[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Micah R Ledbetter]

On Apr 17, 2007, at 13:35, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> I don't want the hassle of licensing and locked data, even if they  
> made
> it 1 penny per year.
>
> None of them seem to understand that, they think it is all about the
> price.

The price is important, though. Not just for e-libs, either... so  
many academic journals are $1000/year or somesuch.

> I once used a service that was decent, but you had to pay to download
> what it found.  It was cheap so I tried it.  Then I found out that  
> what
> you downloaded was encrypted with an expiring key!

Ugh. At my school (University of Texas), at least one of the online  
"libraries" that we subscribe to does the encryption thing... it's so  
they can recreate the whole delightful experience of checking out  
books and then not being able to read them after a certain period of  
time - just like a real library! I think you could only get them for  
24 hours at a time, and then you had to go back and do it again.

I'm just sure that somewhere, they've even added the "feature" of  
allowing only a certain number of articles/books to be "checked out"  
at one time... so that only X number of "copies" are owned by the e- 
lib, then only that many people can view it at once. AAh! :)

  - Micah