Good news, good news

The full article

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 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!

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.

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.

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

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 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.

What these formats have in common is that they are proprietary (owned by a company). This means that to publish ebooks in a proprietary format one has to buy a (software) license to be able to publish books in that format. A publisher doesn’t have access to the format itself (the grimy details of how a table of contents is represented in data for example), and are locked to the limitations set by the format owner. The software provider has exclusive control over the format/technology.

So, the publisher owns the book (content), but have to use a specific software to retrieve it. To share the book requires the receivers to have software that can read it, and again may be locked to one software provider (can’t use competing software). Or a competing software producer have to purchase a license to obtain compability with the format in question.

Example of locked formats are mobi/prc and lit.

So what effect does all of this have on us book lovers?

• Ebook readers are locked to formats supported by their ebook device/reader. Ebooks aren’t always made available in all formats at once, so one have to wait until it do. There have been many incidents where Amazon ebooks aren’t made available to non-kindle people, or where a book is published in a different formats at later times.
• Operating system hassles. Ebook software which simplifies ebook transfers/management like Mobipocket Reader/Creator supports only Windows, and there’s a big Mac and Linux world out there.
• One becomes locked to software provided by the format owner.
• If an ebook device reads a format poorly, converting between formats can be a hassle.
• When ebook reader software becomes updated, previously purchased ebooks may become outdated/not supported/unreadable.
• When purchasing a new ebook reader, it may not support previously purchased ebooks.

Now, there is an open industry standard (format) for ebooks called EPUB, but at the time of writing it’s not supported by all ebook readers.  I also haven’t written about DRM. I will probably write about that at a later time.

There are some websites that takes care of that need. They creates list based upon books you’ve read and suggests similar books that other people have found entertaining.

Beware that I have not tested these sites, so I would love to hear what your experience is.

http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com: Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our database of real readers’ favourite books (over 47,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next. Doesn’t require a registration, though it probably would make it easier to come up with suggestions.

My impression: Very simplistic.

http://www.librarything.com/: Enter what you’re reading or your whole library—it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

My impression: A site containing a lot for what book lovers search for.

goodreads.com: Have you ever wanted a better way to see what your friends are reading? keep track of what you’ve read and what you’d like to read? get great book recommendations from people you know?

shelfari.com: Shelfari is the premier social network for people who love books. Create a virtual shelf to show off your books, see what your friends are reading and discover new books

fantasticfiction.co.uk:  Find all the books (and in the correct order) by various authors.Contains information on forthcoming books. Look up an author and find book recommendations made by that author.

stopyourekillingme.com: Stop, You’re Killing Me! is a resource for lovers of mystery, crime, thriller, spy, and suspense books.

literature-map.com shows authors who produce work similiar to the author you input.

If none of these sites manage to arouse the book worm in you, then you have to be illiterate.