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Stardate 20010808.1250 (On Screen): This article describes the impending sale of an Agatha Christie book in digital format which will erase itself after ten hours. That's described as being "more than enough time" to read it -- but most people don't read a book cover to cover in a single sitting. One of the joys of a book is that you can read it whenever and whereever you want, a little at a time. Perhaps, rather, they mean ten hours of viewing time rather than ten hours of wallclock time.

I'm completely dubious about their claims. For one thing, I don't believe that it will actually disappear. Rather, I think that its reader will refuse to read it. They're using an Adobe format which is probably the one that was cracked by Dmitry Sklyarov's company. But even if they're not, what's to keep you from setting your clock ahead (say, to 2005) then downloading the book and installing it, and then setting your time back to normal, if they're using a fixed timeout? Or of archiving a copy of the file onto a CD while it's live and reloading it to disk as needed, if they're using a count-down?

Or if you really want to be creative, why not do a screen capture of each page, stored as graphics files, during that 10 hours? Then you feed those through a character recognition package and render them back as formatted text, no longer copy protected? With proper scripting tools, the entire conversion process could be automated, and should take much less than ten hours.

I'm actually expecting moderately good sales for this: not to people who want to read the book, but to people who will be challenged by the puzzle of cracking the copy protection. (discuss)