I was really looking forward to today.
Today, the Sony PRS-505 eBook reader finally gets sold in Germany. Now, I already have mine since January, but the more exciting fact is that libri.de also announced selling their ebooks in the open epub format standard.
When I bought my first eBook at libri.de in January, I unfortunately only discovered after the buy that you can only read it with the Mobipocket reader. Sure, I bought this great eBook reader device so that I can read eBooks under Windows XP in kvm in this silly Mobipocket reader! (The Sony can’t run arbitrary programs like Mobipocket).
That’s why I was really excited about libri.de finally seeing the light and selling epubs. So off to libri.de, and order Ken Follett’s “Die Tore zur Welt” (“World without End”). But aaaaaaaaaargh! Not only that they use DRM (which, frankly, I expected them to, but after all, .epub has DRM capabilities, and the Sony reader has a serial number), but I’m again faced with a vendor lock-in: I can only download and convert those books with a thing called “Adobe Digital Editions”, which again of course only runs under some Windows versions. I didn’t try whether it works under kvm or wine yet (mobipocket didn’t run under wine, and Sony’s own library software doesn’t even run under kvm).
Goddammit, I just want to give you my credit card number, you give me the epub, I save it to the reader, and I want to be done with it! Pragmatically, if it’s DRMed and I don’t notice it, so be it. But jumping through hoops like that, installing a different library program for every eBook shop out there, and none of them even running on Linux? No, thanks.
But there is hope. It only took the music industry a couple of years before they saw the light and sold mp3s with no strings attached. Let’s see when the eBook industry stops repeating these errors and stops doing a format and vendor lock-in war as well. Then I hope eBooks will really start to soar.
Until then, Gutenberg and a lot of other great internet sites provide enough content for me to read.
#1 by Smurphy on 2009/03/11 - 10:44
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Just as a note – I have had exactly the same issue as you do. I have however found some tools on the Internet that allow me to remove the DRMrestrictions on all eBooks (so far, I have secure eReader, and secure Mobipocket).
I am very pragmatic about this. If I buy a Book, I think it is my right to be able to read it on my reader. So – I deDRM all my books, convert them into the appropriate format, and put them on my PRS-505.
It is a question of principle – and as long as the Industry does not understand that we, the ones BUYING their stuff, don’t want to be hassled by their useless Anti-Piracy measures, I’ll be keeping doing it this way. I already don’t buy any Copy-Protected Music CD anymore, and the same is valid for Blue-Ray. I still buy DVD – as I can still watch a movie on my Linux system while on travel !
#2 by martinpitt on 2009/03/11 - 11:06
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I read about such tools a while ago as well, but they were taken offline now.
Anyway, it’s not even my primary intention to de-DRM them. I know about the problems with DRM as well, but as long as it’s just tied to a device (or, rather, 3 or 6 of them), and doesn’t limit the number of times I can read them/copy them around, it doesn’t get in my way so much.
The thing I’m objecting to is that it is so much of a hassle to download and get them on my reader. I don’t actually want to impose morehassle upon me by converting and de-DRMing those books over and over, and I don’t want to use some questionable and illegal tool for that. I want getting those books easy and painless, and for that the eBook industry needs to understand that every ebook needs to run on every device, without vendor and operating specific tools.
#3 by Smurphy on 2009/03/11 - 11:20
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Have you tried Calibre ? Check out my Faq – there is a reference to it.
http://stargate.solsys.org/mod.php?mod=faq&op=extlist&topicid=39&expand=yes#145
I mostly do it because some of the DRM’d eBooks are so porly formatted and the layout not adapted to the PRS-505, that reading these is a real PITA.
From the Linux world I am used to adapt things to my needs, hence I do the same with the eBooks.
Regarding the DeDRM things – the tools are still available, and I also understand your Statement also that the content Industry wants to protect their Income.
But then – I’d rather say: Do it through Quality ! and not through the fact to treat everyone as a potential thief. This is what is frankly disturbing me.
You are a Thief, until the contrary has been proven – which is not likely going to happen. This is exactly what DRM does to us ! and I am not willing to accept it that way.
#4 by Rudd-O on 2009/03/11 - 13:23
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With that money, you should have gotten an iPhone or an UMPC (both PDF-capable) and hit mininova or tpb for PDFs or TXTs of the books you wanted. Why would you buy an one-trick piece of crap like that to read books?
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#5 by quamper on 2009/03/11 - 15:09
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If you’re into Science Fiction/Fantasy Baen’s webscriptions don’t have any DRM on them. Also Fictionwise’s multiformat books don’t have DRM.
Also I’ll second Calibre. I’ve got a PRS-505 and I love it and use Calibre exclusively.
A great site for discussing Ebooks/Readers/Formats/etc is mobileread.com they’ve got extensive forums.
#6 by Alberto on 2009/03/11 - 16:02
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I like the idea of eBooks but I have always thought there are two problems. The first is, of course, the DRMs many of the books have. The second is the paradigm: most of the formats (epub included) are locked into the old ‘turn of page’ concept so, in order to read a book, you need to read it turning pages. I think the ‘turn of page’ concept has been supersede by the ‘single page’ concept in which all the content of an article is in one page and you change pages only if you need to go to a different but related topic (or book) which is conveniently linked from the article where you are. This is the plus of the hypertext and most of the eBooks formats forgot there is something called ‘the internet’; the sole exception seems to be Plucker, which has, sadly, no released a new version in a long time.
#7 by martinpitt on 2009/03/11 - 16:22
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@Smurphy: Indeed I packaged calibre, and maintain it in Debian and Ubuntu
(see an earlier blog post of mine). I’m a huge fan of it.
calibre is fairly unrelated to buying books, though.
#8 by martinpitt on 2009/03/11 - 16:24
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But I don’t want an iPhone or UMPC. I want a light device whose battery lasts 14 days which is friendly to the eyes. Which a small backlit TFT very much isn’t.
#9 by martinpitt on 2009/03/12 - 01:07
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Ah, I finally found those tools, thanks! They do a fine job of de-DRMing a book, but they still require me to use this Adobe Digital Editions thingy.
Getting that one to work was no small task, and as software developer I’d like to think about myself of being able to handle computers:
1. I found a WinXP installation (on my wife’s computer)
2. Iread the “easy” 10-step howto from libri.de
3. I went to the adobe website, just to find a non-working “download” button
4. scrolling down it said that I don’t have Flash installed. So I installed that.
5. Opened browser again, went to the page again, and voila, download button worked
6. Download button auto-launches installer, which breaks after a couple of seconds, saying that the zip file is invalid.
7. Found a link “technical q&a” (or similar), and finally found a direct download link to the .exe installer
8. Installed ADE.
I’m inclined to say that my mother wouldn’t have done 2. and would have given up at 3. (Granted, she doesn’t need 1.
).
But after you did that, the pain isn’t over yet. You need another couple of steps to install the Sony library software, register your reader there, and then go back to ADE to be able to save the ebook on your Sony. Since I diverted here, and instead just saved the DRMed .epub to USB stick, walked over to my workstation, and fired those magic scripts and imported into calibre, I can’t say how painful that actually is.
In short: I don’t see this concept fly for the general consuming public with this attitude, brokenness, and vendor lock-in.
It could be so easy… click download, save on your Sony (it looks like a mass storage device after all, and you can put it anywhere you like really), done.
#10 by Smurphy on 2009/03/12 - 09:54
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This is the reason I actually buy only Multiformat eBooks at Fictionwise, or webscription which both have at least a non-DRM´d PRS-505 readable format.
At webscription.net BTW, there are a lot of free SF eBooks available. You have to register to the page though. Even eBooks you pay for at Fictionwise, are free there
@Alberto:
You are right for the “turn of page” context. The any2lrf converter from the calibre package can actually force a next-page (a thing the epub does not support). However you have to force it, means format the html-code to include the “pagebreak” tag. I did that with the converted pdf -> html -> lrf version of Sunborn from Jeffrey A. Carver as an exercise. It’s nice to have new pages for every chapter, and were it makes sense – but it has to be adapted manually for every ebook – which is a pain.
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#11 by Nathalie on 2009/08/22 - 07:01
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I have just received my PRS-600. And boy do i wish i have found your blog before i bought it. So far i’m not loving my first experience with my new e-Reader…
First I have a MacBook, but i made sure it was compatible and the nice man at the SALES department said it was. it’s not. if you go on there web site right now, there is no software for it and when you plug the reader in to the mac, it just does not see it.
I really wanted to start reading NOW, so i installed parrallels and windows on my mac. the windows installer does not work either…
So i figured i would find a way to stuff a pdf on it one way or an other. I went to the sony ebook store to buy a book. I thought it would be a sure place to buy it. After quit a bit of time (I wanted my first book to be THE BOOK
) I find my book, so i come to purchase it and to my big supprise i cant… because i’m canadian. so i see that there is a canadian sony ebook store. not everything is lost, i’ll just buy it from the canadian store. Nop cant do that either.. they dont have the license 
so i start to look at what i can buy. lol it’s a joke. i have more books than they do.
So i figured i would just go and buy it somewhere else. I made sure to see what type i could get. epub is one of them. little did i know the hell to come.
I buy the book and get a stupid .acsm file. and of course the software that i installed at the sony ebook store for my e-Reader does not want to have anything to do with my new book!!!
ok at this point i’m pissed off so i go back to the sony web site, do you think i found information on what to do woth this . acsm file?? nop i most certainly did not. Looked on the net and finaly found that i needed an other adobe application. I install the application and tadam there is my first new ebook
boy am i happy now, so i plug my reader back transfer the book to my reader and you wont believe me but it actually says protected page. I just paid for the goddamthing.
So if i make a resume of all this. I bought the e-reader for 399.00, parallels for 80.00, windows for 125.00 and my ebook 10.00.
spent more that 7 hours installing, uninstalling, googling and i still cant read my ebook on my new e-Reader
i could have planted a gazillions trees for the money i spent trying to save just one.
