Slashdot Mirror
Adobe's New Ebook DRM Will Leave Existing Users Out In the Cold Come July
Nate the greatest writes "Whether it's EA and SimCity, the Sony rootkit scandal, or Ubisoft, we've all read numerous stories about companies using DRM in stupid ways that harm their customers, and now we can add Adobe to the list. Adobe has just announced a new timeline for adoption of their recently launched 'hardened' DRM, and it's going to take your breath away. In a video posted to Youtube, Adobe reps have stated that Adobe expects all of their ebook partners to start adopting the new DRM in March. This is the same DRM that was launched only a few weeks ago and is already causing problems, but that hasn't stopped Adobe. They also expect all the stores that use Adobe's DRM to sell ebooks (as well as the ebook app and ebook reader developers) to have fully adopted the new ebook DRM by July 2014. That's when Adobe plans to end support for the old DRM (which everyone is using now). Given the dozens and dozens of different ebook readers released over the past few years, including models from companies that have gone under, this is going to present a significant problem for a lot of readers. Few, if any, will be updated in time to meet Adobe's deadline, and that's going to leave many readers unable to buy DRMed ebooks."
Hate him or love him: Richard Stallman was right! Read it and weep: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
The whole thing was written in 1997, for pete sake - when ebooks where still pretty much prototypes.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe DRM is used by virtually all publishers (that actually use DRM) and device makers except Amazon. I.e. it is everywhere (sort of like how ePub is used by virtually everyone except Amazon). But, you don't have to use it. No device that I know of requires that an ePub file has DRM.
Two publishers in the SF/F field that don't use any DRM at all are Tor and Baen Books. Baen Books is excellent for other reasons, including their Free Library (you can download and read the first book in most of their series'). Tor is just part of one of the Big Six, and so otherwise has nothing to distinguish them from any other publisher.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Calibre can't do it out of the box; you need to go find certain addons for it.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Calibre is a god send piece of open source software. I don't really use it for stripping DRM, most documents I read don't have any DRM. But for converting between formats especially when the default formatting is crap for ebooks - fuck yes this is the shit.
Main website and for the sourceforge page in case you're are too lazy to Google search it yourself. Apparently this guy is hosting DeDRM the DRM stripping tool. I've never had to use it.
My company puts out gaming materials (as in tabletop, pnp). When we initially looked at putting out an ebook format ten years ago, we did look at DRM as a form of content control. At the time, though, the requirements to implement such a platform were...to be frank, ridiculous.
So we decided to invest a little bit of trust in our community. We KNOW e-pub versions of our rulebooks and the like are shared amongst gaming groups. It's a given.
But we've had great interaction with our player communities over the years, and they understand that if we're seeing everything popping up on BitTorrent, we have less incentive to put up new material in a timely manner.
Now, we've had to issue a few takedown requests over the years. But only a few, and most of the stuff came down with nary a whimper. As such, we have pretty much ZERO impetus to move from standardized PDF distribution to DRM'ed versions. It's still a waste of time, effort and money. And it also would do damage to our relationship with our players.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Strangely enough, Apple is probably the only company that HASN'T removed content from users. Content has been removed, and if no local copy exists, that content is gone, but if a local copy is available, it still works.
The only known ability is Apple can disable an app through CoreLocation (i.e., the app uses location services), but they haven't demonstrated that ability, either.
Google, Valve (Steam), Amazon, etc., have shown they can remove apps and content from user's devices and computers.
It's strange, really. You'd think Apple would've pulled the trigger by now. Google has, many times.
The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees
That isn't really all that true, actually. Charlie Stross has written quite a bit about the subject.
The executive summary is that the cost of putting ink on paper and shipping it to the store isn't much of the final retail price, and if you expect to buy ebooks for more than about 10% less than paper books, you expect lower quality.