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By David Rothman

To reduce piracy, it isn’t enough to offer legal versions of e-book and other media. They mustn’t be nightmares to use because of Draconian DRM. Here is another horror story out of Norway:

I’d never actually bought an eBook.

So I thought, how does this work? Is it Microsoft blahblah reader only? Is it PDF? And then I clicked on and discovered that Amazon provides both a “Microsoft Reader” version and a “Adobe Reader” version. “Aha! Adobe! So it’s PDF! I can buy it here now, and print it at school tomorrow! I can read it on all my computers! I can bring it on my PDA! Lovely! I don’t have to wait!”. So I clicked on. Payed my $5 and after some “personalization progress” (probably for branding my own PDF so they could trace it back to me if it appeared on bittorent) I was redirected to a download site.

So I had just bought my first eBook. I thought. But it wasn’t a book. There was hardly an “e”. All I got was this lousy XML file named ebx.etd.

So I went back to Amazon, clicking on eBook support. I had tried everything they said to try if you had problems. It was a big list. I wonder how it was many years ago when real books came with a 5 page list of things to do if you couldn’t open the book. I wanted to cancel my purchase. As all I had was some “ebx-transfer” file, and not the real book.

go through the two websites mentioned above to see what sort of support amazon and adobe offered them. truly horrendous and sad

(Soiland.no blog via Hulleye Comes By.)

Related: “DRMed ebooks cost lots and break when you upgrade Acrobat.”

 
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