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‘BookFob: eBook on a keychain’: Thumbs down!
May 29, 2006 | 5:45 pm
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By David Rothman
BookFob stores obnoxiously DRMed books on a USB memory stick that you can attach to a keychain.
Granted, the stick handily contains an e-book-reader program and supposedly can work with any Windows PC. But what if you want to use another program? I’m not sure if BookFob allows that. And how about use on linux desktops, various PDAs and other devices without the right Bill-blessed OS? Look, we’re talking market balkanization, when instead people should be able to just buy a book and not worry about tie-ins with hardware of any kind–computer or BookFob.
Whatever the case, here’s yet another deal-killer–perhaps the key one:
Each BookFob memory stick has a built-in unique identifier.This unique identifier acts as the key to decrypting the content of the stored e-book for viewing. By possessing the BookFob, this insures that you are the legitimate owner of the book. Content is not capable of being shared on the Internet or copied and distributed. This should ease authors’ and publishers’ concerns and insure maximum security of their documents.
Can’t be copied? No backup? Oh, great. I call this vanity DRM. Wittingly or unwittingly, the vendor behind the technology is catering to the fears of writers and publishers by focusing on excessive security. Never mind the little detail of book people making money. If publishers want DRM–well, ok. But please: Kindly present the Dobermanish variety as an option, not the main show. Don’t fob this off on publishers as a great way to grow revenue, not when open standards, including, yes, OpenReader, in which I’m involved, are about to break the ties between hardware and e-book content.
Meanwhile I think the Red Feret Journal has this baby pegged well: “Take one common or garden USB flash drive, throw in some sort of eBook reading software, add some content protection and cutesy marketing, and presto, a product for the naive geekular literati. Yuck. Probably better to get hold of Tom’s free eTextReader, a cheapo flash drive and subscribe to Project Gutenberg, eh?”
Detail: Check out the BookFob library. Nothing but public domain classics, such as Black Beauty–each next to a nonfunctional “Buy It Now” button.
(First spotted via jkOnTheRun.)
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Comments:
Irony of ironies, in the image the BookFob is resting against an Apple mouse. Well, it’s not really that ironic, given that it’s a pretty badly Photoshopped image.
Let me tell you something about DRM…
I just had a pretty nasty experience there unfortuantely. I bought an ebook (DRM PDF) a while ago, it was the prologue to the last Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan.
It had a rather complicated installation routine, I can’t exactly remember what I had to do to get it working…well…whatever.
Now I did a bit of hardware related stuff with my computer, created a RAID array and had to reinstall WindowsXP.
I backuped my files to another drive of course. Now I was going through my files and found the ebook, wanted to open it and…NADA…nothing works. I have found no way to use this file anymore. Maybe there is a way and I haven’t found found it yet?
The book was cheap, only 2-3$ because it was only the prologue…a sort of appetizer before the real paper-book came out.
If this book had been 10 or 20$, I’d be really really angry right now…
as it is I’m not so sure whether I’ll get a PDF ripper (assuming there is such a program) and kill the DRM to revive the file or just search the p2p for it.
I’m really willing to pay for my books, but if I can get better value for nothing (unprotected ebooks “illegally”) than I can get for money (DRM books that stop working and don’t tell me how to reactivate them) then it really isn’t a hard decision…
Concerning this Memory Stick thing up there…I’m sure it’s fine if you want to read your books sitting in front of the Computer, but if -like me- you like to read in bed or on the couch, you’ll have a hard time since i don’t think that monster will work with any of the upcoming eink readers, PDAs or the Nokia 770
As usual, Roland, you’re right on target. I can’t stand e-books that I can’t read on a PDA or the tablet I’m using.
Shronk, neat observation! LOL.
David
[...] The BookFob device must be attached to the computer to verify ownership of the e-book content. Entire documents or sections of the document can be password protected to insure an additional layer of security. In addition to passwords, the documents can be set to expire after a certain number of days or number of times accessed. This technique allows an author to distribute promotional material or full books for a limited time before making the content unreadable. Another important security feature of our e-book reader software is the ability to distribute books that are not printable as well as the ability to disable the copy and paste features. Since these documents are complied into the reader, this insures that no one will be able to hack or copy the contents unless the author approves. That’s exactly what we’ve craved for ages: crippled e-books that can expire, are not printable and have the copy and paste feature disabled – provided that you are using Microsoft Windows, because otherwise the reader won’t work at all. And if this isn’t enough to make fresh milk sour, check out their BookFob Library, where you can buy excellent public domain books such as Around the World in 80 Days, assuming that the "buy it now" link would actually work. PS: It seems David of Teleread fully agrees that this is a gadget we could easily live without. [...]
“[the book] had a rather complicated installation routine, I can’t exactly remember what I had to do to get it working”
Excuse me?
yep…I downloaded a file, but this was just the “carrier” file which then had to be “extracted” somehow (don’t ask) to get the final, DRM protected PDF that I could then read…but can’t read anymore.
Something like an activation routine.
I could live with a simple pssword, but this stuff is far too weird for me…and I’m no computer noob…
Actually, I don’t mind this one so much. What this company is trying to do is to replicate the ‘ownership’ rights of a physical book, in the digital domain. That is, it allows for the model that you can go to a kiosk/vending machine and buy a fob. Then you own the fob, and none of the ‘intellectual property’ so called, encoded on it.
You can share the fob, resell it, rent it, lend it out — though there’s nothing to say the company won’t take back those options in some future version of the software.
I do like that there are many alternatives being explored in the whole ebook realm. I’d like to believe that in time these will all shake out and that we readers will determine the format (open, please) and drm (lite or none, please) and fair use rights (yes, please) we will end up with.
In the end, I expect that all creative works will gravitate to open or creative commons types of licenses. Currently copyrighted material will never go out of copyright, but it will become increasingly irrelevant as more and more artists publish openly, and more and more readers prefer, then insist, on creative commons, open texts.
As for copying and breaking the keyfob, I wonder if it would be as simple as taking a screenshot of the displayed pages, then running them through OCR…
I wish the app were html-based, or java, or flash, something that would be usable on more devices, and not just MS-Windows PCs.
[...] At the Teleread blog, where I blog, regular visitor Roland Rohde was talking about the troubles he had with DRM, and in the run-up to his story he casually remarked that: “[the book] had a rather complicated installation routine, I can’t exactly remember what I had to do to get it working“. [...]