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Comment by djent | Hacker News Reader

The page says that there is no DRM on the ebook, yet every page of the PDF is watermarked with the name you used to order. Sounds like managing digital rights to me.

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None-watermarked PDFs can be found here: http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

(no epub though)

You can copy it as many time as you want, read it concurrently on any device that can read PDF, and you can use it offline. And if PragProg goes bust, you can still read the book.

I agree that it might be a bit ugly to have your name on it repeated but it is quite "discreet" nonetheless, and unless your name overlaps with a particular perl keyword, it should not impact full text search.

...and if it really bothers you, it's easily removed. You could probably do that with Perl too.

It's not that easy to remove. To be completely sure all identification info including IDs and other generated differences are removed you would need two files sold to different people and remove everything that differs. I'm not going to buy two copies of a book just to get the clean file that they should be selling in the first place.

I accept this when buying books from O'reilly and other sources.

It's a very small price to pay compared to having physical books only, or Adobe DRM :-/

O'Reilly and NoStarch don't do it because they honour their customers. Watermarks are a disgrace and a potential risk for the customer, because they put the liability to protect the book from third party access onto the customer. I'm not going to accept this. I only buy untouched books. Calling books DRM free when personal identification information is stored into a digital file to restrict the customers usage rights is ridiculous. Shame on those sneaky publishers.

DRM has a specific meaning to most of us I guess and I suspect you are quite aware of it.

If this is DRM then so is adding my name to digital documents I write in Notepad or Vim as well.

It's really not drm but it sure is ugly Manning does it to.

Fortunately it's super easy to unpack a pdf with pdftk or the like then you can delete the text of the watermark with sed or perl if you like then compress again.

I have a script that removes a list of watermarks automatically prior to importing to calibre.

Come to think of it I should propose this as a feature for calibre.

It's in the bottom left corner and in light gray text. Not much of an issue. Plus, the author and publisher are doing us a favor by letting us have the ebook for free.

Thanks, chromatic and PragProg.

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