Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users
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This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).
The effect of DRM on piracy is negligible at best and could be actively promoting it at worst (when ordinary customers get stuck in these hoops). Meanwhile, the main practical impact of ebook DRM is to create lock-in for ebook DRM providers, especially the ones that are also retailers, like Amazon.
The Big Five publishers seem convinced that Amazon is a serious threat to their business. Given that, I don't understand why they give Amazon the club to beat them with by insisting on the customer-hostile misfeature of DRM. If they hadn't done that in the first place, perhaps they wouldn't have felt forced to solve their "Amazon problem" with an illegal conspiracy in the second place.
Kinda like parents and children, I suppose.
1. invest in useless DRM vendor.
2. buys share of company X, go to meetings and say how by not using DRM shareholders are getting screwed.
3. shareholders demand DRM
4. profit!
...If this does not exist yet, I demand 10% commission.
Obviously, this varies with publisher, studio, and game, but that was the rationale I heard when I worked in the industry.
RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here".
Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...)
It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast now, btw. Abandon hope all ye etc.
IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)
By Richard Stallman
Just reading that makes me yearn for the days of SoftICE where you could just hit Ctrl+D and immediately be dumped into a debugger, no matter what your system was doing. It was such a potent feeling of control.
It's just that works are usually not sold, but only licensed, because giving users rights to do whatever they want with their copies conflicts with current idea that people have exclusive rights to their works (actually, not usually their, but the ones they brought from original creator).
Wonder what difference it would cause if someone to regulate that market and force sellers to use proper wording in their offers, so you won't see calls to "buy a book" (unless you really buy it, huh), but only "license a book" or "buy/get a license for a book." Oh, right, nothing, it's just "buy٭" or "$0.99٭" buttons everywhere.
That'll sadly be impacted until the new DRM is defeated.
The exploit that's currently available to extract the key from an authenticated instance of Adobe Digital Editions for Windows only applies to a very old version of the app, so I don't have working memories of how long it took last time.
Still though, different app versions but same DRM system version - the relevant info would be how long it took to defeat that version of the DRM the last time, right?
Unless they proclaim that it is unhackable...then you'd better bring a stopwatch.
The law abiding clients will be out of the product they bought under misleading terms.
As for ignoring the law ... I enjoy reading books. I like paying for books, because I want the activity of writing and publishing books to be a well-compensated endeavor in my society, so I (and others) get more great books from professional writers. Removing the DRM gets me a superior reading experience (favorite reading app), which aligns well with both of those things. Having to remove the DRM is essentially a nuisance I'm choosing to put up with because I like books well enough. It's frustrating the nuisance is mounting.
http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/gplus/those-of-you-who-downlo...
I have actually tried to give preferential treatment to DRM-free options where available, and bought some DRM-free books that I might not have otherwise, as well as advertised them to peers and generally tried to awareness of the topic and the benefits of unencumbered book files.
That's the trade-off I'm currently at. It's not a desirable one and I have great respect for your stance, but it's what I feel is best under the circumstances.
Just because you disagree does not make it less valid. Just ask you local Anarchist. :)
Waaaaaay ahead of you.
> And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies’ wise decision to use their own DRM.
About the only thing "wise" about it is that if Apple were to change its own DRM scheme for the books it sells, I'm assuming they'd update iOS to include the new functionality. Admittedly, this would still lock out older devices potentially that couldn't upgrade to the latest version of iOS.
If you just choose the "standard" DRM, you can end up with what happened to Microsoft customers and their MP3 players. "Apple is proprietary! Get PlaysForSure." It was a real good pitch, up until your Dell Whatever stopped being able to get new music because MS had abandoned PlaysForSure and Dell wasn't going to update their old players.
Amazon and Apple have large incentives to keep their DRMed content working on older devices, at least for a couple of years. Adobe has very little incentive to ensure that their DRM keeps working on the various Sony (and other) Readers.
Apple's tying of iBooks at least partially to iOS updates actually makes them the worst offender in this area. I'm willing to bet 1st gen iPads can't get some new iBooks, but I bet all 1st gen Kindles can still buy all books from Amazon.
You lose this bet. There are quite a few Kindle books like this: http://cl.ly/image/2t2m2V3Y0513 that won't play on basic Kindle devices. I discovered this when I tried to read one of my books on my gen 1 Kindle.
There are also some unexpected restrictions on some titles, such as books that are viewable only on 1 or 2 of your devices, which is quite annoying to discover when you're not near one of the previous devices to deactivate it.
I can't comment on the functionality of iBooks on Gen1 iPads because I've never purchased an Apple iBook, but your guesses about Amazon are, sadly, wrong.
You can check this when purchasing on Amazon: the small print you're looking for in the Product Details section is "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited". If you don't see that, it means your Kindle book is restricted (I believe to 5 devices simultaneously, though perhaps it varies from book to book.)
It's not an optimal solution, but it's mostly OK.
2) Use Calibre to unlock the .mobi files, using the serial number (conveniently located under the "Device Settings" or "About this Device" menu - I forget which it's called, but it's a ~16 digit number and very easy to find.
3) Upload to S3
This works on Linux - I assume it works on OS X and Windows too.
Since you can't stop the dedicated ones, better to provide your genuine customers with the best experience you can.
The people who really lose here aren't the ones who go to the torrent sites; they at least still get what they want. It's the people who don't know they can do that. Those people? They're just screwed.
Hopefully they get collectively upset enough to make people notice. We'll never be rid of this kind of problem, but perhaps it can be made less painful if enough angry support calls are made.
No, it just highlights the fact that you cannot assume that illegal implies immoral.
A little piece of fine print claiming that your purchase was actually an indefinite rental that can be unilaterally cancelled has only tenuous legal power, and absolutely no moral authority. If you bought an eBook in a transaction that was essentially the same as buying a paper book, then you've fulfilled all moral obligations for compensating the author and publisher. No amount of legal shenanigans will create a moral obligation for you to censor that book from your personal library, any more than a legal action can create a moral obligation for you to burn your personal paper books.
There's a problem here, but it's not a moral dilemma, it's just another imperfection in our legal system - an indication that we need to change the laws.
If I'm reading this right - are they saying that these devices will essentially become useless after July 2014?
That is a pretty shady move on Adobe and BN's part, if so.
Later on, I removed the DRM from that books, but still, DE was necessary to download the epubs if the online shop provied just the download files, not the epub itself. If the new DRM will change any of that Workflow, Adobe-DRM-protected epubs will just not be readable on Linux anymore - as they are not providing a Linux-Version of their software.
Or does someone know a .asm-Downloader? Calibre will surely support breaking the now DRM soon, so that part might be fine.
What a fucking mess. How are ebooks supposed to be used by the public, if it is even for me complicated to have a proper workflow which does not mean the ebooks we buy are less usable than a real book (which costs the same)? How shall this system work if they don't even support Linux?
There is a certain series of books, that several installments are only e-books, and the only place you could buy them in Brazil was from Fictionwise.
Except Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise and closed them down, and left a faq on Fictionwise site saying that you cannot even download the books you bought on that site if you are not in the US...
Meaning, that I NEED to pirate books. ZERO stores sell it to Brazil, and ALL of them have DRM. The only way to get the book, is find a illegal copy (because even if you bought legally in the US, the DRM would not allow you to read it in Brazil anyway)
I have an iPad1, so I'm probably screwed. I'll still be able to use the Kindle app to read borrowed books, but some books don't allow reading on Kindle.
If DRM breaks for it, then I'll simply stop buying books from the Sony store (which I mostly have already) and just use DRM-free ebooks from gutenburg etc.
Plus lots of other vendors that don't have their own hardware chain. Powell's books, for example.
Or anyone attempting to self-publish a DRM'd ePub without putting it in Apple's store.
I wouldn't feel comfortable using a device that's contents can be remotely and silently memory-holed at any time.
Only pretty much everyone I know who buys e-books. For them Kindle is synonymous with e-book reader.
The good thing about Kindle is that everything you buy from the Amazon-store can easily and almost automatically have its DRM stripped.
That's not true (or at least not near as seamless) for any other sort of DRMed e-book solution I've seen.
As to your other question, I still use a Kindle. I buy books from various places, but I always put it in Calibre and create a non-DRMed mobi file from the DRMed version. I would not buy a book where I could not strip the DRM.
At least with my kindle, only the books that I bought via amazon and did not liberate from DRM are affected, so the risk is fairly low that it will nuke something really important.
Sure. I have daily Titanium Backup runs going offsite. Not even google/CM can touch those.
I also use CM, who are very good at reversing google's anti-privacy changes (personally, I think they should fork android entirely, but that's another conversation).