151–160 of 297 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should your ebook files be watermarked? Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.
Because it's trivial to turn one ebook into a billion pirated copies, not so much with a physical book. It's a huge difference in logistics.
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.
What do you use for DRM-free audiobooks in Poland?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should your ebook files be watermarked? Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.
I'm fine with watermarks. The only downside to them is that they are traceable to the original buyer if someone else gets their hands on your and decides to distribute it online, so lending them to a friend is risky. But the watermarks really only matter when they get illegally copied around, and don't hurt the owner in the way more restrictive forms of DRM do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They refund them. Why is this an issue?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By making the owned copy ugly and harder to read yet still trivially copyable? Something does not compute here.
These watermarks only appear a few times in places like beside the page number. You'll have to provide a darn good explanation to convince me it makes the book harder to read. And yes, it's still trivially copyable, but that makes it better in any way than DRM: it can be traced back to the original owner but doesn't make it unnecessarily hard to read it on multiple devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're a small independent ebook retailer and we're pushing for DRM-free content with publishers. We've added a DRM-free section to the site: https://www.ebooks.com/drm-free and any search that run you can filter by DRM-free content. We also offer DRM-free PDFs that are correctly formatted, unlike what you'd get from the Google Bookstore (they convert from ePub). This is particularly important for publishers like O'Re…
"We're a small independent ebook retailer" How does that work? Independent in a physical sense, generally translates to 1 or very few outlets. Online is only ever going to be 1 outlet. Plus none of the independent bookstore features seem amenable to translating to the internet. So is it ownership structure? 'vibe'?
> How does that work?
Small: They're not operating at Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Amazon, or any other major book retailer level. Measuring by revenue seems reasonable in this sense. Pick arbitrary numbers to define small/medium/large.
Independent: They're not affiliated with any one single publisher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also removed the DRM on my first Kindle books, found it way harder with the last book I bought (and gave up)
Same here, it seems that amazon has improved its protection and changed its ebook format to harden it against DRM removal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We're a small independent ebook retailer" How does that work? Independent in a physical sense, generally translates to 1 or very few outlets. Online is only ever going to be 1 outlet. Plus none of the independent bookstore features seem amenable to translating to the internet. So is it ownership structure? 'vibe'?
I don't understand the question. All online shops have one outlet. That doesn't mean the distinction between small and large doesn't exist anymore.
Independent in this context includes many different things, most of which I'm not sure are particularly relevant to an online business.
You don't get a knowledgeable enthusiastic shop owner to talk to, it isn't a gathering space, it doesn't keep money in the local community.
So I'm asking what independent actually means in an online context.