iBooks: DRM gone bad

8 points·robomartin··3 comments

So...I've been reading a book and wanted to copy a few useful bullet points from the text and email them to myself for future reference. That's when I discovered that I can't do that. I can't even copy a single word. This, of course, due to DRM.

Just to verify that I was not insane I opened one of the many excellent Sitepoint books I own. I can copy and paste at will.

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This is most likely because of the publisher, not iBooks. Publishers have a copyable flag for each book in their ONIX file. Retailers have to abide by this flag when displaying the eBook. This sucks but that is the eBook industry for you.

Many sample book titles have harsher DRM than the actual purchased title, a little conniving way to entice a sale.

Use your frustration to make a case to the publishers against DRM, instead of blaming a single eBook product which isn't even the source of the problem.

You probably know that this behaviour is only unique to eBooks where the publisher has disabled copying in the DRM settings. (Which isn't unique to iBooks.)

So don't buy that particular book and make sure you let the publishers know why they lost a sale, if you have purchased it - request a refund from the store, you'll likely be granted one.

Until then you're pissing in the wind.

Just for kicks, I snapped a screen shot of the relevant page (power + home buttons) and OCR'd the image.

Oops, next iBooks update will disable screen capture. Crap!

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