4 ms·

Ask HN: The unaddressed iPad ebooks question

7 points by naner 17y ago

The iPad will have several bookstores. iBooks, Kindle, maybe Google, Sony, B&N and others. They all have different DRM schemes and different book-reading interfaces. If I already have several books from Kindle with hilighting, annotations, bookmarks, etc. but I want to use the iBooks interface because of (say) more useful features or to consolidate my library, will I be able to transfer my books over from the Kindle store? What about all my markups from each book? What if some books are only available in one store but not another? How does this make any sense? What if you had to use a different music player for music you purchased from Amazon? Or is Steve Jobs going to wait a few years and then write an open letter shaming the industry into shedding DRM while charging all of us an "upgrade" fee for all the books we've already bought to be free from the DRM constraints? And then each bookstore would have to do the same... which seems unlikely. Book DRM is looking even crappier than music/video DRM. I want to love this whole iPad book thing but this situation sucks.

cmelbye 17y ago
I'm wondering the same exact thing. Luckily I haven't purchased many ebooks (only one from Amazon actually, REWORK) so I'm starting from scratch and figuring out which one is the best to use. I'm excited to see the various apps though.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
What if you had to use a different music player for music you purchased from Amazon? Well, what if every time you bought a book it came as a separate stack of paper in a form factor and layout that was chosen for you and which you couldn't change? Oh, wait, that was how all books worked for five hundred years. Perhaps you are looking the gift horse in the mouth a bit too sharply? Anyway, a big reason why the music industry worked differently is that computer wizards invented machines that were really good at taking a legally-purchased CD and turning it into iPod-compatible digital music in five minutes without human intervention. That's just not possible for books. (Though it might eventually be possible for digital books, DRM or no.) I think it even might be legal, and it's certainly low-risk, for you to buy a book, slice off the binding, feed every page through OCR and put the result into any format that you like for your personal use... but it's so much work that you'd probably rather spend the five or ten bucks and cope with the different book-reading interfaces. (If you're interested, though, I hear the Fujitsu Scansnap is pretty nice.) The other factor is piracy, of course. Perhaps the need to compete against pirated books will eventually drive the book industry to shed DRM. I do wonder, though. Counterintuitively, books really may be harder to pirate than digital music -- at least for now, and for my taste -- because the lowest-common-denominator format is plain text, and plain text can be painful to read. After spending five minutes reading a Project Gutenberg book on the iPhone the other day, and tripping over poor spacing, miserable hyphenation, and misplaced chapter breaks the whole time, I found myself craving the ability to spend three bucks on a version that had been laid out by a competent typographer. What I hope is going to happen is that eleven different iPhone reader apps will come out, and compete, and the profit margins will flow to the one that lets artists and typographers lay out the books in a thoughtful manner, and then everyone will copy that one. But, even if I get my wish, we might have to suffer through years of garbage first, just as we did with CD-ROMs, or laser printers, or the early days of HTML when the blink tag and the animated GIF roamed far and wide.
- Confusion 17y ago
  A more proper analogy: what if, for books from every different vendor, you had to get a separate bookcase (they won't fit in each others' bookcases), which could be removed from your house at their whim at any moment, taking along all the books in it with them?
- clord 17y ago
  The difference is that that a bound stack of paper is a requirement of the media. Monks 500 years ago didn't get together and decide on how to enforce their copyrights by carefully designing the "book experience". The media of software does not suffer from the physical limitations of bound paper, but we somehow are ending up with an inferior product anyway. Why? The monks in our case are greedy and want to be able to control what we buy, because they don't like all of the effects of publishing in the media. So our monks are doing the equivalent of folding a page of the book, and then asking police officers and courts to please bonk anyone who shares books with a corner folded over.
gte910h 17y ago
Why does this matter? Use different readers. Voila, you can read what you buy. Worry less. Be happy more.
Bradlinc 17y ago
Its not a good solution but my plan is to purchase only fiction or items I don't plan on reading again. Unfortantly my local library will miss out as I typically give it the books I no longer need to keep as a reference.

7 points by naner 17y ago

cmelbye 17y ago

I'm wondering the same exact thing. Luckily I haven't purchased many ebooks (only one from Amazon actually, REWORK) so I'm starting from scratch and figuring out which one is the best to use. I'm excited to see the various apps though.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

What if you had to use a different music player for music you purchased from Amazon? Well, what if every time you bought a book it came as a separate stack of paper in a form factor and layout that was chosen for you and which you couldn't change? Oh, wait, that was how all books worked for five hundred years. Perhaps you are looking the gift horse in the mouth a bit too sharply? Anyway, a big reason why the music industry worked differently is that computer wizards invented machines that were really good at taking a legally-purchased CD and turning it into iPod-compatible digital music in five minutes without human intervention. That's just not possible for books. (Though it might eventually be possible for digital books, DRM or no.) I think it even might be legal, and it's certainly low-risk, for you to buy a book, slice off the binding, feed every page through OCR and put the result into any format that you like for your personal use... but it's so much work that you'd probably rather spend the five or ten bucks and cope with the different book-reading interfaces. (If you're interested, though, I hear the Fujitsu Scansnap is pretty nice.) The other factor is piracy, of course. Perhaps the need to compete against pirated books will eventually drive the book industry to shed DRM. I do wonder, though. Counterintuitively, books really may be harder to pirate than digital music -- at least for now, and for my taste -- because the lowest-common-denominator format is plain text, and plain text can be painful to read. After spending five minutes reading a Project Gutenberg book on the iPhone the other day, and tripping over poor spacing, miserable hyphenation, and misplaced chapter breaks the whole time, I found myself craving the ability to spend three bucks on a version that had been laid out by a competent typographer. What I hope is going to happen is that eleven different iPhone reader apps will come out, and compete, and the profit margins will flow to the one that lets artists and typographers lay out the books in a thoughtful manner, and then everyone will copy that one. But, even if I get my wish, we might have to suffer through years of garbage first, just as we did with CD-ROMs, or laser printers, or the early days of HTML when the blink tag and the animated GIF roamed far and wide.

Confusion 17y ago
A more proper analogy: what if, for books from every different vendor, you had to get a separate bookcase (they won't fit in each others' bookcases), which could be removed from your house at their whim at any moment, taking along all the books in it with them?
clord 17y ago
The difference is that that a bound stack of paper is a requirement of the media. Monks 500 years ago didn't get together and decide on how to enforce their copyrights by carefully designing the "book experience". The media of software does not suffer from the physical limitations of bound paper, but we somehow are ending up with an inferior product anyway. Why? The monks in our case are greedy and want to be able to control what we buy, because they don't like all of the effects of publishing in the media. So our monks are doing the equivalent of folding a page of the book, and then asking police officers and courts to please bonk anyone who shares books with a corner folded over.

gte910h 17y ago

Why does this matter? Use different readers. Voila, you can read what you buy. Worry less. Be happy more.

Bradlinc 17y ago

Its not a good solution but my plan is to purchase only fiction or items I don't plan on reading again. Unfortantly my local library will miss out as I typically give it the books I no longer need to keep as a reference.