Helene

iRex Technologies is the company behind a line of ebook devices/readers like the iliad and the digital reader series.

In a recent blog entry iRex announces that in the fourth quarter of 2009 they will provide support for Adobe PDF and epub. iRex currently supports mobipocket on their devices.

The twist however is that ebook readers today can only support one DRM technology on a device, either Mobipocket or Adobe. So the consumer have to make a decision of what DRM technology to use on their device, and it will affect all book purchases. People usually don’t care who publishes the books they read, or what type of paper is used on a paperback. Choosing what DRM to use is in the same category, a decision most people have no knowledge or interest in taking.

Furthermore, if one already have purchased books in one format and suddenly switch to another format, it will leave the previously purchased books unreadable.

This brings the issue of DRM and ebook formats even closer to the consumers, and how it limits the access one has to purchased goods. It’s a bold move made by iRex, and it certainly is interesting that they try to satisfy “everybody’s needs” by leaving it to the consumers to choose which DRM to use. But, will it be a positive change in the long run?

I don’t think so. Most people don’t want or need to consider what DRM they use on their purchased books. I can only see that this will generate more questions and uncertainty to people (that makes them even more uncertain to purchase an ebook device). On the bright side, DRM will continue to be a hassle for consumers, and may be the publishing houses in the end will learn something from the music industry – DRM don’t work!

The long awaited release of norwegian ebooks is here, available at digitalbok.no. Not only have they released ebooks, the ebooks are without DRM as well. They have instead watermarked the ebooks, which entails that customer information is added to the file (name and telephonenumber). It’s amazing that they have chosen to not use DRM, since I haven’t read any indication of this in the press (or even statements from the publishing houses itself). A small drawback is the file format they have chosen – Adobe PDF. It’s not possible to change font sizes on pdf’s so one just have to hope that it will look good on the ebook reader and screen size one has. My experience is that font’s usually becomes a bit too small on the iliad, and I read on the Leseplate-blog that the fonts became a bit too big on Cybook. That doesn’t bode well for the iliad.

The ebooks are mainly from the publishing house CappelenDamm which have released about a 100 ebooks. CappelenDamm don’t expect much sales of the ebooks according to a statement they have made. Most of the books cost 79 NOK (between 11/12 USD at the time of writing and 20/30% cheaper than paperback prices). which is cheaper than the the normal costs of pocket books in norway (99 NOK). I would like to see the prices even lower (40 NOK for example) in the future.

This is a day to celebrate!

Many pdf’s comes with big white borders. This becomes a problem when reading pdf’s on ebook readers since the borders takes up a lot of space on an already small and challenged reading area. Or when one wants to save some trees when printing the document. Well, there’s a solution for this in macosx.

Open the pdf in Preview.
Open the sidebar: Preview Menu –> View –> Sidebar
Choose Thumbnail view: Preview Sidebar –> On the bottom left there is an icon, click and choose Thumbnails. Ensure that you have one of the pages selected/marked.
Select all the pages: Preview Menu –> Edit –> Select All
Choose the Select Tool: Preview Menu –> Tools –> Select Tool

Now you can mark the area of the page that you want to keep. Since you previously selected all the pages, the changes will occur on all the pages.

To remove the unmarked area: Preview Menu –> Tools –> Crop.

Now you can save the document.

This worked as a charm for me and the pdf’s ended up looking good in my iliad, though the font size is still a bit small (but still readable) in most cases.

Fictionwise have issued a statement saying that Overdrive will cease serving (DRM’ed) files to Fictionwise customers. All customers that have previously purchased books from Fictionwise served by Overdrive have to download them before 31st January. After that date, the books will not be available for download again.

This is a good example of why DRM isn’t consumer friendly. I have purchased six ebooks served by Overdrive and from 1. february those books will no longer be available to me. If my ebook reader breaks down, I can’t read them on another ebook device unless I have downloaded, saved and stripped the ebooks of the DRM.

ITunes and the music industry have at last understood that DRM haven’t worked the ten years they have used it. I hope the book publishing industry will reach the same conclusion soon.

Scott Adams published in 2005 a book named God’s debris that can be downloaded. Some of you may recognize the authors name – Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert and he also have a blog that I subscribe to. The blog is regularly updated and he has interesting takes, though he is very interested in how economists would think (he has a very rational take on things) and his visions about the future is… well, enough to make me question his sanity sometimes.
Synopsis

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality.

Brandon Sanderson (and Robin Hobb) is one of my favorite authors. He writes science fiction and fantasy books. Recently tor.com published the first story he wrote, Firstborn, and it’s freely available as download or online reading (you might have to log in to be allowed to download). Tor.com releases drm-free ebooks regularly, so I would recommend getting an account there and start discovering new authors.

He has also made his book, Warbreaker, available for free on his website. It’s a good book. It’s the first book I read by him and afterwards I have swallowed everything he writes.

Tor.com’s statement:

Brandon Sanderson is well-known as the author of Elantris (2005), the novel Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians (2007), and the three-part Mistborn series consisting of Mistborn (2006), The Well of Ascension (2007), and The Hero of Ages (2008). And he’s an object of enormous public curiosity as the writer who was recruited by Robert Jordan’s wife-and-editor Harriet McDougal to finish the epic Wheel of Time series after Jordan’s untimely death in 2007. (A Memory of Light, by Jordan and Sanderson, will appear in 2009.)

Now Tor.com is pleased to present the original novelette “Firstborn,” a tale of war and sibling rivalry that happens to also be Brandon Sanderson’s first published work of out-and-out science fiction. Illustrated by Hugo-winning artist Donato Giancola, “Firstborn” is SF like it used to be. Enjoy

I sometimes have to convert between ebook formats, and that is a common scenario for ebook readers who often experience that ebooks are available as free pdf downloads. The trouble is that the pdf’s usually aren’t displayed nicely on ebook devices, but displays nicely on computer screens. Another issue is that a specific ebook might be available in formats that are not supported by the ebook device that one currently use. So what to do?

I have several options I use (that only works for DRM free ebooks):

• Calibre can convert most formats to epub, mobipocket, lit or lrf. It’s freeware and available for windows, macosx and linux. The user interface for converting an ebook to another format is easy, though have only epub or lrf options. Calibre has terminal/console commands to do the same work (which gives more options): any2epub, any2lit and any2lrf

  

• Windows only: For converting from pdf/html etc. to mobipocket (prc/mobi) I use Mobipocket creator (freeware). It does a good job in converting to mobi books, the downside is that it’s only available for windows. I’m a Mac and Linux user, so this is a hassle for me. Fortunatly I have an old laptop with XP on, so I somehow make it work (anybody wants to donate a windows vista license to me?)

• For converting from prc/mobi/html/text/epub to prc/mobi/html/text/epub one can use Stanza (also freeware), and it’s available for windows, mac and iphone.Personally this haven’t worked out so well for me. When reading converted ebooks to prc using stanza, then my iRex iLiad displays the ebook, but there is no paragrahs and chapters. It’s a continues flow of text that is tiresome to read.When converting an ebook to epub, my iRex iLiad isn’t able to read them at all, it only crashes even though I have FBReader installed on it.

A great resource to get started is MobileReads EBook Conversion Software and Freeware page.

If you have any suggestions and experiences, I would love to hear about it.