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Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users
- taterbase 13y agoI imagine this has to do with how easy it has become to strip the DRM off of Adobe's current epub solution. For those users savvy enough they'll at least be able to salvage their _purchased_ books.
- derleth 13y agoOnce again, it's the people who don't know how, or don't even know it can be done, who suffer. Those people are the customers Adobe wants, and they're the only ones being hurt by this.
- wmf 13y agoIf Kindle, Apple, Google, or Kobo don't use this DRM, who's left? Is there a story here?
- misnome 13y agoI'm also confused - Adobe has their own ebook DRM? I didn't know this at all. Who uses this?
- pudquick 13y agoBarnes and Noble Nook readers use it, I believe. Plus lots of other vendors that don't have their own hardware chain. Powell's books, for example. Or anyone attempting to self-publish a DRM'd ePub without putting it in Apple's store.
- Spooky23 13y agoPublic libraries that use the Overdrive system use this DRM scheme.
- ForHackernews 13y agoMost public libraries in the US use Adobe's DRM to cover their ebook loans.
- dragonwriter 13y agoJust about everyone using DRM with epub uses Adobe's offering, IIRC.
- aidenn0 13y agoMy Sony Reader uses it.
- pacaro 13y agoI have an aging (5 yrs old) Sony reader that I still use. It uses Adobe DRM, but it didn't when I first got it. Sony have been pretty good about updates so far. If DRM breaks for it, then I'll simply stop buying books from the Sony store (which I mostly have already) and just use DRM-free ebooks from gutenburg etc.
- cjensen 13y agoOverdrive (the service most libraries use to lend out books to their users) uses Adobe DRM if you read the book in Overdrive's own app on iOS. I have an iPad1, so I'm probably screwed. I'll still be able to use the Kindle app to read borrowed books, but some books don't allow reading on Kindle.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ewams 13y agoWe use Overdrive from our library on two separate Android devices. Does not worry me for my device but the other user is not technology adept. Just getting Overdrive working and the user trained on was a nightmare and bucket of frustrations.
- abrowne 13y agoGoogle and Kobo use it if you download a file to read on an ereader, but not for their back end systems.
- miralabs 13y agoI wonder if this has something to do with the recent breach.
- DougMerritt 13y agoWhich breach is that?
- pkteison 13y agoAdobe says their source code was stolen last October: "Very recently, Adobe’s security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products." http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/10/important-customer-security-announcement.html http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/10/important-custo...
- DougMerritt 13y agoAh, of course, I should have remembered that. I don't quite see the connection, though -- unless there was a backdoor and the crackers got that backdoor password, or some such.
- Rizz 13y agoThe current DRM was broken years ago, so I doubt that any leak of private information necessitated a change.
- pudquick 13y agoI'm not sure I agree with this sentiment here regarding "wise". > And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies’ wise decision to use their own DRM. About the only thing "wise" about it is that if Apple were to change its own DRM scheme for the books it sells, I'm assuming they'd update iOS to include the new functionality. Admittedly, this would still lock out older devices potentially that couldn't upgrade to the latest version of iOS.
- TillE 13y agoThe nice thing about Amazon's Kindle DRM is that it's fairly easy to crack. It presumably satisfies publishers who insist on continuing with this cargo cult charade (which really should have ended after the music industry accepted DRM-free sales), and it allows educated consumers to strip the DRM if they really need to. It's not an optimal solution, but it's mostly OK.
- jmelloy 13y agoSo is the nook DRM.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI'd pay for a tool that I could feed in my Amazon credentials and it would iterate through the hundreds of eBooks I've purchased, download them, crack them, and then back them up to an S3 bucket.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hyperbovine 13y agoJudging from your user name your time might be worth more than mine, but some scripting + Calibre could do this for you with not much effort on your part.
- tomrod 13y ago
- glesica 13y agoDoes anyone know if the Adobe DRM in the BN readers can be upgraded with a software update? I've never understood whether it was basically just a library loaded on the Android OS or if it was some type of firmware that possibly can't be upgraded...
- victorhooi 13y agoErr, I have two BN Nooks..... If I'm reading this right - are they saying that these devices will essentially become useless after July 2014? That is a pretty shady move on Adobe and BN's part, if so.
- HelloMcFly 13y agoBN will almost certainly issue a software upgrade before the deadline.
- cityhall 13y agoThis is almost certain to cause an increase in piracy as owners of now-obsolete Nooks turn to torrent sites for books they otherwise would have purchased.
- mildtrepidation 13y agoIt's a situation that takes the usual morality of theft piracy question (which people have many different opinions on, both regarding the question itself and the possible answers) and makes it harder: What happens when people can't make a "moral" decision, because you've taken away their option to do so? The people who really lose here aren't the ones who go to the torrent sites; they at least still get what they want. It's the people who don't know they can do that. Those people? They're just screwed. Hopefully they get collectively upset enough to make people notice. We'll never be rid of this kind of problem, but perhaps it can be made less painful if enough angry support calls are made.
- wtallis 13y ago> It's a situation that takes the usual morality of theft piracy question and makes it harder No, it just highlights the fact that you cannot assume that illegal implies immoral. A little piece of fine print claiming that your purchase was actually an indefinite rental that can be unilaterally cancelled has only tenuous legal power, and absolutely no moral authority. If you bought an eBook in a transaction that was essentially the same as buying a paper book, then you've fulfilled all moral obligations for compensating the author and publisher. No amount of legal shenanigans will create a moral obligation for you to censor that book from your personal library, any more than a legal action can create a moral obligation for you to burn your personal paper books. There's a problem here, but it's not a moral dilemma, it's just another imperfection in our legal system - an indication that we need to change the laws.
- pwg 13y agoThe Right To Read By Richard Stallman http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
- ultramancool 13y agoI highly recommend reading that to anyone as an introduction to why free software and free content are extremely important. Not to mention reverse engineering tools like debuggers. Just reading that makes me yearn for the days of SoftICE where you could just hit Ctrl+D and immediately be dumped into a debugger, no matter what your system was doing. It was such a potent feeling of control.
- blueskin_ 13y agoI would like this story, but it comes across as typically RMS preachy - people should have inherent moral rights to what they own, but people also have a moral right to sell their work instead of giving it away if they want. That is a different issue to DRM.
- drdaeman 13y agoNothing RMS said or says is against selling digital products. IIRC, he had himself sold copies of GNU Emacs - obviously, properly obeying GPL license they were under, i.e. providing buyers with four essential freedoms that Free Software is all about. It's just that works are usually not sold, but only licensed, because giving users rights to do whatever they want with their copies conflicts with current idea that people have exclusive rights to their works (actually, not usually their, but the ones they brought from original creator). Wonder what difference it would cause if someone to regulate that market and force sellers to use proper wording in their offers, so you won't see calls to "buy a book" (unless you really buy it, huh), but only "license a book" or "buy/get a license for a book." Oh, right, nothing, it's just "buy٭" or "$0.99٭" buttons everywhere.
- cstross 13y agoI believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on a per-book basis, with some imprints being entirely DRM-free) -- are already revisiting the question of whether DRM buys them anything useful. This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).
- pacificmint 13y agoFunny how it took the music industry a long time to come to that conclusion (that DRM is useless), but every other industry insists on making the same mistakes again. Kinda like parents and children, I suppose.
- gcb0 13y agoprobably shareholder lobbying. 1. invest in useless DRM vendor. 2. buys share of company X, go to meetings and say how by not using DRM shareholders are getting screwed. 3. shareholders demand DRM 4. profit! ...If this does not exist yet, I demand 10% commission.
- higherpurpose 13y agoWhat's worse is that Hollywood and Netflix are now trying to push DRM to the web.
- Jare 13y agoVideogames dealt with piracy and DRM way before music, movies and books, and DRM is very much alive there. The only significant change in DRM usage in videogames is due to the shift to service-oriented games (multiplayer, updates, events, etc).
- 13y ago
- lostcolony 13y ago"And if you’re using an existing ebook reader, you’d better plan on only reading DRM-free ebooks until further notice." Waaaaaay ahead of you.
- WalterSear 13y agoMe too. They weren't all that DRM free when I got them, mind you.
- bjelkeman-again 13y agoI prefer supporting those that sell DRM free from the beginning. Fortunately I like Science Fiction and at $4-6/book, with a bunch of free full length samples, there is nothing to loose. http://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx http://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx
- razzmataz 13y agoDid they not already abandon one DRM scheme many many years ago, with DRM-ed pdfs? I remember Acrobat versions 5-8 or somewhere in that range of versions having DRM, with a few vendors using it, then dropping it around '06.
- fekberg 13y agoWhen I converted my book to Epub and Mobi I just focused on embedding watermarks/serial numbers so I can identify where the leak is if it leaks. However, I trust the people that bought my book to understand how much effort I put into it and that if they would share it with someone else; it would really hurt my feelings. However, I would never prevent them from putting the book on all their different devices.
- SyneRyder 13y agoFrom experience, the bigger risk is not from genuine customers (even though some of them will share it with friends or even post it online for others). The egregious ones are the dedicated "pirates" who purchase the book using stolen credit card data, leaving you with a chargeback penalty fee while they upload the book to websites plastered with Adsense ads so they can profit from it. Since you can't stop the dedicated ones, better to provide your genuine customers with the best experience you can.
- fiatmoney 13y agoEbook DRM is such a silly idea. Even absent vulnerabilities in the software, it's trivial to screenscrape & OCR the text.
- speeder 13y agoOr worse... There is a certain series of books, that several installments are only e-books, and the only place you could buy them in Brazil was from Fictionwise. Except Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise and closed them down, and left a faq on Fictionwise site saying that you cannot even download the books you bought on that site if you are not in the US... Meaning, that I NEED to pirate books. ZERO stores sell it to Brazil, and ALL of them have DRM. The only way to get the book, is find a illegal copy (because even if you bought legally in the US, the DRM would not allow you to read it in Brazil anyway)
- badman_ting 13y agoTrue, though that doesn't sound like a book I would enjoy reading. Ebook formatting is terrible enough as it is.
- sho_hn 13y agoMy current workflow is to buy Adobe DRM'd epubs and remove the DRM so I can read them in FBReader on Android. That'll sadly be impacted until the new DRM is defeated. I could switch to buying from Amazon in the interim and cracking those, but I'd rather not support the Amazon ebook oligopoly. Annoying. I guess I'll have to switch to using a DRM-enabled app for a while, but I don't like any of them as much as FBReader. I suppose I could try limiting myself to DRM-free releases for now. Wonder what's out there? I remember Tor Books went DRM-free ...
- WalterSear 13y agoThat'll sadly be impacted until the new DRM is defeated. You might have to wait hours, or even days for that to happen. The horror :)
- sho_hn 13y agoLet's hope you're right. I'm curious though, do you base that on actual time-to-circumvention experience with ebook DRM systems? Might be interesting to compile some data points on that ... The exploit that's currently available to extract the key from an authenticated instance of Adobe Digital Editions for Windows only applies to a very old version of the app, so I don't have working memories of how long it took last time.
- gergles 13y agoThat's not true; you can read the key from 3.0 (the latest) Digital Editions with no problems at all.
- sho_hn 13y agoHmm, that's repeatedly not worked for me IIRC, but then I'm doing it on Wine rather than an actual Windows. Actually, now that I'm forced to recall the details ... maybe the problem was actually getting the newer version to run due to the .NET requirement. Still though, different app versions but same DRM system version - the relevant info would be how long it took to defeat that version of the DRM the last time, right?
- reiichiroh 13y agoWhatever happened to the Microsoft Reader LIT format?
- nikbackm 13y agoMicrosoft gave up on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reader
- jonahx 13y agoGiven the chance the new DRM is broken quickly, or even within a couple years, isn't this likely to be a massive wasted effort?
- stefanve 13y agoI would gladly pay (help fund) to get a DRM remover ASAP for the new Adobe DRM make it useless as fast as possible. I pay for my books I love the Kobo ecosystem (and safari/manning) but I always download the epub and remove adobe DRM. since that is the only way to ensure your investment is still readable for the years to come. If you want DRM give me a rent option for 10 per month like Spotify. Anyway I would stop buying books until the DRM is hacked.
- onli 13y agoThis might break the option to use Adobe DE on Linux. The current version does not properly work with Wine, only a specific older on (1.7? There are by now different reports on WineHQ, but it just didn't work on the system I tested). I migrated the family computer to Ubuntu (ran XP before), and to support the prior bought DRM-protected Epubs, Adobe DE in that old version got installed and locked. Later on, I removed the DRM from that books, but still, DE was necessary to download the epubs if the online shop provied just the download files, not the epub itself. If the new DRM will change any of that Workflow, Adobe-DRM-protected epubs will just not be readable on Linux anymore - as they are not providing a Linux-Version of their software. Or does someone know a .asm-Downloader? Calibre will surely support breaking the now DRM soon, so that part might be fine. What a fucking mess. How are ebooks supposed to be used by the public, if it is even for me complicated to have a proper workflow which does not mean the ebooks we buy are less usable than a real book (which costs the same)? How shall this system work if they don't even support Linux?
- blueskin_ 13y agoDoes anyone even still use a Kindle? I wouldn't feel comfortable using a device that's contents can be remotely and silently memory-holed at any time.
- Xylakant 13y agoDo you use any kind of smartphone? At least with my kindle, only the books that I bought via amazon and did not liberate from DRM are affected, so the risk is fairly low that it will nuke something really important.
- blueskin_ 13y ago>Do you use any kind of smartphone? Sure. I have daily Titanium Backup runs going offsite. Not even google/CM can touch those.
- Xylakant 13y agoWell, since they own the OS underneath they can nuke any of your apps and prevent reinstall. Enjoy your backuped version of the app.
- blueskin_ 13y agoNope, I can disable the signature enforcement. I also use CM, who are very good at reversing google's anti-privacy changes (personally, I think they should fork android entirely, but that's another conversation).
- furyg3 13y agoIn this case Kindle users who buy their books from Amazon shouldn't be affected by this Adobe format change. Amazon decided (smartly in this case) to keep the keys to their own walled garden. As to your other question, I still use a Kindle. I buy books from various places, but I always put it in Calibre and create a non-DRMed mobi file from the DRMed version. I would not buy a book where I could not strip the DRM.
- abc123xyz 13y agoMore reasons to use http://ebookoid.com http://ebookoid.com