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Sharing e-book files legally via e-mail: Could vendor cooperation reduce the tech hassles that can beset us?
August 23, 2009 | 11:43 am
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By David Rothman
Downloading an e-mailed ePub—or any other e-book format—should be a snap. In fact, I don’t recall having problems doing this with a mix of Firefox and Gmail.
But today I received the following note from someone in Europe trying to get a press copy of my novel in ePub: “It downloaded as a folder, not as a single file, and even when I tried to compress it, I got an error message from Adobe Digital Editions” (Adobe-originated screenshot).
What’s going on here? The email recipient himself is apparently using Gmail, and when I tried Opera with it rather than Firefox, sure enough I had a problem. Opera apparently wanted to treat the ePub as just a bunch of zipped files and use a decompression tool associated with that. The circumstances were not quite the same as with the recipient in Europe. But we were in the same territory. Although I came up with a possible workaround for him, I shouldn’t have had to bother. Read on.
The solution of the moment
The solution? I messed within file associations in Windows Vista and made sure the epub extension was linked with Adobe Digital Editions (for the purposes of helping the person interested in seeing The Solomon Scandals). And within Opera I specified ADE when the software asked.
I shared the results with the recipient of my email. I don’t know if he uses Opera. But the same concepts might well apply in other cases. I suspect that my Firefox worked because it was on my system when I installed Adobe Digital Editions: perhaps that automatically reset Firefox. I’m not sure.
More cooperation among vendors involved?
In any event, what a hassle! Can e-book-industry people better coordinate matters with browser and email app companies? Might appropriate cooperation among companies, involving settings, menus, etc., help?
Yes, the e-mail-related hassles are one argument in favor of dedicated Kindle-style devices that can transfer material wirelessly—with the added wrinkle of some kind of e-mail feature.
The copyright question
Meanwhile, to address a related issue, yes, I’m sure some copyright defenders love the idea of e-books being as difficult as possible to share through email. And I myself am against piracy. But what about situations where I want easy emailing? And I don’t just mean book promotion. How about about public domain books in ePub? Or ad-supported books—when some people involved may prefer the goodies to be spread around?
I’ll welcome your ideas—both in terms of tips for individual users and solutions for the e-book industry.
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Comments:
As a writer, of course I’m interested in money, but, as an experiment, I decided to put nine short stories of mine, each of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, together as a “book”, under the title “BOYS who DO the BOP”, and make it easily and freely downloadable in e-form at http://www.anderbo.com/bop9.html (Anyone, anywhere, anytime can read it on a computer, and I’ve heard of some who’ve accessed it directly on their Blackberry devices.)
[As a matter of policy, TeleRead does not endorse any contest mentioned on the Anderbo site or elsewhere, unless we know more about the people involved, which in this case we don't. Please investigate carefully before participating. - D.R.]
Um, an ePub file *is* a zip file, but with a different extension. Or to put it another way: You can create an ePub by putting together your content and metadata files (which must conform to a rather confusing set of standards), zipping the files together, and renaming the result as *.epub instead of *.zip.
It’s annoying, but not entirely surprising, that some software detected that the file you sent was a *.zip (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…) and tried to treat it accordingly.
The solution I would use is to zip the file *again* and email the *.zip (which the recipient would unzip to get the *.epub). That’s what I do to post *.epubs on a website; it’s easier than trying to tell my web server what an *.epub is and how to handle it.
Not a huge extra hassle, but it is one. Setting your own equipment to recognize certain extensions is sometimes a pain… why doesn’t it already know?… but with so many possible extensions, you have to expect that some new ones aren’t going to be part of everyone’s lexicon yet.
The best thing to do is to get in touch with Google and let them know about the problem. They can probably add the format to their list of recognized formats, so everyone else doesn’t have the same issues you had, David.
Rick, Raja and Steve:
Rk: Luckily the topic police around here are asleep, and tonight or tomorrow I’ll “promote” your note to the main section of the blog. Congratulations on your experimentation. Give us further details below if you’d like (the more the better). Or email me at dr NOSPAM teleread.com.
Raja: Yes, there was quite a debate at one point over the kind of wrapper ePub would use, and I guess the confusion with other ZIP-related stuff should have been an issue, if it wasn’t. I encourage people to try out your own solution. Thanks for sharing it. Sounds very logical to me!
Steve: I want e-books to be for “everyone,” not just techies, and I wish there were a a more graceful way of coping with extension issues. Many and perhaps most nontechies do not feel comfortable messing with file extensions. The move to ePub, of course, could simplify matters. Excellent suggestion about Google, assuming that’ll help. I’m trying to recall if Firefox will recognize the ePub extension even with Google in use.
Thanks,
David
I have a comment on another blog, “Touch Point City”, that seems perfectly obvious to me but that no one there has agreed with: “The costs involved for hard-copy printing & distribution are edging toward making newspapers, magazines and books a VERY speculative business. Probably if even The New York Times could figure out, in a business sense, how to quit using its daily paper-and-ink model, and NEVER print and deliver a physical newspaper again, they’d do it tomorrow. But, let’s face it, it’s happening anyway, only S-L-O-W-L-Y — and, for them, EXPENSIVELY.”
Currently at the guidelines page of my on-line literary journal http://www.anderbo.com we’re running a no-fee novel contest in hopes of posting at first one, then more, complete original quality novels online — one twitterer has already suggested that I’m trying to legitimize a new publishing model. And why not?
[As a matter of policy, TeleRead does not endorse any contest mentioned on the Anderbo site or elsewhere, unless we know more about the people involved, which in this case we don't. Please investigate carefully before participating. - D.R.]
While an ePub is a zip file, there is one small requirement above that. The mimetype file must be first, and must be uncompressed. From the command line ( Mac/Linux – where your current directory is the folder that was created)
zip -Xr ../.epub mimetype *
This detail is most likely what is causing the problem with ADE.
I have seen various people reporting that on Windows creating a “compressed folder” and adding the mimetype file first, and then adding the rest will work as well (but I haven’t spent time to verify this myself).
Shoot,
It didn’t like me putting a tag in the command line:
zip -Xr ../filename.epub mimetype *
Hi, Jim. Helpful stuff. Further details welcome! David