8 ms·
Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access
by idontwantthis 4y ago
Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow.
I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!
- thrdbndndn 4y agoWhy is it guaranteed? I have been buying ebooks for more than 10 years and they still work.
- orbital-decay 4y agoBecause someday either that DRM will be obsolete or Adobe itself will die. The probability of that is 1, so it's guaranteed.
- thrdbndndn 4y agoNo doubt, but I'm questioning the timeframe. > you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow
- idontwantthis 4y agoI meant it is inevitable and uncertain, and will be sudden.
- komali2 4y agoSome don't, like... literally 1984 and animal farm in one instance lol https://slate.com/technology/2009/07/how-amazon-s-remote-deletion-of-e-books-from-the-kindle-paves-the-way-for-book-banning-s-digital-future.html https://slate.com/technology/2009/07/how-amazon-s-remote-del...
- dredmorbius 4y agoObxkcd: <https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/>
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoDRM-free eBooks do exist, don't lump them all together!
- nicolas_t 4y agoYes they do but it's extremely hard to find drm free books.
- pacaro 4y agoEverything published by Tor I believe, plus, of course, everything on Gutenberg [Edit: tor books, not the other tor. Although presumably everything is there regardless of legal status]
- baryphonic 4y agoIronically, I've found many of the publishers will sell DRM-free ebooks. The biggest problem I've found is books out of print but still in copyright, since we have absurdly long copyright lengths today. The "ebook shops" are the worst. Amazon & Apple have their DRM'd copies, and Kobo may be even worse.
- neilv 4y agoIncidentally, O'Reilly links people to ebooks.com for one-off DRM-free purchases of their technical books. I recently bought these two (in DRM-free PDF and EPUB), mostly-happily paying twice what I'd have to for paperback or being locked to a jerky-reader: * https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210313783/programming-rust/jim-blandy/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210313783/programming-rust... ($60; for experienced systems programmers, this seems better than the free official book) * https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-engineering-at-google/titus-winters/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-enginee... ($51; for front-loading Googliness)
- lxgr 4y agoInterestingly, all German language e-books have been DRM free for a couple of years now. I have no idea how that happened, but at one point, all major publishers have pivoted from mandatory DRM to DRM-free (but watermarked) ePubs. The notable exception is Amazon: Kindle books are almost always DRMed from the same publishers.
- night-rider 4y ago> I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase! Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don't want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.
- roywiggins 4y agoI don't think there's any Kindle format that you can't strip the DRM from fairly easily.
- judge2020 4y ago> Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Does anyone do this? I don't see how it's relevant beyond "wow! you reading speed increased 5% this month" in emails from the Kindle service. Maybe they target ads for "read better and faster in 90 days" if you're in the 10th percentile on reading speed?
- popinman322 4y agoIt could also be a useful proxy for density/interestingness of the material (when adjusted for your typical reading speed). Fed into a recommender system it might produce better outputs and more purchases. It could also be sold to publishers as part of a tool to determine the above prior to publishing; what if books were optimized for your attention? Pleasant or not, there are plenty of uses for the data.
- cr4nberry 4y agoProbably amazon They can also see the things that you highlight, the things that you reread. This could be used to profile the reader and personalize ads not only this, but being forced to buy an ebook through their portal, they'll know everything you're reading. Whereas you could read pdfs anonymously if you wanted
- mftb 4y agoThe Kindle app tracks how fast you're reading. If nothing else it uses it to improve it's estimate of how long until you finish reading the chapter, which it tells you.
- barbazoo 4y agoI'd say at least for someone tech savvy it's fairly easy these days to remove DRM. It's the first thing I do whether I buy them from Kobo or Amazon.
- Blackthorn 4y agoMy wife has a Kindle, we wanted to buy an ebook to support the author but didn't want to go through Amazon anymore because it's Amazon. So we tried buying from Kobo and surprise surprise, they only work with their ereaders because of their shitty DRM! So now Kobo has permanently lost us as a customer too. Great job there folks!
- wlesieutre 4y agoKobo doesn’t force books to use DRM, for example: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-way-of-kings-1 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-way-of-kings-1 Tor Publishing Group Release Date: August 31, 2010 Imprint: Tor Books ISBN: 9781429992800 Language: English Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free) But if you’re only browsing the books that choose not to use it, it’s certainly a smaller selection
- Blackthorn 4y agoI wouldn't mind so much if the books that do use their DRM were able to work with other ereaders, but they aren't because this technology is garbage.
- blooalien 4y agoMain reason I mind is because DRM a) creates "artificial scarcity" of an effectively "infinitely" and freely duplicate-able resource (digital bits of data) mostly to fulfill the bottomless greed-hole of corporate entities (rather than to enrich the original creator for their part in it), and b) (and this is the main reason I hate DRM) because it gives some bottomless pit of greed corporate entity the ability to arbitrarily deprive me of something I paid for, or restrict my ability to use / access it at some unknown point in time down the road, forcing me to maybe have to pay again for something I already paid for. (Nope. Not gonna do that. If I'm backed into that corner, I'll choose to "fly the Jolly Roger" and acquire a DRM-free copy some other way.) Given the option to support content creators in some way that doesn't screw me over as a content "consumer", I'ma prefer that option all day long, every day; However, too many corporate entities these days would rather not offer that option, if they think they can find a way to make you pay every single time you lay eyeballs on something… (That is the ultimate goal of some of 'em, to be certain.)
- chocolatkey 4y agoAs someone who works in the ebook sector, I'll say that no one loves Adobe's DRM, whether it be the publisher, vendor or user. It's implemented by apps and such because of the network effect - other apps support it, and users want to be able to read Adobe DRMed content without trouble, and it was also the first big solution to the "problem" of ebook DRM. However, because people have to pay a fee to Adobe per license, vendors are not very happy about having to continue to tolerate it, so that provides for a great incentive to slowly get them to move to a more user-friendly alternative as long as it's zero-cost, which is what LCP is trying to solve.
- comex 4y agoHadn't heard of LCP before. Based on some skimming of the website… how does it improve on Adobe's DRM other than cost? It's still limited to applications that explicitly support it. Maybe there will be a wider ecosystem than Adobe's. But my current preferred reader apps all either have built-in storefronts (Kindle, Apple Books) or are open source (Calibre and Google Chrome, so I can use a Japanese dictionary extension). The former category probably won't ever support LCP, and the latter category definitely won't. And as for longevity… who's to say LCP will still be around in 10 years or 20? At least Adobe has a big brand name. At the end of the day, I'll keep using de-DRM plugins to get around those problems, but that's a solution that only works for people who are relatively tech savvy, not your average reader. And I'm not sure DRM will always be as ineffective as it is today.
- chocolatkey 4y agoIt improves on it because the barrier to entry is much lower for apps to integrate it, and the ecosystem for LCP is arguably already much larger than for Adobe Adept. There are multiple mobile apps, the thorium reader on desktop, and more. As for LCP being around in 10-20 yrs, the idea with LCP (excluding loans, of course) is that you don't need to be online or require a remote server to validate/access ebooks you've downloaded. You just have your "password", that is used to decrypt the book content through LCP, so as long as you still have any app that supports LCP, you still have access to the publication. I think it's the best compromise that will exist in reality for publishers that still want DRM. The entire system is open-source except a small key derivation function.
- christophilus 4y agoExactly. I used ZLibrary to download e-books of books that I could only find in some crappy format (including physical). I use game-pirating sites the same way. I already purchased Secret of Mana-- why shouldn't I just re-download it? I have a Kobo, and its store is woefully lacking (would get a Kindle if I could go back in time). So, what I do is buy the book wherever I can find it cheapest, then chuck it and pirate an e-version of it. That way, my weird conscience thinks it's OK, and I have it in the format I desire. The entire content distribution system for all forms of media (and a lot of software) is pretty broken.
- NoGravitas 4y agoSame. I wish there were a Bandcamp-like model for ebooks: try-before-you-buy, no DRM, reasonable prices, most of the money goes to the artist. Since I've started using Bandcamp, I have bought so much music that I otherwise wouldn't have.
- moolcool 4y agoHeck, I'd just be happy to get an epub bundled with a physical book purchase. Most contemporary vinyl comes with digital download codes all the time, I wish books would get on that train.
- acomjean 4y agoI like my ebooks drm free too. Oreilly books had drm free copies you could buy. Some good deals (buy 2 get 2 free) They moved to a drm based subscription model, but because the books I bought were drm free I still can access them! Manning still does this. (Thoug they embed your email address in the pages of the pdfs you download. I’m ok with that). They market drm free as a feature, and I look there first when looking for tech books. “What is Manning's DRM policy? What security restrictions are enabled on the PDF eBooks? Can I print, copy and paste, etc? Manning eBooks are DRM-free. We do personalize each eBook with a license stamp in the footer of the PDF. There are no print or copy & paste restrictions on the PDF eBooks. You can also download your eBook as many times as you want, and put it on as many devices as you wish.”
- kertoip_1 4y agoI buy a lot in polish online book stores. I've never seen any DRM-protected books yet, they always give me mobi and epub files which I can give to whoever I want. Maybe it's time to change where you buy them? :)
- ROTMetro 4y agoI too don't like waiting at stoplights or following the rules we agree to to make society work if they are inconvenient for me. Forcing people to wear masks over COVID sure was more inconvenient than having to read in an app, right? F society! F trying to all live together!