Month: February 2006

Kelly Applegate’s DRM E-Book Horror Story

Via Teleread (the best web site for coverage of e-book and related issues), I came across Kelly Applegate’s DRM horror story which basically recounts how she was screwed by actually bothering to pay for electronic editions of books back when Gemstar was running high,

As the ebooks had the ability to download, I continued
purchasing them. Then I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket EBook Pro. I loved
it. My library climbed to well over 500 purchased books and slowly I
got rid of my paper books except the “keepers”. (I would love to be
able to get those in electronic form because I prefer it but it is
way too expensive at this point.)

I have written to several authors about my delimma and many of them
have sent me unencrypted or in some cases replacement encrypted
ebooks to replace the ones I cannot either load on my ebook reader or
to enable me to read them on my computer with the new drive. The ones
that refused my request, I don’t bother with anymore.

At this point, I have invested a large amount of money in my
electronic library. I have been through the Gemstar fallout and they
still have MY books that I paid for that I can ONLY read on ONE ebook
reader (I have several). Because of the protections that have been
placed on the ebooks I purchased and not being able to read them on
the reader of my choice, I REFUSE to by any ebook that is protected.
And, I REFUSE to buy any ebook that I cannot get to load on my ebook
reader. I will contact a publisher before I purchase from them and
find out exactly what their books are made of. I, also, insist that I
be able to test drive the formats at their site because I have found
that often I order the HTML version of a book to convert to my reader
and it comes out with gibberish. So, I get another version and
convert it to HTML (Most often it is MS Reader converted to HTML)and
it is perfect for the reader. I have an Excel spreadsheet that I
maintain with the publishers and the formats I must purchase from
them to get the best copy readable on my ebook reader. A few
publishers have told me they will not replace ebooks and will not
accomodate me in any way. It’s their loss. I was going to buy 15
books from one of the sites that would not allow this so they lost a
chunk of change.

As I’ve said before it is pointless to buy an e-book unless you are able to convert it, one way or another, to a non-DRMed format such as HTML. Once you’ve got it in HTML, then you can convert it to pretty much any format you want. But if you don’t have it in HTML, you’re completely at the mercy of the DRM provider.

For example, Sony’s upcoming Reader looks like a decent e-book platform, but you’d be crazy to actually buy DRMed books in its native format given Sony’s history. Instead, wait to make sure it has decent tools to convert HTML files to its proprietary format, and then buy MS Reader books which are easily stripped of DRM and converted to HTML where they then should be easily convertible to a format that the Sony Reader can handle.

Yes, that is a bit more convenient, but a lot less convenient than ending up in the position that Applegate has found herself with hundreds of dollars spent on books that she cannot read except on the dead Gemstar platform.

Blizzard Apologizes for Warning Over GBLT Guilds

Back in January, Blizzard got a bit of unwelcome publicity after one of its customer service representatives warned a GBLT-friendly guild for advertising itself as such. Of course, inevitably, Blizzard finally got around to apologizing for this boneheaded action.

According to InWeekly, which initially reported Blizzard’s warning against the GLBT guild,

Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief operating officer, contacted In Newsweekly and said, “What we’ve done is decided to add a guild recruitment channel to the game… providing players with a designated area where they can advertise their guilds in an appropriate fashion.”

This would mean that players who wish to find others to associate with will have a channel designated to finding those individuals and will not interfere with the general chat channel.

Blizzard has stated that the original incident with Andrews never should have happened and that they will be reviewing policies and procedures and having “sensitivity training” with their 1,000 GMs on staff in North America, Europe, and Korea in the hopes that something like this doesn’t happen again.

Sensitivity training? Ugh. Just train them to support their players rights to say whatever they want. After all, it is trivially easy to /ignore anyone you disagree with in WoW (I really need that command in real life).

One has to wonder, though, how far this openness in the guild recruiting channel will go. GBLT friendly will presumably be okay, what about a hetero-friendly guild? A Fred Phelps-friendly guild? An Asian-friendly guild? A whites-friendly guild?

Sources:

Blizzard apologizes for ‘GLBT’ policy problem. Alexander Sliwinski, In Newsweekly, February 8, 2006.

China Moves Toward Liberalizing Its Currency Market

China has started making moves toward liberalizing its currency market, though not fast enough for some in the U.S. government who bizarrely complain that China keeps the yuan artificially low.

In December, China announced that it approved 13 foreign and domestic banks who would be market movers for the yuan. If it follows through, this will change China’s long-standing micromanagement of its currency designed to keep its value from rising against the yen, pound and dollar.

Having a number of banks that are market movers for the currency would, in theory, limit the ability of China to intervene to keep the value of the yuan down.

There are a lot of reasons that China should stop such intervention, but one of the odd things is watching U.S. officials complain about the cheap yuan. The argument goes that the cheap yuan is largely responsible for the U.S. trade deficit in which the United States imports far more goods from China than it exports to that nation.

But if China is crazy enough to essentially subsidize exports to the United States, why should the United States object? The United States get goods far cheaper, raising the effective buying powers of wages, and China gets cash it uses for the capital investment necessary to continue its economic growth.

Source:

China reforms its currency market. BBC, December 30, 2005.

U.S. Follows Through on Promise to Cancel Zambia’s Debt

In late December the United States followed through on a promise by writing off $280 million in debts owed to it by Zambia.

In all, Western countries and NGOs wrote off over $1 billion in debt owed by Zambia. When all is said and done, according to the BBC, Zambia’s debt is likely to fall from around US $7 billion to around US $500 million.

Now the only issue is what the hell Zambia will do with this sudden lowering of debt. Zambia’s debt problems originated largely from widespread corruption within its government. Former president Frederick Chiluba drove the country into the ground during his 10 year reign that ended in 2001, and if Zambia is going to succeed it will take more than just debt relief — it will take a complete change in its political culture.

Of course, Chiluba’s corruption trial is a very good start, but too often reformers have come to power in African nations only to find the culture of corruption to entrenched to over come, and in some cases find themselves quickly compromised by that culture. For example, current Zambia president Levy Mwanawasa hold his office thanks to winning just 28 percent of the vote in a 2001 election that was deemed unfair by independent election monitors, including the Carter Center and Mwanawasa rejected proposed changes to Zambia’s constitution that would modify election rules to make such outcomes less likely.

Not exactly the sort of person ideal to lead basic reforms to overcome official corruption.

Sources:

US boosts Zambia with debt relief. Martin Plaut, The BBC, December 31, 2005.

President Mwanawasa backtracks on constituent assembly. IRIN, February 3, 2006.

Gary Busey Anti-Semite?

Gary Busey’s pretty washed up as an actor so it is understandable that he’s appearing in low-budget foreign fare of late, but there’s no excuse for appearing in blatantly anti-Semitic films such as the just-released Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves Iraq.

According to the Associated Press the film is very loosely based on an actual event at the start of the Iraq war. American soldiers came across a group of Turkish soldiers and mistook them for insurgents. The Americans detained the Turks for a couple days before the mistaken identity was cleared up and they were released.

In the movie, a group of rogue American soldiers led by Billy Zane are committing atrocities and a group of Turkish special forces intervene to stop Zane and his crew.

In one of the atrocity scenes, the American soldiers are depicted as bursting into an Iraqi wedding, killing dozens of attendees, and then dragging the rest back to Abu Ghraib.

At which point Gary Busey’s character enters the picture. Busey’s character, according to The Washington Post, is “a Jewish doctor [who] cuts out their [the captured civilians] organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.”

WTF? Was Busey forced to do this because the lead in the film version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was already cast? Is he going to follow this up by playing a rapist in black face?

Source:

In Turkish Movie, Americans Kill Innocents. Benjamin Harvey, Associated Press, February 3, 2006.