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That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, s
by miki123211 8y ago
That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.
- novaRom 8y agoDo you mean even books from Kindle store are without DRM?
- arnvald 8y agoI believe he means polish e-bookstores. They're way more popular than Kindle store because they offer books in polish language. IIRC some of the stores started offering DRM-free books, others followed and generally it became kind of a standard in Poland.
- vsl 8y agoEvolved the same way in neighboring Czechia.
- gambiting 8y agoThere is no Kindle in Poland. In fact, there is no Amazon in Poland either(which is almost ironic considering that there are a couple huge Amazon warehouses in Poland - they serve customers of Amazon.de, as they are both very close to the German border - I suspect the labour costs are lower in Poland hence it makes more sense to have the warehouses there. Incidentally, going to Amazon.pl redirects you to Amazon.de instead). However, in the absence of Amazon, domestic services have sprouted instead - there's a few very big ebook stores, an excellent Audible replacement(with huge superproductions involving famous Polish actors voicing the lines being made regularly), instead of Amazon and Ebay we have Allegro(which in my personal opinion has leapfrogged ebay by about a century worth of development, it's just a much nicer experience). Ebay tried entering the Polish market a few times with huge marketing campaigns and lots of deals, but Allegro's dominance is just so untouchable that I think they have just given up now. I suspect Amazon doesn't even try for the same reason - it's not even localized to Polish(although Polish customers can still order items from any Amazon site, they get delivered to Poland without any issues and for free if you have Prime).
- wolco 8y agoWithout amazon many smaller publishers would fill the market.
- dudus 8y agoI get my books from Google play books and it does allow downloading as epub. I'm not sure if it includes any kind of drm in it though. I always assumed all of them allowed downloading # Edit: apparently you need something called Adobe digital Editions to read that epub later. So there is some kind of drm.
- donatzsky 8y agoApprentice Alf will take care of that.
- dragonwriter 8y agoGoogle Play Books may or may not have ADE DRM; it varies from title to title.
- billpollock 8y agoWhy should your ebook files be watermarked? Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoBecause you can't trivially make identical - down to cuts, paper type, print fidelity - copies of a physical book. But you can trivially make identical copies of a digital one. Watermarks are an attempt at reproducing rules of physical space in digital space.
- feanaro 8y agoBy making the owned copy ugly and harder to read yet still trivially copyable? Something does not compute here.
- Angostura 8y ago> Something does not compute here. That's right. They are trivially copyable, but the copies are easily traceable. Compute now?
- feanaro 8y agoUnless you quite easily remove the watermark.
- 0815test 8y agoThese aren't visual watermarks like what you'd get on physical paper. They just alter the digital copy so that it can be traced back to the buyer, and people are deterred from sharing it on the web. It's a very elegant solution if the 'watermark' can be made hard enough to remove, and I can see quite a few workable approaches.
- feanaro 8y ago> These aren't visual watermarks like what you'd get on physical paper. Except they often are visual. "Owned by X" and such.
- commandar 8y agoThis is how Pragmatic Programmer distributes their ebooks. I think it's a really good compromise, personally.
- wdages 8y agoWhat do you use for DRM-free audiobooks in Poland?
- miki123211 8y agoaudioteka.pl. They offer mp3s. They're apparently pretty weirdly encoded sometimes, but there's no real DRM. Of course, if you want to, you can use their own mobile apps which don't let you extract the content and provide gimmicks like remembering your last position. There are also some smartphone-only deals, but you can usually get the book in mp3 for a higher price.
- everdrive 8y agoImportantly, a digital watermark can also be used to track which citizens are reading subversive literature. I'll admit, the modern internet has so much tracking that this point is a bit moot. But, why add one more bit of tracking?
- johncolanduoni 8y agoHow does it track that unless you upload the file somewhere public?
- jwr 8y agoI think the reason why no-DRM approach took off in Poland is because Amazon has been slow to enter the market. None of the competitors were large enough to develop and maintain a DRM ecosystem (with reading apps, readers etc). I'm sure they would have liked to (corporate brainlessness knows no limits), but they were not able to pull it off. The result is indeed great: E-books are reasonably priced, they get auto-delivered (as "docs") to your Kindle if you wish, or you can get an ePub version if you prefer. You really do own them: the publisher might disappear, but if you keep your files, you keep the books. I don't think piracy is a factor. It's way too easy to buy the real thing at this point.
- miki123211 8y agoalso some publishers let you upload your books directly to Dropbox.