Alan D. Taylor: Social Choice and the Mathematics of Manipulation
Sun, Dec 17, 2006./choice/social-choice | LinkThis book is linked from a lot of social-choice related pages on Wikipedia (a great way to advertise your book, for sure), covers an impressive selection of topics and got a good review. It's available as an eBook for $US20, or I could pay more, wait a month and get a dead tree from Alibris. What the heck, I think, how good can PDF DRM lockdown be these days?
I paid my money, Adobe Reader's iceberg functionality kicked in to
download the book in a very mysterious way, and then crashed. No worries, I
download it again, and this time it works. Not confidence-inspiring, and
apparently eBooks.com has had
plenty of experience on that score.
After futzing around with it for a while, the cons of the Digital Editions DRM become apparent. It seems to be locked to this machine. No other PDF viewer groks the file. The DRM-removing tools tend to not work for eBooks. Ultimately this means I cannot print the whole thing (which is as the publisher intends) or share it as one would by loaning the dead tree to someone. The pros are that one saves about a third of the cost and doesn't have to wait on the post, neither of which justifies such a loss of utility to me.
