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.
Oh, that can’t be good. Spammers gaming your site again, sir.
This also lends credence to my theory as to why sites autoclose their threads after a certain amount of time. Note the age of this entry. I’d bet the software is designed to target older entries.
Its really weird how much spam ends up targeting this specific post. Fortunately Akismet keeps the level of spam that gets through to a level where I can actually take the time to review the spam a couple times a day and delete it. Akismet itself has caught 4600 spam posts to this site since January, and I’ve only noticed a couple of false positives, and most of those were trackbacks rather than comments.