3 ms·

DRM-free epubs are at least supposed to be available from Google Books (though Kleppmann says when he tried with his book it wasn't DRM-free) - the ebook.com fo

DRM-free epubs are at least supposed to be available from Google Books (though Kleppmann says when he tried with his book it wasn't DRM-free) - the ebook.com folks say that they have DRM-free epub and PDFs, but I don't know if the PDFs are the high-quality print editions that ORA used to sell or the crappy epub-PDF conversion that Google books sells, and what exactly ebooks.com means by 'DRM-free' - they make reference to having to use a specific Adobe software package to read them, but that you have the right to print and copy-and-paste. Until I see it opened in some libre-PDF reader I don't know that I trust it. One bummer: Nearly everything I bought from O'Reilly were 'Early Release' books - The Kleppmann 'Data Intensive Apps' book took like two years for him to finish (not complaining, books aren't easy and this book was exceptionally well-researched), but it was nice to have the first half of the book available early on. Sadly, the Early Release program seems to be only available through Safari now. There were like five books I had planned to buy over the holiday weekend that now I guess I'll have to wait a year or so before being able to buy. I also don't get the folks saying "Just buy $DIFFERENT_PUBLISHER books instead" - books aren't interchangeable, people buy specific titles, not whatever the publisher's version of that topic might be.

clumsysmurf 9y ago
If I read these pages (1,2) from ebooks.com correctly, you need to read their PDFs in Adobe Digital Editions: "As our books have Adobe DRM applied to them your device must state that it is compatible with Adobe DRM or Adobe Digital Editions" Some time ago, there was a big fiasco with Adobe (3,4) "On 6 October 2014, Nate Hoffelder reported in The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 ("ADE4") was sending extensive information about eBooks back to Adobe, including ebooks read by a user as well as eBooks stored on the same machine but not opened in ADE4." I tried Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) a while back and considered it very poor experience. Originally it was based on Adobe Flex, and the font rendering was grey scale anti-aliased and looked terrible. I won't try it again to find out if they improved it. There was another fiasco, but Adobe backed down (5). A contact from Datalogics confirmed that Adobe was going to force everyone (publishers, users) to upgrade to the new version of DRM (ADEPT) and that your old titles would be unusable if not! I avoid ADE like the plague. (1) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide-to-ebook-formats https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide... (2) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Reading-your-ebook https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Readi... (3) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users... (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions (5) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-epub-drm-july-expects-abandon-existing-users/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-...

clumsysmurf 9y ago

If I read these pages (1,2) from ebooks.com correctly, you need to read their PDFs in Adobe Digital Editions: "As our books have Adobe DRM applied to them your device must state that it is compatible with Adobe DRM or Adobe Digital Editions" Some time ago, there was a big fiasco with Adobe (3,4) "On 6 October 2014, Nate Hoffelder reported in The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 ("ADE4") was sending extensive information about eBooks back to Adobe, including ebooks read by a user as well as eBooks stored on the same machine but not opened in ADE4." I tried Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) a while back and considered it very poor experience. Originally it was based on Adobe Flex, and the font rendering was grey scale anti-aliased and looked terrible. I won't try it again to find out if they improved it. There was another fiasco, but Adobe backed down (5). A contact from Datalogics confirmed that Adobe was going to force everyone (publishers, users) to upgrade to the new version of DRM (ADEPT) and that your old titles would be unusable if not! I avoid ADE like the plague. (1) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide-to-ebook-formats https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide... (2) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Reading-your-ebook https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Readi... (3) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users... (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions (5) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-epub-drm-july-expects-abandon-existing-users/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-...