What's on your reader? And what DRMed books are in your e-collection, and why?

“What DRM books do you own?”

None. I’ve heard too many horror stories about them to want to try them, and I won’t buy them just on principle. Which is a shame, because there are quite a few major-press e-books that I would have bought if they’d been DRM-free. Instead, I’ve borrowed them from the library and scanned/OCRed them into my computer.

I recently bought music for the first time in a decade – the reason was, quite simply, the opening of Amazon’s MP3 store. I’m waiting for the New York publishers to similarly get wise. In the meantime, I read online fiction and nonfiction (far too many works to list). I’ve downloaded a few e-books from Wowio and like its business model; however, being partially sighted, I can only read its PDF format for a limited amount of time during the year. I’m quite open to buying DRM-free e-books from small presses – those presses tend to be especially good about providing HTML editions – but haven’t found any books yet that I’d want to buy.

I don’t have any DRMed books either.
Once I tried to buy one, but being in Canada the Connect store did not let me.
(I still have the same book on my reader from a less legitimate but way more useful source. Oops)

I have the Tanach that I downloaded from the web and reformatted with OpenOffice into PDF.
the content owner did not allow me to share the PDF with others even though their website is free and they actually encourage people to share it via links in email.
They are selling an online version on CD too… probably that’s why they did not want me to distribute the PDFs… one can create it for himself with a little geekyness 🙂

I also have some other stuff, longer blog posts copied into Word and saved in RTF, some books that come and go. Programming manuals that were again downloaded as HTML and reformatted.

I accidentally wiped the books and programs from my Palm the other day, and have yet to sync them back. However, if I remember correctly I had at least Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R.L. Stevenson, which I was busy reading, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, which I had just finished reading, and Also Sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, which I had difficulty getting through.

I have very few ebooks with DRM. I would buy more ebooks if DRM did not exist, as I don’t like the ebooks I buy to be locked up so that I can’t use them the way I should be able to. There have been a few times where I have purchased DRM laden ebooks. I have also heard that ConvertLIT works very well in such cases.

The one side effect of DRM is that I am reading more of the public domain material available at Project Gutenberg and other sites. I’m sure that the pro-DRM publishers didn’t intend this, but I have found that there is a lot of very enjoyable material to read for free at these sites. Maybe I don’t need the latest best seller after all ? 🙂

Welcome to the Fun World of DRM!

MLB rips off fans who bought DRM videos
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/07/mlb-rips-off-fans-wh.html

http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/deals-lies-backchannelling-why-this-is-a-bigger-mess-now-than-ever-before/#comment-6717

Now imagine giving someone a bunch of ebooks as Xmas gifts. Only to have them “taken back” by the publisher!

I bought 1 DRM’d book once – and never again. The experence was so unpleasent, I swore I would never leave myself at the mercy of the publisher again. It the only choice is printed or DRM, I would buy the printed copy, split it and scan it before before buying a DRM version.

I, too, have been driven into the public domain by my fear of DRM and I’m having such a good time re-reading many of the literary heroes of my childhood. Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling… I even skimmed through Raphael Sabatini for some of my favorite passages from Captain Blood and Sea Hawk. They were some of my early favorites and I loved the Errol Flynn movies that were made from them.

Among the ebooks on my Palm are Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Joyce Carol Oates’s Gravedigger’s Daughter, Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts, Harlan Ellison’s Gentleman Junkie (all the above are DRM titles), and a bunch of others. I’ve bought plenty of DRM titles, in eReader where possible because its DRM methods are as painless as DRM can get for the consumer. On the computer at home are hundreds of titles, DRM and not.

I’m not fond of DRM, but view it as a phase publishing’s going through the same way music has. I’m not sure I see much point in boycotting DRM titles — publishers who don’t think as seriously about ebooks as they should will simply take the lack of sales as lack of possible audience and thus never get behind them — but I understand the impulse.

As to buying the print copy and scanning it — mind telling me what scanner you use? The couple of times I’ve done this it’s been far more time consuming than dealing with DRM on the titles would have been (if I could have gotten the titles as ebooks at all).

Bests to all,

–tr

Tony Rabig said:

“I’m not sure I see much point in boycotting DRM titles — publishers who don’t think as seriously about ebooks as they should will simply take the lack of sales as lack of possible audience and thus never get behind them”

Perhaps they’ll notice that e-book sales are increasingly going to small presses. Alas, I suspect that the only thing that will wise them up is the same thing that wised up the music industry: the proliferation of pirated electronic copies.

“As to buying the print copy and scanning it – mind telling me what scanner you use?”

Hewlett-Packcard Scanjet 8200 – it’s quite zippy. It’s mainly the OCR process that’s a pain; there are inevitably typos and formatting problems. So I only scan books that I really, really want to have a copy of to read in the nine months out of the year that I can’t read standard-sized print.

Honestly, if someone like me is boycotting e-books from major presses, the New York publishing industry is really in bad shape.

To scan my books I used a Fujitsu Scansnap 510 – it is a double sided scanner, and is quite fast (but you do have to slice the book – destroying it in the process). It produces a very nice PDF out, and will OCR as well. I can slice, scan, OCR, and finalize a 200 page book in less than 30 minutes – your milage may vary. I’ve been very happy with the results.

A number of the more prolific Distributed Proofreaders, such as Bill and Barbara Tozier and Jeroen Hellingman appear to be using the Plustek Opticbook. The even more prolific scanners, such as Juliet Sutherland, use highspeed scanners that they either borrow from PG or that were donated to them by PG.