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Laptop’s Epub primer
July 29, 2010 | 7:23 am
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By Paul Biba
If you are new to this whole confusing area of ereaders and epub you might want to take a look at Laptop’s primer which was published yesterday.
With a steady stream of new eReaders and eBook stores popping up, consumers now have a wide range of choices when it comes to purchasing digital books. But even though most devices can read the EPUB format, it’s not always clear whether books purchased for one reader will work on another. If you shop around and find the book you want at the lowest price in Barnes & Noble’s store, will you be able to read it on your Sony Reader? Will your device be able to open a book if it’s locked by DRM? Or, if you decide to buy a new eReader, can you transfer your books over or are they lost forever? We have the answers.
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Comments:
I’m wondering what they tested when they say “Barnes & Noble”.
For B&N e-books, to my knowledge none of the other readers they tested—the Alex, the Entourage Edge, and the Sony Reader Daily Edition—handles B&N’s DRM (yet). B&N will deliver some free e-books and free samples without DRM, so I wonder if that’s what they tried.
The comment in the final paragraph about a limited number of devices does not apply to B&N. (To my knowledge) you can have any number of devices associated with a B&N account. It certainly isn’t limited by Adobe’s “six computers and six devices”, because B&N doesn’t use Adobe’s DRM.
Doug,
That’s actually not true. B&N does use Adobe DRM, and the book I used to test this was a regular title (I believe it was the Oprah biography) and not a free eBook. I know that the free books sometimes have different permissions and I wanted to test on regular books, so I actually bought some for this testing.
Also, Adobe told me that any devices associated with your B&N account DO count toward your six and six. They also told me that it’s not hard to get the number of devices upped, so it’s not a serious problem.
I don’t know what to tell you. I’m a NOOK owner (4+ months) and I’ve got a lot of B&N e-books. The ones without DRM are no problem anywhere, of course. The ones with DRM can only be read on the NOOK or in B&N’s reader software/apps.
Adobe Digital Editions gives authorization errors on the B&N e-books it sees on my NOOK.
B&N has never asked me for my Adobe ID, so I don’t know how my Adobe device count could go up from registering my NOOK. My Adobe ID isn’t the same as my B&N ID—I’m sharing my wife’s Adobe ID in order to allow us to share Adobe EPUB e-books.
B&N’s “social” DRM, which they inherited from eReader.com, uses an encryption key that’s created from your name and credit card number. It doesn’t use Adobe IDs at all. If you bring a “foreign” B&N e-book into the NOOK and open it, the NOOK will ask for the name and credit card number associated with that e-book file.
Adobe has incorporated B&N’s “social” DRM into Adobe Reader Mobile 9.1, which means that other readers could handle that DRM if they had the appropriate version of ARM. A number of readers have been announced with that capability, but most slunk out of sight when the price war started. I think the Pandigital Novel is about the only one left standing, although iRex may still be producing the DR800S—I think that Jeppesen sells a pricey version of the iRex for pilots.
Adobe has said that they’re going to include B&N’s “social” DRM into Adobe Digital Editions this year. We’ll see… it’s seven months into the year and it hasn’t happened yet.
I’m with Doug on this one… I own both a Nook and a Sony Touch and the B&N DRM eBooks will not open on ADE or the Sony…
When I look at Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders (for example) on ADE it gives me the following error: “Document is licensed for a different user account.” It won’t even list the title or author in ADE, just the file name.
It won’t even try to open on the Sony. This is true of every DRM epub I’ve purchased from B&N.
If you don’t want to believe us, check out the Nook user boards on the bn.com website, ask the admins and mods there about it.
It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that my experience has been totally opposite this. I had no trouble at all loading my B&N-bought eBook on any of the other readers and ADE didn’t give me the errors you’re talking about.
Now, the error Debbie mentioned is something I encountered once when testing the library lending function on the Sony daily Edition. The email address I’d used to create my library account wasn’t the same as my Adobe ID, so ADE wouldn’t let me transfer the books.
Have either of you tried first authorizing your computer, then importing books, then authorizing your eReaders, then transferring?
I also, just to be safe, used the same email when registering for B&N, Sony, etc. that I used for my Adobe ID. Adobe told me that this wasn’t necessary, but I did it, anyway.
Yes, computer is authorized, both readers all the books… All accounts use the same user ID and password information. ADE will NOT read B&N eBooks at all… Neither will the Sony Reader, you are the only person on all the boards and blogs I’ve read that has gotten a book to work on either ADE or the Sony Reader that was purchased at B&N.
The sad part about this is people are going to believe it will work, they will purchase non-refundable books from B&N and their Sony Reader is NOT going to read them. We see this a lot on the boards already, people thinking that just because B&N uses an epub format they can put it on any reader and read it, every single one of them has been disappointed and wasted their money.
I have about 200 eBooks from B&N, few and far between are those without DRM that will work on the Sony and can be read on ADE, the other 99% will not work… If the accounts were not set up correctly and the readers/computers not authorized correctly I wouldn’t be able to see those books on ADE but I can.