

The automatically updatable book - bdfh42
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/02/the_automatical.php

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philjr
This isn't so much a criqitue of the theory of "updateable content" as it is
about the way in which it's updated. Nick lists the benefits, but, losing the
"permanence" of a hardcopy of a book works both ways.

In the printed forms, books can go out of print and become extremely rare
heightening their value and making it extremely difficult for them to be
acquired.

If someone recognises the problem and introduces a revision system to the
system in which books are updated, this is effectively sorted. Anyone could
potentially rollback.

Whether the updateable book or a revision history of changes is on the cards
is anyones guess however. I'd imagine the publishers would prefer this wasn't
the way it was implemented.

Also, I believe the example given is more censorship than anything wrong with
some sort of auto-update protocol. If a book is censored, for example, two
weeks after it's published and re-published thereafter, the number of
uncensored copies in distribution is probably extremely small. I can only
imagine in this scenario using a technology like the Kindle, that someone
would simply copy the original manuscript and redistribute it themselves.

Again, open formats make things like this easy to solve. Closed DRM-like
formats are going to make this hard. Guess which one we hackers want? :)

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thinkcomp
I just posted something related to this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476787>

The Interbook technology/brand I've developed is designed to let you keep
books in print, but update them on-line when and where appropriate.

