DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry 212
Presto Vivace writes "In a blog post, danps explains how the music industry initially thought that the Internet meant that people wanted their music for free. In 2003 Apple persuaded the industry to use an online music store with DRM. But DRM just does not work for consumers, so by 2011 online music stores were DRM-free. Sadly, the book industry has not learned these lessons. And there are larger lessons for the gadget industry: 'The tech industry right now is churning out lots of different devices, operating systems and form factors in an attempt to get the One True Gadget — the thing you'll take with you everywhere and use for everything. That's a lovely aspiration, but I don't see it happening. What I see instead is people wanting to only carry around one thing at a time, and rotating through several: Smart phone for everyday use, tablet for the beach, laptop for the road, etc. If you can't get the book you paid for on each of those devices, it's a pain. As a reader I want to be able to put a book on everything as soon as I buy it so I always have a local (non-Internet dependent) copy — no matter which thing I run out of the house with.'"
The textbook market is just as bad (Score:2)
The textbook market is just as bad small updates all the time to kill resale, paying teacher X per book (some even rip pages out and try use a used book you fail)
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Are you suggesting that teachers and college professors receive kickbacks on book sales?
Are you high?
That would cut into the publishers' profit margins.
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Doesn't Amazon provide what the OP wants? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't like DRM, and as a result I don't own a Kindle, but at least with Amazon, you still have Kindle apps on IOS, Android and for Desktops which allow you to read your Amazon ebook purchases on other devices. While the average Slashdot user, like me, would prefer DRM free ebooks so they could use any app on any device to read their books, the average Joe is going to be quite content with buying via Amazon and using the Kindle apps across devices. Using the same app across multiple devices to read your ebooks is a lot easier than juggling DRM free ebook files between different devices and apps (for the average Joe)
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The Kindle app is a horrible, slow, piece of poo whose only saving grace is that it's not as bad as the Adobe equivalent.
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Duh, I have the Kindle app on my Android tablet, on Windows and on Linux (through Wine). They all suck as e-book readers, at least when you have thousands of e-books.
Re:Doesn't Amazon provide what the OP wants? (Score:5, Informative)
Provides just more than that. Syncs reading all across tablets, e-readers, cellphones, and desktops. You can even put your own (or purchased elsewhere), DRM free book, send to kindle, and read in whatever device you have, in all of them if you want. That is a killer feature in a world where you can use a lot of different device, for different environments, to access your books. A service like that is needed, from Amazon or other players, but what matter is the broad reach across devices.
That books are DRM free is somewhat orthogonal with that. You must own what you purchase, DRM, in the other hand, is turning it into renting in practical terms.
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Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.
But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.
As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on
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What Kindle doesn't provide: orientation lock on WindowsPhone. Makes it impossible for me to read books in bed. I gave up on my kindle purchases a year ago and switched completely over to epub.
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You can also put your own content (DRM Free) on a Kindle account so that it syncs between devices just like purchased content.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle [amazon.com]
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Imagine 40 years from now, who will decrypt your precious library?
In the future? Just about anyone... Kindle DRM is fairly easy to break with current computers and in 40 years time it won't even register on a CPU usage graph...
Just doesn't make sense for books (Score:5, Informative)
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
With good OCR, books can be transcribed even faster.
Some people will read your book without buying it. You can't stop that. A lot of people are going to check your book out from the library and read it free too.
So DRM especially just prevents your legal readers from reading your book.
The beauty of DRM! (Score:2)
Its even sillier than that (Score:2)
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
If you can read it, then you have physical access to the encryption keys/algorithms used to protect it, so it is nigh-on impossible to stop someone, somewhere cracking the encryption.
Some people will read your book without buying it.
...and if they like it, many of those people will go on to buy your next book.
Seriously - look at your bookshelf, look at your CD collection. How many of those purchases happened because somebody previously lent you a book by that author, or gave you a MP3 or C90* of an album by that artist? DRM throws a spanner in that, while
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I don't think you can say "many of those people will go on to buy your next book."
I think it's reasonable to say, "some people who consume your entertainment will purchase more from you."
From what I've seen, a lot don't.
Advertisements work much better than word of mouth.
But people who use advertisements start min/maxing the entertainment.
Autotuning- not supporting anything fringe, dropping 17 products and only keeping the 3 most popular products on the shelf, only printing/publishing books/music/movies, etc
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Advertisements work much better than word of mouth.
From what I've heard from advertising people, no they don't. Advertising can help people discover stuff that no one knew about before. Advertisement can keep a specific product near front of a potential customer's mind. But for actually getting people to make a specific purchase, nothing beats and endorsement from people you know and trust.
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Try it and see - retyping a page of text takes many times longer than just reading it.
If only there were some way of getting a computer to automatically recognise text in an image and convert it into ASCII at high speed...
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Even granting your point,
It's would still be true that 10 people could transcribe 10 books in the time it would take each of them to read 10 books.
And in my prime- pre carpal tunnel, I typed 120wpm. I could transcribe a 50,000 word book about 8 hours with breaks.*
Scanning is even faster.
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For reference, Harry Potter has 1,084,170 words...
Sorcerer's Stones: 76,944
Chamber of Secrets: 85,141
Prisoner of Azkaban: 107,253
Goblet of Fire: 190,637
Order of the Phoenix: 257,045
Half-Blood Prince: 168,923
Deathly Hall
Actually, consumers didn't mind DRM (Score:2)
The general success of iTunes shows that consumers don't really mind DRM as long as it's not intrusive. Going DRM free was great, and DRM still exists for movies/TV shows on iTunes...and for most downloadable movies, etc. Audible still uses DRM as well, and they're not slowing down any.
At some point Apple's going to have to increase the device count on what's left of the Fairplay infrastructure...but until then, whatever's left of Fairplay really is fine.
As a note, what the OP wants already exists: it's cal
Re:Actually, consumers didn't mind DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
I call BS.
Consumers put up with DRM, in exactly the same way they put up with exorbitant prices for gas, "convenience fees" and other corporate tactics to sink a sump into their wallets.
When I buy movies, books, or music, if I can't jailbreak them, I don't buy them. Period. End of story.
Everybody I talk to either hates DRM or thanks me for telling them where the picklocks are.
But NOBODY "doesn't mind" DRM.
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On holidays I take my old e-ink reader which I will not miss too much if lost or stolen, and for that I buy books in (DRM'ed) epub or PD
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but most consumers will have no idea what you are talking about
Bullshit.
I've seen untecnhical friends and family bump into DRM quite often and they all think is sucks, even if they don't know what it is or why.
Like buying a DVD on holiday and trying to watch it back home.
Trying to copy/paste a quote from a book to email to someone.
Trying to watch a downloaded HD film on their TV (oh wrong cable/ no HDCP).
Trying to watch some downloaded TV at all when the internet connection is crappy (streaming only sevice
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So Much hate. I'm guessing you tried to sell your Steam account and they noticed which is your own fault for breaking their rules.
As for resale - Once, many years ago, when I was a poor teenager I resold games I no longer play and now I regret it.
I often think "Wow, [old game x] I haven't played that in years and it was great" then realise that I sold it and can't even attempt to try and get it running in DosBox. Lending to friends is more or less the same as selling, but without financial gain as I didn't
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I believe there's another legitmate use for DRM. I can go on my local library's site and "check-out" an audio book using OverDrive. OverDrive has DRM mainly to make sure you don't "keep" the audio book past it's due-date. Since I didn't buy this audio book and the DRM forces a standard library model, I really don't mind it. It allows the library to serve it's customers in a new way that is more convienent.
I gave up on OverDrive. When a major metro area has one "copy" of an ebook, there's no point in queuing up to be the 147th person in line to read it. The local branch often has multiple copies of popular books, even if they are in dead tree form. So I can get it faster that way than I can via the Internet.
As a consumer I do mind DRM (Score:2)
The general success of iTunes shows that
...is bloated unpleasant licence abusing (they made a south park episode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad [wikipedia.org]) itunes still relevant with the death of the iPod...and the decline of the iPhone, ironically it has several DRM free competitors that work through...a web page.
What is quite hilarious though is that DRM something Apple support as they currently benefit from it...will start to hurt them as customers are restricted migration to their platform.
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Isn't Google's music service DRM'ed, even if you "buy" the music? And things like Spotify are of course DRM'ed. Seems like even in music, it's reverting back to DRM. Seems like we're moving to a different model, where people don't "own" copies of entertainment / cultural works. It's not inherently a problem, if the majority prefers this model then people and business will be happy. There is one problem: things can be more easily censored and modified by government and business. (I'm against DRM, won't buy D
DRM Pain (Score:4, Informative)
I bought a couple of books on iBooks until I figured out that they were crippled by DRM. Naturally I couldn't view them on my Nexus 7, so I did two things:
1. I found torrents to decrypted copies of the books I purchased.
2. Never bought another book from iBooks.
I still buy DRM-laden books from Kobo, but I can still decrypt those with ePUBee. The minute I can't do that any more, I won't buy from them either.
As a bit of a kudo, any SF nuts out there, head over to Baen, who has a big chunk of their catalog available as non-DRM ePubs (along with other formats as well).
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Stripping the DRM off an iBook means installing an earlier version of iTunes. It was just easier for me to find the torrents and use other eReading software. Love my iPhone, won't touch iBooks.
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Quite frankly, you sound like a rabid apple-hater - Apple is far better than Amazon / Kobo or Google when it comes to DRM.
Oh, really?
So Apple has DRM-free books in their shop and marks them accordingly?
That's what Kobobooks does. And that's what Amazon does.
Pricing Plays a Role (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the choice between copying a song for free and paying 89 cents for a song legitimately, many people will choose the purchase, if it's easy enough.
Now, take a college student who can copy a textbook or purchase an eBook for $350.
That's why publishers want DRM - so they don't have to face the real value of their products.
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By "real value" do you mean the cost of copying it? Or the $1 people are willing to pay for the convenience instead of chasing it down on a pirate site for $0? Besides, you're confusing "real value" with rational behavior. If I'm drop dead in love with a song with a song and would pay $10 for it but it's offered for sale for $1 then of course I buy it. Just because you feel the total cost (moral, legal, financial) of copying that textbook is a better value than buying the $350 eBook the real value is neithe
Buy DRM free and use Calibre (Score:3)
Been reading ebooks since the 90's (Score:4, Insightful)
Look people, corporations are greedy bitches that only care about making a profit. Because they are greedy, they think everyone else is out to rip them off. Why? Because they rip us off every chance they get. They except people to pay full physical book prices for ebooks, when it cost way less to make a copy of an ebook then it does to make a physical book. They know they are ripping us off, thus they want DRM so they can gouge the stupid people that actually pay them for the ebooks.
Me? I've been downloading ebooks since the 90's. Way before the publishers got on the bandwagon. Sure, I might get some spelling (OCR errors), but I don't care. It's free. So why should I go from paying nothing, to paying over $10 for an ebook? Seriously, explain that one to me. The corporations do NOT care about me, they only care about is how much profit they can make off of me. Well, fuck them.
Bring old ebooks to the $2-3 price, and I'd consider buying them. New ebooks $5, max. I'd never pay more then $5 for an ebook, ever. Why? Because I can't sell it used. A physical book, I can take to a use book store and sell for some dollars, or trade for credit. That is value. Ebooks? Don't have a value and I sure as fuck ain't paying the corporations to fuck me over.
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Right, and you only care about paying as little as possible. What's your point?
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Look people, corporations are greedy bitches that only care about making a profit.
Right, and you only care about paying as little as possible. What's your point?
My point in about value. Why do physical books cost so much? Because it cost for the materials to make them. How much does it cost for ebooks? Very fucking little. But instead of getting cheaper books, we get DRM on the ebooks and high prices.
Can you sell your used ebook to offset the cost? No.
You like paying more for stuff then it's worth? Apparently you do, or you wouldn't of replied.
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Sigh... another fool on the Internet with bad grammar and no understanding of economics.
Books don't cost that much to bind and ship. This is definitely part of the cost of a physical book, and should be left off of the cost of an ebook. However, writing and even the non-physical portions of publishing (meaning editing, typesetting, getting cover art, and especially marketing) are not free. Writing in and of itself might not cost much of anything, but there is a huge opportunity cost; the time spent writing
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Now, as to what an actually reasonable price is for an ebook... that's an interesting question (and of course there's no one solid answer, because different types of book will command different prices). For your typical mass-market fiction novel of ~300-400 pages, the kind of thing that would be maybe $8 as a paperback at a bookstore, something around $3-$5
Yes, I price the e-book versions of my books between $3 and $4 for essentially that reason. I do feel guilty that the various e-book "standards" don't allow for anything remotely resembling decent typesetting, so people who read my books on electronic devices are having a definitely less-than-optimal experience. On the other hand, I go to great lengths to ensure that one doesn't see (as I have seen with e-books from big publishing houses) howlers such as the word "you" presented as "y-" "ou".
I believe tha
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Would you break into a writer's house and steal his TV? No? Then why would you steal a book he wrote?
If the writer is taking forever to get his next book out (I'm looking at you right now, George R.R. Martin, and also referring to Robert Jordan, maybe his soul take years to get where it's going, since it's Wheel of Time took decades), then me stealing his TV so he can focus on the book is probably for the best.
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OK, you hate the business model of publishers, so you want to do the unprincipled thing and read their stuff without paying for it and then rant about it. Instead of ranting you could find publishers whose business model you DO like--those that release DRM-free works--and be positive and support their business instead of ranting against those whose business you don't like, while benefiting from their labor. You would rather sink to the level of the publishers you despise. But it looks like you're okay with
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Look people, corporations are greedy bitches that only care about making a profit.
Guess what PEOPLE are greedy bitches that only care about saving money
So why should I go from paying nothing, to paying over $10 for an ebook? Seriously, explain that one to me.
Because it is wrong and illegal... Of course you know you can probably go to your local store and not pay for the loaf of bread, but you don't do you?
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A while ago I came across a writer that was making reasonable money with ebooks but couldn't get a deal with a dead tree publisher but really wanted physical print runs of his books for his own satisfaction. He typeset a book, arranged artwork etc himself and paid out of his own pocket for a (small) print run. He then *gave* the books away for free from a stall at local markets, literary events etc and invited people once they had read the book to either buy it if they liked it or give it to someone who t
Blog Posts (Score:2)
I don't use reader apps (Score:2)
Hate to say it... (Score:2)
The music industry situation was different. At the time the market went to drm-free by a landside, music playback devices by and large had no wireless or cellular radios. They were fixed-function devices that could only consume non-executable content (mostly). In that ecosystem, supporting multiple platforms was difficult to the point of being unfeasible. For the no-name cheap devices, DRM was completely out of reach. Customers more keenly felt the pitfalls of DRM given the state of the ecosystem. Eve
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"But DRM just does not work for consumers"? (Score:4, Insightful)
"But DRM just does not work for consumers"? I don't buy that. The scores of DVD and Bluray players and discs that have been sold suggests otherwise, as does the number of Netflix subscribers and the number of Kindles sold.
DRM did not work for music for two reasons. First, network access was not as ubiquitous in the Napster days as it is now. Back then, if you wanted to listen to your music on the go, you needed a local copy. Now you can get one over a cellular network. Second, there were no business models around digital music back then. Now there are. Apple of course did big business in DRMed music tracks before finally removing the DRM.
Further, if you want to put your Kindle book on everything, you can. You can read it on a PC, iPhone, Android, or Kindle.
learned what?! (Score:2)
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Certain publishers are DRM free to keep their pricing low. While not my cup of tea, I happen to know that Entangled Publishing http://www.entangledpublishing.com/ [entangledpublishing.com] is DRM free (fiance is interning there). I'm sure there are other smaller publishing houses that do the same... as with most things it's the big companies that have forgotten their customers.
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My 60+ year old mother had that same attitude until she got a Playbook then a Nook. Now it's a mix - book when she can, electronic for travel/convenience. Fiance has a massive collection of paper books but does almost all of her reading on electronic devices.
Personally I don't care either way - I tend not to read books (I read articles + studies instead).
Re:buy DRM free books (Score:4, Insightful)
I love paper-books and wouldn't buy any DRM encumbered e-book because some 30+ year old books I'm reading once a while and I don't trust any DRM-server to last that long.
But if a paper-book would get me a download of the same as an e-book I'm willing to spend a little bit more to have a significant chunk of my 4 digit number of books during travel.
I'm considering to build a scanner linear-book-scanner [google.com] to make my portable library but question my ability to build it ;-). This scanner seems to be able to scan a book without any human help. Start one book before going to work, one coming home and one before going to sleep gives more than 1000 books a year. A few years of minimal efford and all is done. If one could buy such a scanner for 1000-2000 eur I would start building my e-books tomorrow.
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But if a paper-book would get me a download of the same as an e-book I'm willing to spend a little bit more to have a significant chunk of my 4 digit number of books during travel.
O'Reilley publishing offers $4.95 "ebook upgrade" for any of their physical books you have. And those ebooks are offered in a variety of non-DRM formats.
They probably don't have a lot of the books you read, but it's good to see at least one publisher with a reasonable model.
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I carry my entire library on a form smaller than a postage stamp. There's just no replacement for that convenience.
Just make sure that there's also just no replacement for the library. DRM-free ebooks can be backed up to alternative locations in case the original memory chip goes bad and the publisher's servers have gone offline.
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Actually I'd say it really doesn't matter as it'll take another 20 years to convert the majority at least. I live just a block from the local library that is on the edge of a lovely park so i spend a LOT of time there talking to folks and most of the book lovers? Really don't want electronic books at all.
All fine and well, but just where the hell do you put the batteries in a paper book?
Re:buy DRM free books (Score:4, Informative)
With my nook I never have less than a hundred unread books ready and waiting to be read, it lasts weeks without a charge and can charge anywhere I can find a USB socket and my laptop battery can charge it a couple times if I don't use it for anything else. I like owning books, but haven't cracked a physical book in months.
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they like the feel, smell, texture of books
Ok I'm curious... I've heard this type of comment before, and I don't get it.
I read a lot before e-readers. I almost never smelt books, nor do I have some romantic idea about such things...
BUT If I wanted my ebook to smell and feel like paper I'd tape some newsprint to the back.
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"Really don't want electronic books at all. they like the feel, smell, texture of books, they like how they can just throw a paperback in their bag or backseat of the car and not have to worry about sunlight killing it, ..."
I have my kindle in always my pocket, with a couple of hundred books on it, I would never leave it in the car, because, then I can't read it when I want.
Unlike the paper you prefer, it has a built-in encyclopedia, that explains every unknown (and known) word just when I put my finger on
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I bought a kindle a few years ago now and if it ever dies I'll likely buy another, and even if I don't there are many ways for me to get at my books.
Not only does the Kindle DRM not bother me, the books are available, readable and automatically sync up over most portable, **non Amazon** devices with no real effort on my part. The lack of portability between non Apple mobile devices was probably they only thing that really fuelled the fire for Apple to drop DRM.
There are of course the 'lesser' DRM schemes t
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I received a kindle as a gift this Christmas. I am not a big reader. I like old fashioned books more. The DRM doesn't bother me. And I think mainstream publishers aren't shooting themselves in the foot with a bit of DRM.
I am just a bloody hard sell for any kind of book. I mostly read fiction. And in my youth I read a lot more then I do now. Though I think National Geographic would be interesting in e-reader format. Considering the nice color displays some have now.
One reason I never subscribed to National Geographic was that I could never bear to throw out back-issues and you can end up buried alive in them. So being able to pack them all into a virtually open-ended reader is a major plus.
The one downside to NG's archives are that they were actually shipping JPEG images of the pages, which can limit the quality of the text.
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Tor and Forge [macmillan.com] are DRM free as a matter of policy.
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Certain publishers are DRM free to keep their pricing low. While not my cup of tea, I happen to know that Entangled Publishing http://www.entangledpublishing.com/ [entangledpublishing.com] is DRM free (fiance is interning there). I'm sure there are other smaller publishing houses that do the same... as with most things it's the big companies that have forgotten their customers.
I'm not sure that the cost of DRM to the publisher is all that high. When I buy a Nook book, the actual DRM is applied by the B&N server as part of the download process, since it's specific to my user credentials.
Baen, Tor, and O'Reilly may not be the biggest publishers in the world, but they're hardly "smaller", and Baen and O'Reilly were philosophically against DRM from the beginning. Tor had some entanglements to resolve, but have since jumped on the bandwagon.
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Re:buy DRM free books (Score:4, Informative)
I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.
So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!
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For the costs of everything mentioned, it wouldn't be that much more per year to join Audible. The selection is excellent and even the worst readers are better than text to speech readers. I just spent around 100.00 for the best text to speech reader I could find, and it still hard to listen to for any extended amount of time. Out of well over 100 books in the last two years, I've only gotten a handful of crappy readers from Audible books.
Also, Audible is a piece of cake to break the DRM. You just convert t
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Audible is great for a lot of people, just not people like me. I agree the reading is generally high quality. On Android, the speed-up feature used to totally suck, but lately, they've copied my pitch-synchronous algorithms from libsonic, which I can tell from the new and improved sound quality. It's perfectly legal for them to do that: I give the software away as public domain software.
For around half of blind people, Audible is wonderful. For people like me, Audible is almost useless. First of all, t
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Taking a book to the beach means I'm doing it wrong too I take it?
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My tablet doesn't have a cellular connection. And if your beach has wifi, then I think you're doing it wrong.
My beach is part of the metro area. So yes, WiFi is an option. But since I only need the WiFi to buy the books, not to read them, more secluded beaches are not a problem either.
After all, if your beach is that close to a bookstore, you're also doing it wrong. And, come to think of it, a lot of bookstores have WiFi.
Re:Now if we could just kill PDF... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's my problem with them too. The last PDF eBook I got (which was an OCR'd scan of "Spy Catcher", because there's no actual eBook version available) I ended up converting it to a mobi so it actually displayed properly on my Kindle, modulo the OCR errors.
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FTFY. Pretty much every eBook format other than PDF—EPUB, Mobi, KF8, KePub, etc.—is based on HTML and CSS.
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PDF is almost better than Mobi - sure, it's based on HTML... v3.2. Pretty sure there's no actual CSS support, and MobiGen just converts it to <i> etc. tags.
But it does make for very nice EPUBs, you're right. :)
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Fair point. Mobi is just HTML, and really crufty HTML at that. You're correct about kindlegen converting the CSS to tags and attributes, with a very limited dialect. Fortunately, KF8 is supported on just about everything but fairly old Kindles and iOS. (Don't get me started on that last part.)
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You only need that if the PDF is actually just holding un-OCR'd images, rather than text. If the PDF contains text you can just extract it (afaicr the text blocks are just Deflated streams of text).
Re:Now if we could just kill PDF... (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is, PDF and ebooks are really at odds with one another.
The point of PDF is to render the exact same on each screen. Like a physical book, each page should always look the same (only zoomed or not zoomed). An ebook needs to be able to reflow the text to support changing aspect ratios, font sizes, etc. When you do this with PDF, you can just zoom in or out. If your application is actually reflowing a PDF, that means it's not really displaying a PDF. Instead, it is taking the content, extracting it, and displaying it in some native format.
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What an awful format for ebooks.
It works for me. Instead of whining that something is awful like you expect everyone to agree with you, why don't you elaborate on what you don't like about PDF-format ebooks? If a particular device doesn't handle them well, is that the format's fault? Explaining this would be much more constructive and educational for the rest of us.
Personally I use PDF-format ebooks with no problems. Usually I view them with Okular on my Linux netbook. It displays the text and images with no problems. If you can name a problem with them I didn't even know I had, let's hear it.
Yes, PDF documents formatted for an 11-inch tablet are at fault for being painful to read on a 7-in tablet. And I really prefer the 7-inch form for casual reading.
The HTML-based formats used natively on most e-readers are flexible because the goal on HTML is to render text readably on as wide a range of devices as possible - even my 3-inch phone screen (which I have read many books on, including War and Peace). HTML is about the information. PDF is the mechanism you want when you want something whose layout
Re:Don't blame the book industry... (Score:5, Informative)
Please stop spreading this myth about Amazon. Publishers are perfectly free to list their books without DRM - you can tell because the last sentence of a book's description will say "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied." You can also load DRM free books from other sources into the Kindle app. Of the 102 books on my Kindle, 49 are DRM free or in the public domain.
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If your doctor told you that you have a disease that make you cough incessantly and will kill you in 3 months, and he gave you a medicine that would stop the cough but not the kill, when there are medicines out there that cost less and do both, would you be happy you got the cough-only medicine?
Calibre is the Robitussin, sure--it makes you feel good, and at least lets you talk without sounding like some sci-fi monster, so it can be used if the other medicines are out of stock--but not adding the bloody DRM
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Your analogy is bad and you should feel bad.
When I strip the DRM from my purchased ePub documents, it's gone. There is no lingering death. There's nothing else to "cure". It's gone. I can access the contents of those files on any platform that can read ePub and I can convert the content to any other relevant format if I've got some weird device that can't read ePub.
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Google "epub download" and add some authors name and book title and you'll see why DRM doesn't work.
DRM doesn't change the availability of non-licensed download options.
There is really just one group of people that has to deal with DRM -- the people who actually are willing to buy your stuff. Anybody who doesn't want to pay will find the content DRM-free somewhere.
That's the lesson that the music industry learnt the hard way -- the people that aren't willing to pay are a lost cause either way, but DRM may a
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That's the lesson that the music industry learnt the hard way -- the people that aren't willing to pay are a lost cause either way, but DRM may alienate the paying customers.
that's ridiculous. you are essentially saying there there are two groups of people: ones that will pay for your music, and ones that won't. are you really denying the existence of people that would pay for your music if they couldn't download it?
when i was a kid, i spent untold $ on $15.99 CDs. there's no way i would have spent my very limited $ paying for music if i could have it almost instantly for free. i really doubt i'm usual here. if you have any doubts, i challenge you to ask any 16 year old what th
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I bought a few new, but then discovered the local used places :)
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Google "epub download"...
tl;dr, executive summary: Locks are for honest people.
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So, because the thing is available for free at a google search, book authors must punch their customers in the face every time they sell a book. That'll make people flock to the paid - punch enabled - version.
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Hmm. That's right....I own some O'Reilly eBooks...keep forgetting about them...almost as bad as Steam sales sometimes. "Lightknight, how would you like that $40 book for $20, in eBook format..." -> fine, fine, put it with the others, I'll eventually get around to reading it (when I recover from this backlog in the real world).
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Check your local library - mine has an "e-branch" which includes unlimited access to a Safari subscription, just gotta plug my card number in for access...