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When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

bbc.co.uk

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Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#111

Post by TeMPOraL »

nil-sec wrote: post #59
gnicholas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetical? Every major ebook platform offers annotations (and I just checked — this platform did too). MS apparently recognizes the additional inconvenience to people who have annotated, as they are offering an extra $25 to anyone who has made annotations. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497396 I agree that this closure is not world-ending, and I think the point of the article is that if MS can do this t…

What do people annotate generally that's worth 25$? I'm genuinely curious.

Your thoughts? Deeply engaging with a book, particularly a non-fiction one, involves more than just bouncing words off your retinas.

Personally, while I might not expend the effort on some random novel (though I do highlight quotes I find particularly insightful or funny), I do make a lot of in-line notes & highlights on non-fiction books, both paper and digital. I'd be really pissed off if a book I studied disappeared with all annotations. That's why I learned to procure PDFs of e-books I care about, and I recently started to maintain a separate folder with "reading notes", into which I retype my annotations and thoughts on them after I'm done with reading (this means essentially re-reading the book, albeit much faster, as I have annotations to guide me to important thoughts).

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#112

Post by donatzsky »

dudus wrote: post #100
miki123211 wrote: post #92

That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.

I get my books from Google play books and it does allow downloading as epub. I'm not sure if it includes any kind of drm in it though. I always assumed all of them allowed downloading # Edit: apparently you need something called Adobe digital Editions to read that epub later. So there is some kind of drm.

Apprentice Alf will take care of that.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#113

Post by 0815test »

feanaro wrote: post #108
TeMPOraL wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't trivially make identical - down to cuts, paper type, print fidelity - copies of a physical book. But you can trivially make identical copies of a digital one. Watermarks are an attempt at reproducing rules of physical space in digital space.

By making the owned copy ugly and harder to read yet still trivially copyable? Something does not compute here.

These aren't visual watermarks like what you'd get on physical paper. They just alter the digital copy so that it can be traced back to the buyer, and people are deterred from sharing it on the web. It's a very elegant solution if the 'watermark' can be made hard enough to remove, and I can see quite a few workable approaches.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

dudus wrote: post #100
miki123211 wrote: post #92

That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.

I get my books from Google play books and it does allow downloading as epub. I'm not sure if it includes any kind of drm in it though. I always assumed all of them allowed downloading # Edit: apparently you need something called Adobe digital Editions to read that epub later. So there is some kind of drm.

Google Play Books may or may not have ADE DRM; it varies from title to title.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#115

Post by donatzsky »

feanaro wrote: post #108
TeMPOraL wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't trivially make identical - down to cuts, paper type, print fidelity - copies of a physical book. But you can trivially make identical copies of a digital one. Watermarks are an attempt at reproducing rules of physical space in digital space.

By making the owned copy ugly and harder to read yet still trivially copyable? Something does not compute here.

It's not that kind of watermark. Rather, usually at the beginning, there'll be some text saying who bought the book, along with some kind of identifier. The id can also be hidden inside the file.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#116

Post by reitanqild »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #42
hombre_fatal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they still get your money and you deal with the inconvenience? Try buying from https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebooks where possible (DRM-free).

There's actually quite a few eBook stores out there with DRM-free options, you just have to know where to look, and they're usually publisher-specific. Humble Bundle does a weekly Book Bundle. Wiley, O'Reilly, No Starch, and several other publishers all regularly participate with tech books, geek books, comic books, and manga. No Starch itself deserves a separate mention just because they're awesome. On their own sit…

Didn't O'Reilly stop selling ebooks and now only sell paper books and online (Safari)?

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#117

Post by sohkamyung »

Check out this list of DRM-free bookstores, maintained by Libreture [1].

I usully buy my DRM-free ebooks from Weightless Books [2], and also subscribe to "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" and "Interzone" from that site.

[1] https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/

[2] https://weightlessbooks.com/

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#118

Post by Tepix »

billpollock wrote: post #101
miki123211 wrote: post #92

That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.

Why should your ebook files be watermarked? Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.

> Why should your ebook files be watermarked?

Because digital things can be copied for free without loss of fidelity.

> Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.

A digital watermark can be invisible.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#119

Post by arnvald »

novaRom wrote: post #99
miki123211 wrote: post #92

That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.

Do you mean even books from Kindle store are without DRM?

I believe he means polish e-bookstores. They're way more popular than Kindle store because they offer books in polish language. IIRC some of the stores started offering DRM-free books, others followed and generally it became kind of a standard in Poland.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#120

Post by werid »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #24
asveikau wrote: post #8

I didn't start buying ebooks from Amazon/Kindle until I realized it was relatively easy to break its DRM. I've never used the files anywhere else but I keep a cracked copy of every purchase just in case. That old story about "1984" being removed gave me too much of a negative impression.

So they still get your money and you deal with the inconvenience? Try buying from https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebooks where possible (DRM-free).

So they get the money and you deal with the inconvenience of getting the files onto your ebook reader...?
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