have any way to run iPad software ten years from now.

This is simply false.
Once I have an unlocked copy I can convert it into any format I want and then run it on whatever device I want.
And this is what I mean - buying legal locked data and then downloading the same stuff but unlocked/pirated. Downloading something that is locked to specific account would be pointless. Other than this - we are just talking different formats of data which can be converted, even if they are propriatory.

Are you saying there's a converter from iGoBooks to some open format?

In the amount of time you've spent arguing about this, you probably could have built it.

Bill Spight wrote:There are forces moving us towards a state of electronic tenancy, where what we have is owned by somebody else. I understand why it is happening, but I regard it as pernicious. As we know, serfdom can last for centuries.

Indeed.

This notion first arose with the ill-fated DivX initiative which attemped to put all control over your home video content in the hands of the content providers/creators. Movie studios and television networks would have had the ability to disable your DVDs, at any time, for whatever reasons they chose (Disney was chomping at the bit for this because they had a practice of rereleasing their animated classics into theatres on a 7-year cycle, and they wanted to be able to "turn off" everyone's home video copy of, say, Snow White during such a theatre run). Luckily, that was killed by consumer crusades at a time when the nascent DVD format would have suffered greatly from a marketplace format war with DivX.

Then Napster came along, put the fear (and rage) of God into the music industry at large, and then quietly transformed into media lessors with the catchy slogan, "Have everything, own nothing." It is the unspoken mantra of all those who advocate for electronic tenancy. And now the dark spectre of DivX is rising from the grave with a new name and new logo called Ultraviolet. It is trying to worm its way back into the marketplace under the Trojan Horse auspices of media portability and consumer convenience, when in fact, it is electronic tenancy that cedes ultimate control over the content to the creators.

Eventually the world will have all its data up on some cloud, where access to and control over it is willingly handed over to the technology megacorps who are not required to operate with any transparency and gladly participate in eroding and, ultimately, eliminating any and all old-fashioned notions of individual "ownership" of anything media-related.

I wholeheartedly agree that open formats would be best. Meanwhile, however, I have spent my life collecting (then tossing) records, cassette tapes (never had an 8-track), video tapes (both beta and VHS at different times), CD's, DVD's, and I don't know what else. Didn't everyone - everyone over the age of 20 maybe? So what else is new? This is no new global conspiracy, but rather the same old, same old. Fighting it seems like a good idea, but not to the extent of cutting off you nose to spite your face.

By the way, how many of the physical books that your parents lovingly collected and passed on to you have you passed on to your children in turn? In my case the number is zero - none from my parents to me because they had nothing from their youth that I was interested in and nothing from me to my kids for exactly the same reason (the ungrateful wretches!).

Bill Spight wrote:There are forces moving us towards a state of electronic tenancy, where what we have is owned by somebody else. I understand why it is happening, but I regard it as pernicious. As we know, serfdom can last for centuries.

Right now I can grab all the books off my Kindle and convert them into whatever format I want with little trouble. I imagine if the go world was a lot bigger in the West I'd be able to do the same with SmartGo Books. The problem will come when we are streaming content from servers not hosting it locally and this is coming, it's just impractical for anything other than music or film right now with current speeds for many things (and bluntly server costs and latency to do the processing server side for computer games). For books and the annoying fact (for publishers) that we often want to read them where internet access is not available or very, very slow, local side storage is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

That and the courts are comforting, at least in the EU: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... ital-Games

Guys, you are making one big mistake.
SmartGo Books or Nihon Kin books are not simple txt books. They are not epub, nor pdf, nor mobi. These books/magazines are interactive piece of software. What does it mean? It means that you will not be able to convert them in any way. You can probably build an interpreter / reader for these books for certain OS, but not a converter to other format - because all other formats are not interactive!

Second thing. If you really crying over inability to pass these books over - what will stop you from doing copy via screenshot of every page (this is 1 second on iOS) then just make a pdf from it in any pdf creator. Is it piracy and violating any agreements? Maybe. In a scenario where all iphones and ipads are doomed, and there will be no alternatives, and the authors of these mentioned earlier apps will not provide any resolution for this imaginary IT apocalypse then who cares?
But to believe in such scenario you need to be.... well, you name it.

palapiku wrote:From Apple's documentation:

Backup of purchased music is not available in all countries. Backup of purchased TV shows occurs only in the United States. Previous purchases may not be restored if they are no longer in the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore.

You certainly don't know how it works. Your local backup is independent from apple central and there is not even a single byte send to Apple, there is no veryfication of any kind when you do a restore from your local backup.

lobotommy wrote:Guys, you are making one big mistake.
SmartGo Books or Nihon Kin books are not simple txt books. They are not epub, nor pdf, nor mobi. These books/magazines are interactive piece of software. What does it mean? It means that you will not be able to convert them in any way. You can probably build an interpreter / reader for these books for certain OS, but not a converter to other format - because all other formats are not interactive!

Someone who created software with those capabilities would not have a hard time creating a format to go with it.

lobotommy wrote:Guys, you are making one big mistake.
SmartGo Books or Nihon Kin books are not simple txt books. They are not epub, nor pdf, nor mobi. These books/magazines are interactive piece of software. What does it mean? It means that you will not be able to convert them in any way. You can probably build an interpreter / reader for these books for certain OS, but not a converter to other format - because all other formats are not interactive!

When did we talk about converting SmartGo Books? What was talked about was someone creating a reader for the book files which if I remember correctly are a modified form of SGF file (presumably with DRM). The only reason you "convert" a Kindle book is because the format is proprietary and not readable on other devices/apps other than Amazon ones. It's really a .mobi file with the .azw files, so you're just removing DRM to make it readable elsewhere, the .mobi format is portable the .azw is not. If there weren't other formats for ebooks and thus something to convert to someone would just create a reader for .azw.

lobotommy wrote:Guys, you are making one big mistake.
SmartGo Books or Nihon Kin books are not simple txt books. They are not epub, nor pdf, nor mobi. These books/magazines are interactive piece of software. What does it mean? It means that you will not be able to convert them in any way. You can probably build an interpreter / reader for these books for certain OS, but not a converter to other format - because all other formats are not interactive!

One of all... this is not what we talk about.
Two of all... content is content, interactive or not. Extracted into another format the data can lose some interactivity, but will still contain a lot/most/all of the content. Many/Most/All of the SmartGo books are the same books you can already purchase in other formats for other devices, even as paper books. So I am not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Hmm... It looks I lost the track and need to re-read the topic then. Pass.