SaysDave.com

The broad acceptance of digital technology—the personal computer, in particular—creates a social breach between those who have access and those who do not. Access is not only a function of being able to buy a PC, but also a function of being able to operate the machine efficiently.

This thought came to me while I was sitting in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, drinking a cup of coffee and working through the last few pages of a book on multidimensional physics.

My acquaintances, John and Dan, and I went out for lunch last Sunday. I picked up Dan and together we drove to John’s house. As I hoped, John was ready to go, when we arrived—it was almost 2:30, and I was hungry. We had not seen one another in a while, so we were interested in catching up with one another’s news—especially John’s academic studies. John had a laughing about his falling asleep while reading a less-the-gripping textbook, a problem that plagues all scholars on occasion.

It did not strike us a unusual that a student would find a textbook dry until we remembered that John is blind. It was Dan who first remembered, and he asked John if he were reading the book or listening to the book on tape. I got to thinking about the problems that John might face while completing his academic work—what if a text were not published in audio format? I asked him about this, and he explained how he converts digital texts to audio format.

His comments have been twisting and turning in the back of my mind for the last few days. I am an academic, a full time faculty member. All of my texts are delivered in digital format, as either HTML or Adobe PDF documents. With the exception of two grammatical style manuals, all texts are digitized and delivered electronically, to both students and faculty. The university has a fully-digitized reference library, so with the exception of two writing references, all books are available in digital format.

Many of the Adobe PDF books are protected from unauthorized distribution by DRM (digital rights management) encryption, a system that allows only authorized recipients to open, view, and print the books.

Many of my students have complained that the publishers’ DRM encryption fails to work on home computers, so they are left to read each chapter in HTML, without being able to download and print the entire properly-formatted text,

As much as I advocated within the university for a conversion from physical to digital texts, I never imagined that the publishers would so bungle the books’ distribution chain. Protection of copyright is vital in America, and I so believer in copyright and other intellectual property protections that I made the topic the focus of my dissertation. However, unless the works are accessible to the scholars—the book’s consumers—who pay the bills, the DRM protections defeat their purpose: making the texts accessible only to those who have paid for the text.