When Apple ads native support to Preview.app for ePub/iBook format then you'll be able to read them on your Mac.
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Apple iBooks Copy Protection Cracked for First Time
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When Apple ads native support to Preview.app for ePub/iBook format then you'll be able to read them on your Mac.
First let me ask you to not misconstrue what I am saying and try answering to my points without straw men. I didn't mind changing from vinyl to cd, it's expected. But to charge me for converting the audio (first of all what conversion? they already have it in digital...) of a cd and have to rebuy via itunes you bet I mind. It takes me, the amateur, a few minutes to do it myself, and it takes them close to nothing to press a button and export the whole album to .aac, or whatever they choose.
Is that what I said? I said I mind having to pay twice for the same content or not getting a discount for owning both versions. And no it's not expensive once you develop (once and for all) the ability to highlight, annotate and look up in the api then you just stick it in any ebook you create, so no it's not expensive. I paid goodreader on the ipad a flat fee of $2.99 two years ago and it can do all that for most every file not just epub. And you are telling me it's costly for large publishing conglomerates? All the more so when epub is an industry standard (if they would get their ... together and standardize one format instead of balkanizing their market) available to every publisher at no extra development cost. The page setting they might do for print, they might just tweak it around a bit for ebook. Again are you kidding me? Yes they are stealing me when they tried to bully me into buying an e-copy of their book for my digital file while I am also buying a print version. Too bad their greed has bit them in their behind and now they have another unhappy customer which is just a click away from stealing their content, instead of a happy one who would have bought his printed books and e-copy for a marginally higher price. The sole reason I keep paying for books is cause I feel for authors, but publishers...
What on earth are you on about re-typing the book? I have a book scanner and I can scan the book in minutes and ocr it to get what I want. Once a book is typed, and you know, nowadays that's what the author does right? It's not that common manuscripts, are they? Anyway, once a book is typed it can be printed, typeset, the deal is done. What exactly are you on about typing? And yeah when I buy it in a much more costly format which involves physical bookstores, distribution, paper etc. I expect the "stamp" they used to create, which to the publisher is a click away from a converter to become epub to be at the very least offered to me at a large discount.
But anyway, since I am wrong and you are right, sit back with your cocktail and your self vindication and watch as people pirate books away everywhere and post them on the web... That's very similar to what the music biz did stick their heads in the sand and hope they could continue making boatloads of money by reselling the same old content and drm-ing the hell out of everything, and asking people to buy content that was just a click away from digital conversion in their home computers... and if it hadn't been for Steve Jobs insight by now they would all have been unemployed, since when it's digital it's hard to police. They got on his case too for itunes match too and now they are praising him cause they get a cut for every matched song not purchased by them, but before they were like "oh his legalizing piracy"...
Publishers better start finding a workable business model. One robust ebook format and physical bookstores with printed books a bit more expensive than ebooks maybe but where a buyer has an easy way of owning an e-copy too with ease. If they are too dumb to think they can police the web or that they 'll go full digital and end the printed book (instead of using it to their advantage) so they can raise their profits with no distribution, printed costs etc. they can be my guests and just enjoy their books being pirated with no end in sight. If they were wise and offered a BETTER format than the run of the mill pdfs that get posted online FREE with their printed books, maybe they could motivate people to say, ok, I want a print copy cause print books are good for reference, to have on the desk to quickly pick up etc. etc. and anyway my printer will be nowhere near the quality, AND I am getting an ebook as well for my ipad if I am on the road, or need to search it. Good deal, I am going to buy the book and not spend the next 10 minutes looking for it on the net.
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and they have no excuses to be honest for not doing it already... too much time spent developing a reminders app for mountain lion doesn't cut it...
You are assuming books that are encrypted are sent in the same format as those that are not. That may be true, I have never checked. They may for some unimaginable reason use a slightly different format for DRM'd books.
Doesn't work!
I will confess to downloading and using Requiem on my iBooks purchases. The reason I did this was not to distribute them but only - and I mean only - for the reason that I want to sometimes read my iBooks on my Mac desktop, like I can with my Kindle books. And I can't. I don't understand why really. But I can't. I wouldn't have to try to do this if Apple would give us iBooks for Mac.
Unfortunately, either I'm doing something wrong or the program doesn't work because when I then try to open the books in Calibre, they still have the DRM attached. Has anybody else tries this? Requiem says they don't have DRM, so it does nothing. But they do. <sad face>
I will confess to downloading and using Requiem on my iBooks purchases. The reason I did this was not to distribute them but only - and I mean only - for the reason that I want to sometimes read my iBooks on my Mac desktop, like I can with my Kindle books. And I can't. I don't understand why really. But I can't. I wouldn't have to try to do this if Apple would give us iBooks for Mac.
Unfortunately, either I'm doing something wrong or the program doesn't work because when I then try to open the books in Calibre, they still have the DRM attached. Has anybody else tries this? Requiem says they don't have DRM, so it does nothing. But they do. <sad face>
The eBook is just text. Searching, highlighting, annotations, and the ability to look up words are all part of the software. That the software has these functions doesn't justify a higher price for the eBook. Why should it?
Also, 30% is a pitiful commission?
Giving away 500,000 copies of my book should be MY decision, not yours. It's that simple for me. You buy one copy, that does not give you the right to redistribute. Period.
Yes it does, it's maybe the main reason why we at all have books - BECAUSE WE ARE ABLE TO SHARE THEM AND RESELL THEM. Being digital doesn't make it different.
I can lend my books to friends, obviously i can't lend my drm infected books to friends, but i can give my iPad or other ereader for them to read - it's a lost sale to you anyaway, right?
This whole thing just stands in a way of the things that's all.
Fiction. The second book was a sequel to the first.
Clearly of the 500,000+ illegally downloaded first books, many of the readers were interested in the series and paid to download the second book when they could not find a free version of the second book anywhere...
Physical books will include a special QR Code which when scanned will give you access to a free eBook version. These will be tied to our own registration system in an attempt to restrict the free eBooks we give away to one per physical book. We will see if this is interesting to book purchasers or not, and if these eBooks end up being cracked and distributed. They will be individually serialized as well...
Physical book sales start this Summer for both books with a new publisher.
Nobody contends that it's your decision to give away your book, but you simply cannot avoid this. It was tried with music and it failed, it was tried with movies and it failed. You hope it will work with ebooks which are even much easier to distribute?
You have to live in the world you get, and in this world if you really want you can get music, movies and ebooks for free. You can stomp your fists on the table yelling about your rights all day, RIAA & company are doing this since the Napster days. It didn't change much, because the world is headed in a different direction.
You might not like it, but it's much more effective to ride the flow than to try to swim against it, that was the point the other poster was making. Even if you were against this unlawful distribution, you cannot claim it did bring only damage to you as a writer. How many of these 500k would have been sales if the book were not free to get? How many sales you earned thanks to word-of-mouth? How many sales of your second book were due to the popularity gained also through the widspread availability of the first one?
Becoming popular is much more important than a few thousand additional sales on your first book. Most authors did understand that and provide some free books, enable lending, encourage word-of-mouth. With the right approach you can lose a few thousand sales to piracy (which is inevitable) and gain thousand hundreds thanks to how the current social-network-centric internet works.
TL;DR: Playing with the old rules is your choice, but it doesn't make it a smart choice.
Should be, but it isn't. Any song, film, book, ebook or tv programme that is sold can also be shared and you can'r run away from it.
Am I missing something? I read iBooks on my Mac(s) all the time???!!!
Navigate to Books in iTunes, double click on the book it opens and you can read it! There is no specialized app, but you can read them.
You do realize that DRM isn't Apple? It's the publishing houses that force Apple to use DRM.
It's the old adage, 'Don't shoot the Messenger' or in this case the Delivery guy.
Every chance Apple gets (as history has proven) they have tried to make the content more portable. Renegotiating with the Music industry to offer DRM free content, and most recently, buy an app through the App store and the license covers all your household machines.
This is the age old fight that Apple has been doing for years for all applications and content. The movie studios are the worst, won't even let Apple import content that you purchased on DVD. At least Apple got the Music studios to allow this early. It's the content creators that need to be complained about, not the delivery people. Eventually the studios will figure out that the people want their paid content portable and the need for places like itorrent.tv, etc. will diminish and not be needed as much.
There's a pattern however.
The harder something is to find, the more perceived value it has. For example the iTunes store is only somewhat harder to find than just searching google. However if all you know about a song is a couple of lyrics, you might enter the lyrics you know into google, it will find a "unauthorized copy" of the lyrics from which you can find the title and hopefully the author, and then go to itunes and search it. It might not be on iTunes in your country, so you then have to go back to google and see if Amazon shows up. If Amazon doesn't show up, now your choices are buy/pirate it DRM-free from Russia, or fly to a country that has it and buy a physical CD, and hope it doesn't get confiscated by customs on the way back.
eBooks are the hardest to find, next to music, and then images. Mainly because these are DRM-locked, or not in a computer-readable format that google can search. If you don't have the title and author, you'll never figure out what to buy, and you're not going to buy 20 some items that sound like it might be correct at full price just to figure out which one is the correct one.
And instead of taking a flight to foreign country just to buy a CD that isn't sold in your country, you might find foreign store in that country that is willing to ship it to you, but you'll still risk the item being confiscated or excessive taxes added at customs.
People will prefer the easiest and cheapest option every time. You want that cheapest option to be either iTunes or Amazon, not the pirate sites. If your content isn't available on every countries version of the iTunes store, then you are choosing to leave money on the table. Amazon is a bit more flexible, and you can generally buy from the foreign site (and ship to the US.) In the case of eBooks, there should be no shipping at all.
But this is not always the case.
eBooks and music will generally play on all future devices, if they are DRM-free. Games and Software will not play on future devices, DRM-free or not. As we've learned from all software released on physical media, if the company goes out of business, or is bought/merged with another, all the old content may be destroyed with there not being any possibility of recovery. So if there is only a DRM'd version of X application, music, video, game, or ebook, and that company has gone out of business, that content ceases to exist in 120 years, and does not become public domain. Because in 120 years, todays iPad and Kindle's won't exist.
Case in point, all the old forms of electronic DRM have to be cracked in order to play a 20 year old game on a modern computer, because they run inside virtual machines that don't have the physical media anymore. Soft DRM like code wheels and "find word X on page Y in the manual" are worked around by simply copying the soft DRM with it. There are some games that may never work on a modern computer because the DRM at the time was too tightly integrated with the old assumed operating system and hardware, and the only way around it is to strip the DRM from the game and then patch the game to work on newer operating systems. (Games by Origin Systems/Electronic Arts and Sierra Online/CUC/Vivendi/Activision released between 1994 and 1999 have no source code to make their old games work on new computers, and the games that have been made to work, are the DOS versions, using Dosbox. These companies have been merged over and over again, and the chances of the software being "Remade" by the IP holder is zero.)
Businesses are frequently so short-sighted that they only care about the profits they make in the current quarter, and not any potential future profits from selling the product perpetually. If they release things with DRM on day zero just to thwart the pirates, fine. But when version 1.1 or a half a year goes by, release it DRM-free so that everyone else with a capable device can also read, listen, watch or play it.
If you don't ever release a DRM-free version, you won't get people buying the same copy every time a new piece of hardware comes out, no you'll just have people hanging on to their old hardware till it bites the dust. If you are a hardware company like Apple, getting everything DRM-free is in your best interests to ensure future hardware sales.
TL;DNR version: DRM is a short term prospect that should be abandoned once short term profits have been had in order to ensure long term profits.
No. It's kind of stupid, but B&N has a different adobe DRM scheme than Sony. You can open a book from the sony store on the nook, but you can't open a book bought from B&N on a Sony or Kobo.
There is no reason why any CD would be confiscated as long as you are not importing it, and "importing" means bringing into the country in order to sell it. Any CD that you buy in order to listen to it is fine. Obviously if you bring 10,000 CDs then you might have a hard time to convince them you are not importing.
i will never know, because they are encrypted.
Yap, in theory the DRM scheme had to be included in Adobe DE but still hasn't.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/articles/barnes_noble_faq.html
In my opinion the comparatively lack of pirated content is a consequence of the fact that ebooks are appealing only to a smaller niche of users. Listening to music is much more mainstream than reading, especially in the Internet users' demographics. Being somewhat less popular means there is less interest in cracking the various protections or sharing.
Still if you are after a huge bestseller ala harry potter you'll find it very easily. You actually were able to read it before the book's release. The more popular, the more easy to find a pirated version.
Oh I dunno...
- Reading on a Mac
- Reading on Kindle
- Able to copy and paste from iBooks
- Reading on any other ereader
- etc...
I'm sure others might have already replied, but these are good reasons for content you purchased. Yes, it's the license you purchased, but at the same time, it's a nice thing to have some flexibility with your media.
What if it were a paper book? People share paper books all the time and there's nothing wrong with that?
DRM makes content disposable since it cannot freely be transferable from one device to another. If this is the case, I hope content providers charge appropriately to reflect the disposable nature of the goods.
Sharing a paper book is different. If you really valued that book, you probably wouldn't give it out to anyone, except someone you knew who would take care of it and bring it back. Libraries will have you fork over money if you destroy a book or never bring it back. Heck, we got police warnings in the past over not bringing books back to the library.
People share textbooks all the time too, teachers photocopy out of books all the time aswell. Have teachers who give us 50+ stapled sheets of short stories and material A LOT.
But there is a difference in sharing something to about 100 students in paper format. All that valuable information will get wrinkled, torn, and eventually fade away because of the copier ink not lasting forever. The paper will start to change color too.
But a digital copy will see itself being converted from one format to another overtime, and could find itself reaching over a million people if it gets out of the original person's hands.
I have no problem with you buying a hard cover copy of my book, reading it, then passing it along to a friend.
You no longer hold the book, and your one friend is reading it. Even if he in turn passes the book to another, and each reader in turn passes it to 100 more, you have not distributed copies to 100 people, you have passed along one physical book. Libraries do this too. I have no problem with this at all.
If you could pass ownership of an eBook to another person - you can no longer read it but they can - I would have no problem with that either.
You posting my eBook on a website where 500,000 people can download it for free? That's a problem.
If you cannot see the distinction, I will never be able to explain it to you.
Some of us do see the distinction, but assuming that everyone that buys a book and strips the DRM from and is sharing 500,000 copies of it, is short sighted.
That would be like saying because Amazon MP3s don't include DRM, people are uploading those and sharing 500,000 copies. Same when iTunes removed DRM from their music (although there is a user stamp on each file that highly discourages people from uploading).
DRM, in general, hurts the legal purchasers of media. Flexibility in reading the ebook you purchased on say, a Mac (a backup of the file is actually placed on the Mac) in a reader that understands the ePub format, would be logical.
I would think that the artist that created the work would want to protect their works from being stolen in a number of ways, but to suggest that DRM is the best current solution for any digital media, is just as short sighted.
I'd love to hear your alternative solution. DRM is the only option that authors have today to protect our works from being illegally distributed.
Like it or not, people primarily hate DRM not because they cannot read their eBook on their Mac, but because they cannot find free downloads of the books they want.
I believe the solution lies in a ubiquitous book reader and a common format, that includes managed ownership rights to the eBook you bought. You can give it away or sell it, but when you do you lose the ability to keep reading it.
Unfortunately that system does not yet exist.