Scifi available in E-Books

[[deleted user]]

Deeptanshu wrote: "Frankly i never understood peoples fascination with Farmville, I found it a pretty boring game."

Most of what I know about FarmVille is from the financial pages when Zynga went public and nose dived.

[[deleted user]]

Here's yet another really dumb idea:

New ebook DRM will change the text of a story to prevent piracy

The idea behind SiDiM isn't so much to prevent piracy as to watermark every e-book sold so its actual text is unique to each purchaser, making it possible to track down the source of any pirate copy. (And then what?)

It does this by making some "minor" changes to punctuation, changing the order of words in lists, and occasionally substituting synonyms!

I can't wait until my favorite quotes don't match your favorite quotes...

"There ain't no such thing as a complementary lunch."
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

"Winter is approaching."
- A Game of Thrones

"The Wheel of Time rotates, and Ages pass and come, leaving memories that become Legend. Legend fades to myth, and even fable is long forgotten when the Age that gave it nativity comes again.”
- The Wheel of Time

“It was a bright gelid day in April, and the timepieces were striking thirteen."
- 1984

GoodeReader has some actual samples from SiDiM.

[[deleted user]]

If there is any kind of award for really dumb ideas in publishing, this one is a sure win with any competition left way behind. Who the heck comes up with such "innovations"?

[Jim]

Wow. The idiocy is astounding. I would have thought that the music industry's fight with DRM would have taught publishers something. Apparently not.

[Sabrina]

I love what some artists like Amanda Palmer has done with her music. I'll just let her mission statement sum it up:
http://amandapalmer.net/producttypes/...

The author of the 'The Devil's Grin' basically adopted a similar attitude with pirating. I think her last sentence sums it up beautifully. Here's her blog snippet about piracy:

Piracy cannot be helped. No matter how loud you scream for the police or the devil. But it might work in your favour by spreading the word for you. Remember, for the word-of-mouth to spread, you’ll need a lot of mouths!
As I found links to pirated versions of my book on file-sharing sites, I freaked and sent them acidic emails. Now, a month later, I came to like my “pirates” very much. They taught me how to properly format my e-books and which programs to use. Now, my books are posted on their site and I keep providing them with the newest editions. In return, some of them buy my books and recommend them to their friends. How many book sales will be lost or gained, I cannot tell. But to me, having readers is more important than sitting on a pile of stories no one ever came to enjoy.

You can read the whole blog here: http://kronbergcrime.blogspot.com/201...

[[deleted user]]

im with G33....this is insanity

[Jim]

I think Palmer has it right. Obscurity is the author's biggest enemy. There are too many books out there now, probably over a million published yearly now, twice what there was a decade or so ago. I read maybe 150 books a year. The math says it's all my choice.

How much am I going to hassle with a book? If DRM or price is too much of a pain, I'm going to find a book that isn't. Even at the library, I find I'm grabbing more mp3 books than wma because there are plenty & I never have a problem with the mp3's. Too often I've gone to listen to the wma only to have the licensing get screwed up.

[[deleted user]]

my 101 on the DRM thing...if I pay for something, it should be MINE, now and forever. But my Kindle library is growing to the point i am starting to worry...they SAY these books are mine when i am handing over my money, but will i still have access to them 10 years from now?

I got my Kindle after loseing a killer library to fire...besides i live in a small apt, not lots of room for books...

He who controls the DRM controls access.

[Deeptanshu]

G33z3r wrote: "Deeptanshu wrote: "Frankly i never understood peoples fascination with Farmville, I found it a pretty boring game."

Most of what I know about FarmVille is from the financial pages when Zynga went ..."

Trust me when i say that you did not miss much.
Many of these so called free games carry significant costs and make live extremely difficult for those not willing to fork over a 100 dollars for a supposedly free game. Its often cheaper to just buy a proper game for your PC or console.

[I.E.]

Spooky1947 wrote: "But my Kindle library is growing to the point i am starting to worry...they SAY these books are mine when i am handing over my money, but will i still have access to them 10 years from now?"

As an author, I do not add DRM on my books for that reason. I want readers to be able to read the book on any contraption they would want.

I'd say the only problem with accessing ebooks years from now would be obsolete technology. It's like having records or eight tracks and only having an mp3 player.

[Fredrik]

When they introduced ebooks in Norway, they chose Adobe Reader epub-files with DRM. This means you can't read them on your Kindle. I've been using a DRM removal tool plugin in Calibre. Works fine, and I can then read the books on my Kindle. Don't feel bad about it at all. I've paid for them and I'm not sharing them. :)

And another tip. The "free 3G" abroad is paid for by adding a couple of dollars to every book (those $0.99 titles always cost three bucks when I buy them from Norway. I read about a guy from Canada with the same experience.) Using ProxMate plugin for Chrome gives me the opportunity to pay the same as U.S. customers.

[[deleted user]]

Fredrik wrote: "When they introduced ebooks in Norway, they chose Adobe Reader epub-files with DRM. This means you can't read them on your Kindle. I've been using a DRM removal tool plugin in Calibre. Works fine, ..."

I use Calibre, too. It allows tagging so I can organize my e-books.

Back in the early days of the Apple iTunes store and iPod, I purchased music which was then DRMed. Of course, it wouldn't play on my Kindle Fire until I stripped the DRM. Sooner or later, e-books will present the same dilemma. (Though one tends to listen to a purchased piece of music more often than one reads a book.)

The ugliness of this SiDiM watermarking is in its assumption that the author's original choice of words didn't really matter, and any old synonym will serve.

[[deleted user]]

Spooky1947 wrote: "if I pay for something, it should be MINE, now and forever. But my Kindle library is growing to the point i am starting to worry...they SAY these books are mine when i am ..."

If you're looking for a reason to worry about access to your Kindle library, here's an article from today about a woman who lost some access to her e-book library when Amazon suspended her account (some credit card issue. She can still read anything currently loaded on her Kindle.)

[E.D.]

He who controls the Cloud, has you by the yarbles. Is your data yours when it sits in someone else's server? Why would any individual, let alone business, open themselves up to extortion? Flash drives ain't that costly, really. Why do people so easily become tech lemmings?

[[deleted user]]

E.D. wrote: "He who controls the Cloud, has you by the yarbles. Is your data yours when it sits in someone else's server? Why would any individual, let alone business, open themselves up to extortion? ..."

Generally agreed. The Cloud has uses as a supplementary storage. Easy to access material that wouldn't all fit on a small device like a phone or eReader, and easy to backup files off-site.

The web is littered with vanished Cloud services, from GeoCities, Kodak Gallery, Yahoo360, to .Mac.

I still keep copies of everything locally (usually with the DRM already removed.) Maybe it's because I'm old, but I like my eBooks in Cailbre, just in case.

One of Goodreads best features is the "export" button on the "My Books" page. It means all the information I've entered here is still mine to keep (and I pull it down locally every month.)

[Jim]

You've all pointed out reasons why I avoid DRM. Actually, I avoid any proprietary formats & programs as much as possible. I still have files from my old Atari back in the 80's & have fought many conversion battles over the years. I've lost a few & sometimes not due my doing or actual issues with the file formats, but simply because of where the files were stored.

Notably, my uncle's PC. He took a lot of pictures from before I was born & many were on slides. He scanned & took more digital photos, but never really understood how his computer worked. Then he used a proprietary program to put all of them into albums with annotations. It was a huge undertaking that only he could really do. He was slowly dying of Parkinson's as he closed in on his 80th birthday. Many of the pictures were of family & friends long dead.

While I was living nearby, it wasn't a huge problem for me to keep things straight, but I moved away. He asked my cousin to help him upgrade his computer & they did without my knowledge, disposing of the old machine. New photo software, the huge number of photos & his declining health masked the fact that most of the photos didn't get transferred. After he died, I found out when my cousin handed me a flash drive with 5gb of pictures on it. He'd copied what he thought were all my uncle's documents & photos, never realizing how much was lost.

I probably have half of those photos in a box about a cubic foot square as slides with no dates or anything on them. They're about as completely lost as can be, even though they're still there.

Kindle & other books could easily go the same way, if you're not careful. If you use the Kindle app on a PC, you can sync it to your account then find the book in your files with a weird name & file extension. If they're not DRM protected, you can easily copy them elsewhere, change the file name to something recognizable & the file extension to .mobi & read them with any mobi reader/converter program. If they are DRM protected, I suppose you can break the DRM, although I haven't looked into it much. The last thing I saw for that was pretty ugly, though.

Still, the biggest issue is keeping up with it & storing the files in a place where they are recognizable & easily backed up. Not sure about the legality of passing them along when you die. There was recently an article about that - somebody tried to leave their ebook library to someone in their will - & it was being contested. G33z3r, did you post that?

[[deleted user]]

Jim wrote: "Not sure about the legality of passing them along when you die. There was recently an article about that - somebody tried to leave their ebook library to someone in their will - & it was being contested. G33z3r, did you post that?..."

No, I don't think so, but I do know of this New York Times opinion piece on the general subject:

Where Do e-Books Go When You Die?

I think the real answer is that your kids are savvy enough to remove the DRM from any of your e-books they actually want to read.

[infael]

I have Calibre but haven't played with it much. I downloaded it to remove Kindle DRM, was not successful at all.

I save my books to a flash drive. They always have numbers so I rename to the book title. I haven't done this for a while and it's way past time for me to save ebooks to my flash drive.

[E.D.]

For those of us who recall the changeover from rotary to touch tone dialing, there still remains a little "awe and wonder" when it comes to the web. Our children lack this perspective. They embrace "upgrades". They expect them. They "accept" them.
They pat us on the head and smirk when we lament bandwidth becoming a commodity.
We end up facing each other across the table simultaneously saying: "..you just don't get it, do you?"

[Jim]

Interesting, although not the article I was thinking of. Did a quick search & didn't see it, either.

No matter, but it does bring up the whole thing of what happens to electronic content when you die. Do you have a list of all those accounts & instructions on what to do with them? I do, but few others I've talked to do. Most won't be an issue, but some will need closure. Here, for instance. Any credit cards should be cancelled, but other online payment accounts might need emptying or closing. It's way beyond most lawyers & wills. We had ours done last year & the lwayer never mentioned it. Luckily, I have a techy son to dump the problem on.

[infael]

I've thought about the electronic access issue as well, but only because an old college roommate had an uncle who hopped from job to job throughout his left. The uncle always opened a local account for his pay then left that account open when he moved on to another job. He died without leaving a list. No one had any idea of where his money could be or if recoverable.

[E.D.]

Ahhh...the cyber-undead. Children of the ether. What sweet metadata they make?

[Xdyj]

infael wrote: "I have Calibre but haven't played with it much. I downloaded it to remove Kindle DRM, was not successful at all.

I save my books to a flash drive. They always have numbers so I rename to the book..."

Calibre itself can not remove DRM. It can only convert non-DRMed book from one format to another. However there are plenty of open sourced de-DRM tools available online & it is easy to find one if you Google it. As to possible legal issues I've seen conflicting views so I'm not sure, but personally I think they should be considered protected speech.

[[deleted user]]

screw the legal issues...i paid for these ones and zeros and i will damn well do as i please with them...what is the best (as well as easy to use) DRM stripper out there? i mean im sick of it...in the days of records and CDs we OWNED our music, now with mp.3s we only RENT it...im starting to feel like a real sucker here. I lost a HUGE library of books and comics -- the work of a lifetime of collecting -- to a fire sometime back (no insurance...i was refused fire insurance on my library by all but one carrier, and they wanted several thousand a year to cover it), so I turn to digital...fire cant burn it, but Amazon can taketh away...im getting angry...

[Jim]

There are a lot of DRM stripping programs out there, but quite a few also infect your computer, so be careful. Some work pretty well, others have issues. Test any before buying. Any remarks I make are on the Windows platform.

DRM Converter Platinum is good for most sound files such as ripping wma to mp3. They're here:
http://www.drm-converter.com/st.php

I've tried a few ebook ones, but never been thrilled. The latest was "Kindle DRM Removal" but it didn't work on one of the test files. You can try 5 for free.
http://www.ebook-converter.com/kindle...

They have an epub one, too.
http://www.ebook-converter.com/epub-d...

The biggest problem with Kindle files is figuring out what they are. By default, they're stored in your
My Documents\My Kindle Content folder with file names such as B005BSRAZO_EBOK.azw

(There are other files with different extensions in there, but you can ignore most. Some non-DRM'd ones will have readable names with a .mobi extension.)

The regular names are not very helpful. The easiest way to figure out which is which is by date. Since most don't know that or put them on their PC the same time they put them on their Kindle, dragging them into Calibre is the next best choice. It will give you the name, but if you double click on it, will tell you it's locked. Then you can drag it into a converter & rename the result, if it doesn't do it for you.

------------

The remarks above shouldn't be taken to mean that I support DRM'd files or Kindle in general. I don't. I don't own a Kindle & won't buy one. I do have the Kindle App on my PC simply because I have supported a few authors who published that way. Typically, they will ask me to R&R their book. They send it to me via email in non-DRM format (e.g. epub or mobi) & I read it on my Sony ereader. If I really like the book & want to support the author, I will buy it. Occasionally I have also gotten a free book that way, but only have a dozen.

While I won't say, "Screw the legal issues." I vote with my wallet by typically not supporting either proprietary formats or DRM. I think anyone who does is foolish - you're giving the company power over you.

I completely agree with the idea that buying a book gives me full rights to it, but also try to obey the law. I also understand that physical books & sound media have built-in obsolescence which digital ones don't. (I've had many copies of CSN&Y's "4 Way Street" in LP, cassette, & CD. I don't think I had that album on 8 track, but I had quite a few of those, too.) This is a consideration, but I've paid my dues to my favorite artists over the years & still purchase both music & books legally to support them. I want them to keep producing.

However, I am a computer tech & do test software programs & am interested in the state of those that bypass legal restrictions. This includes which ones include spyware & what their legal agreements are since my users often put them on their PC's. Also, I used such programs before they were illegal & like to keep up on the state of the art a bit. I am not particularly knowledgeable in the area, though. If anyone knows of better, safer programs, please let me know, either here or through a PM. I'd appreciate it.

[Steve]

Can I ask some dumb questions? I have a standard e-ink Kindle, and occasionally use Kindle app on my Android phone. Are all Kindle books DRM protected, or are some DRM free? How do I tell, and if DRM free, how do I legally get access to them not on a Kindle device?

I'm not hugely bothered about a lot of my books - before Kindle I'd give away a lot of books I wasn't going to read again to save on bookshelf space. But there's still quite a lot I like to keep and would be upset if one day I lost access to them.

[[deleted user]]

Some of the books on Amazon are DRM protected; some not. If you try to add a DRM'd book to your Calibre collection, you will fail with Calibre complaining about said DRM. As far as I know there is no way in advance to say whether an ebook is crippled with it, but I found that if you ask the author of the book, he/she is usually nice enough to tell you whether it is the case.

[[deleted user]]

Calibre is a free e-book organizer & reader for desktop computers. You can Download Calibre Here for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Its interface isn't as slick as iTunes or Amazon provide, but it's free and both platform and vendor agnostic, and permits organization by tagging.

(These days, I'm trusting to Goodreads to keep track of my books for me. What's to organize? Well, some of my books are on my shelves, some on my Kindle or desktop, and some are audiobooks, and a bunch were borrowed so there's no sense in me searching for them on my shelves!)

If you want to remove DRM from an e-book file, and if it's legal in your country to do so, I suggest checking out Apprentice Alf's free plugin for Calibre. Among other things, you will need that to read your DRM'd e-books in Calibre.

Note that like Jim, I am not in any way advocating doing anything with these e-books beyond your own personal use. It's insurance against device lock-in and technological obsolescence. I don't understand how one can be a fan of an author and not support him or her with a purchase.

[[deleted user]]

Steve wrote: "I have a standard e-ink Kindle, and occasionally use Kindle app on my Android phone. Are all Kindle books DRM protected, or are some DRM free? How do I tell, and if DRM free, how do I legally get access to them not on a Kindle device?..."

Steve,
Amazon often annotate any books they sell without DRM with the notation "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied." Usually under "Book Description". Otherwise, you should probably assume DRM is present on Kindle books, even freebies. (The same applies to Apple iBooks, B&N Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader stores.) Tor & Baen are examples of SF/F publishers that have gone DRM-free.

Any eBook you buy from a site other than Amazon that you can still read on your Kindle, e.g. Smashwords, will not have DRM. Nor will old, out-of-copyright books downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Those would be e-books you downloaded to your desktop and then either e-mailed or side-loaded with a USB cable to your Kindle.

As Evgeny just wrote, the only sure way to tell if an e-book has DRM is to try to read it on something that's not an Amazon Kindle reader or application, but otherwise supports Amazon's .mobi format; e.g. Calibre.

As Jim suggested, you'll want to download Amazon's Kindle Reader App for your Desktop (Windows of Mac) to back up your Amazon eBooks on local storage. The Kindle App will Download your Cloud e-books from Amazon to read locally (Though it won't download the e-book file until you open the e-book in the application. The location where it stores the file depends on your desktop OS.)

[E.D.]

This topic is hot on author/publisher sites. To DRM or not DRM is the author/publishers choice. Some fear being "robbed" and some consider their readers rights as paramount. The overall consensus seems to favor not using DRM. I concur on that.
Formats (.mobi, epub) are the retailer's decision. The Man gots the power. Live it, or live with it.
You can get it if you really want it. Reggae. Ja, mon!
Buy it if you can, nick it if you have to,..but read it. Then spread the word.

[Steve]

Thanks for all the advice and suggestions. I'm going to download the Kindle Reader Desktop app and download my books. Will also get Calibre and have a play around.

[Fredrik]

I believe the main reason for piracy has been availability (or rather lack of). Ten-twelve year ago it was hard to obtain a (non-pdf) ebook. I had a Dell PDA back then and started to read otherwise hard to get books. Now I have more money than spare-time to read. So now I pay for every copyrighted book I want to read. It's the same with Spotify; I don't need to get mp3s since most titles are available with my subscription ($15/month, Premium = offline listening on my phone) unless I really like the music 'cause then I buy it. With HBO and Netflix streaming I'm offered more than I have time to watch.

DRM doesn't stop piracy. The irony is that pirated stuff is DRM free, but legally bought stuff has a lot of restrictions.

[Jim]

Microsoft had quite a few books in .lit format. Like they did with tablets, they were ahead of their time & didn't do it very well, though. Just last week I was cleaning off a user's PC & found that he had a whole directory of .lit files in an innocuously named directory. Most were porn.

[E.D.]

Und, vould you describe zis collection as "vintage" porn?

[[deleted user]]

DRM...I'm sure everyone here has seen where Microsoft has been in the news with the X-Box One (Micro$oft wanted you to log on to the net every day for the X-Box One to check the DMR on your games, no selling of your used games, no loaning to friends, ect.). What's more this isnt the first time MS has tried to pull a fast one like this (years ago with the orginal X-Box)...im not a huge gamer, but ive had to toss out my share of games i bought for my desktop because i lost the product key (bought LEGAL for ghod's sake)....its pretty messed up when DRM keeps us from useing what we paid cash for).

[[deleted user]]

Hows this for a story idea....call it The Data Died...ALL out digital stuff is in the cloud...NO hard copies...we dont even make paper anymore...then something or other happens (maybe a EMP pulse) and we lose all the servers....

[[deleted user]]

make that "The Day the Data Died"

[Jim]

E.D. wrote: "Und, vould you describe zis collection as "vintage" porn?"

I don't think so, but didn't spend much time looking. It's pretty standard to find 'objectionable content' or sites on PC's, so I just go through & nuke most personal stuff outside the profile (which I also delete) quickly without comment. No time or sense in looking.

[E.D.]

Sorry, Jim. Couldn't resist the "Thought Policeman" urge. Really was thinking "lit.file"..."vintage"...
Old is a relative term, digitally speaking.

[Jim]

No problem. I get that 'thought police' or 'snoop' a lot in my job. I do have access to everything, whenever I want, but I don't want. I have no interest in looking at what users' kinks & quirks are. I'm not kissing them, so why would or should I care? Actually, I'm pretty crazy on the whole privacy thing. I won't even open my wife's or kids' mail without their express permission, even if it looks like junk. So, unless the user is doing something stupid on the computer that harms it, I don't pry.

My comment on Microsoft's .lit files was because they seem old to me, but they came out in 2000 & haven't been supported in years - since about the time ebooks really became popular. How weird is that?

Proprietary formats come & go rapidly. As you say, digital age is relative. It's best to stick with something that pretty much HAS to stay or be easily converted. My old Atari files were in .txt format, but even old Word files will probably be easily converted for decades since there are so many.

That's not the case with DRM programs or readers. They're changing those pretty constantly & legally, they can change them without notice. Oh, they'll have to make some type of conversion available, but it doesn't have to be easy. A lot depends on who is running the company & how good the business is.

A company as big & profitable as Amazon probably won't do anything too stupid to tick off their users, but it's not a certainty. Look at IBM, Microsoft, SCO, or Novell. The last two are pretty much gone & they were giants in the field in the 80's. IBM was a huge player in the PC field & managed to screw that up incredibly. Now Microsoft has come out with Windows 8 & dropped .lit files. Need I say more?
;-)

[[deleted user]]

Jim wrote: "It's best to stick with something that pretty much HAS to stay or be easily converted. My old Atari files were in .txt format, but even old Word files will probably be easily converted for decades since there are so many. ..."


Luckily, after I wrote my thesis in 1971, I saved it as a plain text file. Now, if I can just find an 80 column Hollerith punchcard reader that will connect to my desktop... :)

Which is to say, if you're collecting e-books, you not only have to worry about DRM and file format, but about the media you store your e-book files on. Backups need to be upgraded from time to time, from punch cards to 1" mag tape to floppy disk to diskette to ZIP drive to DAT tape to CD to DVD to Blu-ray to Flash to ...?

Maybe it would be easier to just stick with paperbacks after all. I've had plenty of those from well before 1971 (including next month's scheduled classic novel discussion, The Space Merchants). The only maintenance they've needed was dusting. :)

[Jim]

Backups do need to be upgraded as the media changes. Hard to find anything that will read magnetic tape, Bernoulli or Zip disks any more. I've moved many files from one type of media to another over the years.

They also need to be checked. I double up on them & still found I have to watch them like a hawk. They can degrade. Hard drives get bad sectors, mirroring can corrupt, & other problems. It's tough. I use a couple of USB drives now, so important files are in 3 or more places.

[[deleted user]]

Barnes & Noble retreats from tablet wars as Nook sales plummet

They plan to keep making Nook eReaders, but to give up on the HD multi-function tablet. (They will sell some other, as yet unnamed, tablet in their store, with the Nook reader app preloaded.)

Their Nook business was down 34%. (Also, their physical store eBook sales were down almost 9%.)

I think that since, unlike Amazon & Apple, B&N doesn't sell downloadable music or videos, they decided they didn't have enough revenue stream from the Nook HD tablet to justify the growing losses.

[[deleted user]]

i hope B&N can get things going in the right direction again...i use a Kindle and order from Amazon, but i also visit the B&N two towns over when i can...i would hate for the only "local" bookstore to go under

[[deleted user]]

It would be nice if B&N could straighten things out. They have been gradually reducing their number of retail stores (closing more than they open.) The good news is that since 2010, the total number of bookstores in the US has actually been going up again (contrary to the doom and gloom articles about a bookstore closing. Probably because of the gradual recovery from the 2008 crash.)

[[deleted user]]

For the First Time, You Can Actually Own the Digital Comics You Buy (Wired)

Image Comics to offer their books for download without DRM. (pdf, epub, cbr, cbz.)

I really hope this works really well for them.

[[deleted user]]

Pew Study: E-Reading Surges, But Print Is Hanging On

The numbers:

* 76% of adults read a book in some format last year.

* 69% read at least one print book

* 28% read at least one e-book

* 14% listened to at least one audiobook.

* "Typical American adult” read or listened to 5 books in the past year. (I think that means the statistical median.)

[Baelor]

It is really sad -- REALLY sad -- that a quarter of the population did not read even one book last year.

[Jim]

It's hard to imagine, but I know people who are proud of not reading a book since HS.
:(

[[deleted user]]

I don't know. Some people work long hours, commute long distances, and when they get home they're tired and want to have dinner and spend some quality time with spouse and kids. Reading is pretty much a solo activity (not counting reading to your kids. :) In contrast, even watching television is a family activity. It's hard to fit much reading time into a working, child-rearing, active lifestyle.