DRM and watermarking of e-books should be banned. Copyright should be abolished.
When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
281–290 of 297 posts
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an issue if there were ebooks exclusive to Microsoft and not available anywhere else. You've lost access to something that you can't get access to (legally) again at any price.
These books also don't exist in print?
The ebook no longer exists. That's the point. Whether or not the item is available in print is irrelevant as the person who paid for it did not pay for a physical copy.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#283I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…
I use ebooks and physical books, but I am regretful of some physical books mainly because:
1) They take a lot of space. I have bookshelf's full of them.
2) They can get damaged by humidity and mold.
3) I am prospecting travelling/moving/migrating, and I will likely sell/donate my books in this case.
That being said I want to support the authors I read, and wish I could buy the digital book directly from the author (100% of the money goes to him/her), and get an electronic copy.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#284I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…
All your points are dead on. I'll throw in these cons as well: 5. visibility (as noted by angrygoat) and browseability is terrible. 6. Flipping through an ebook looking for something is impossible. 7. Illustrations or drawings are rendered terribly. The list of pros of ebooks: 1. It's just a better experience. Ebooks are lighter than their equivalent books, easy to use one-handed, fonts can be adjusted, you can carry…
> A literally out-of-print book [1] selling for $13 is so outlandish that it makes my head spin.
You got that completely backwards. The book is freaking out of print. You can’t buy a physical copy anymore without a lot of effort. $13 seems a fair deal for conveniently getting a book you’d otherwise have a hard time obtaining.
For that matter, out of print books being rare and thus more valuable and selling for (sometimes much) higher prices are not unheard of in the physical world either.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically, the price of books is largely a function of the costs of manufacture and distribution. There are some fixed, up-front costs that don't vary with print run (editorial, typesetting, proofreading, cropyediting and so on), which is why a bestseller novel is way more profitable than a complex academic book that is expensive to produce and limited in sales, even though you're probably spending more on royalties…
> Typically, the price of books is largely a function of the costs of manufacture and distribution. I don't think that's always true. The cost to print and ship hard cover vs paperback books is less than the price difference between the two. I'm surprised about ereaders not supporting what you need for complex books. When I looked at Apple's version of epub it I thought it was pretty impressive. The Kindle format is…
You’re right. It’s pretty much never true. The publishing costs are dominated by the fixed costs.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#286I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…
Correct your first sentence and I agree with everything you said. I don't buy ebooks at amazon . I have hundreds of books in my collection. You will never catch me buying a book with drm on it. Get drm-free ebooks from a store or from project Gutenberg-type places.
Publishers can request DRM-free regime. Tor does on both Amazon and iBooks as a matter of policy, there are others.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#287Earlier 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.
Well, that “downside” is the entire point. Czech publishers call this “social DRM”, which conveys the point well: if the book says it was printed for me, visibly, I won’t be inclined to distribute it illegally. It isn’t about enforcement (see sibling comment). And yes, you can strip visible watermarks, but this still discourages casual pirates well.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Evolved the same way in neighboring Czechia.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mass sharing a scanned book, particularly one that was not OCRed, indeed usually takes too much work. EBooks, or rather most of them, are tiny epub files with little to no images, 5mb maximum. There are sources distributing ebooks at scale, libgen.io is a prime example, the ebooks channel on IRC highway and myanonamouse, a private ebook and audiobook torrent tracker that some people apparently use also exist. There a…
Gotcha -- an epub/mobi of a novel is tiny and easy to host. I was thinking of more design-heavy books with figures and images, which tend to be much larger.
Still, if people torrent audiobooks (and they do), then eBooks, even with figures, can't be that bad. I've seen hosted collections of audiobooks ranging in the gigabytes and they were not best sellers. No reason why you couldn't do that for ebooks.
Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotcha -- an epub/mobi of a novel is tiny and easy to host. I was thinking of more design-heavy books with figures and images, which tend to be much larger.
Still, if people torrent audiobooks (and they do), then eBooks, even with figures, can't be that bad. I've seen hosted collections of audiobooks ranging in the gigabytes and they were not best sellers. No reason why you couldn't do that for ebooks.
Thanks for the warning. I've published a ~100MB niche ebook, and thought of publishing another. Now I need to reconsider.