TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Evil Genius kicks DRMed e-book habit

By David Rothman

You needn’t be an Evil Genius to hate onerous Digital Rights Management, but it helps. Dave Slusher has laudably kicked the habit of buying DRMed e-books. His original skepticism of DRM was a little more at the abstract level. Dave had worked as a software engineering team leader for the server side of Intertrust’s PDF publishing system, and he obviously knew how messy the technology could often be.

But now Dave has a more practical and personal reason: his own pain and suffering as a past buyer of DRMed books. Technology marches on, but you may be stuck with beloved e-books locked in a nasty, proprietary shell–mere detritus left behind by a megaconglomerate with other suckers to reel in. I’ll let Dave tell his story, as he did so nicely in his blog today after deciding to buy a Linux PDA:

As I’ve made the decision to get a Sharp Zaurus for the next PDA, I can’t use my typical PalmOS apps anymore. For all the multiformat books and magazines I have purchased from Fictionwise, I’m OK. I can redownload them in another format that is usable on the Zaurus. However, I have a few (not a whole lot, but some) Palm Reader/Peanut Press books that I actually purchased. Every one of these is no longer usable by me.

There is no Palm Reader for Zaurus so the money that I paid Palm is essentially gone and there is nothing I can do about it, save either trying to crack the books myself or someone releasing a Palm Reader port for the Zaurus. Theory moves into practice as I now find myself a burned customer, who is rewarded for paying my money and downloading legitimate copies of things by not being able to read them any more.

Thanks Palm/Peanut! Hope you enjoy the $50 or so I have spent for your books that I can’t read anymore.

A bad part is that I can’t refer back to books for which I paid good money–in most cases a similar amount to what one would pay for the paper copy.

“Even worse,” Dave says, are the books that “I haven’t read yet.” One is Conscience of a Liberal by the late Sen. Paul Wellstore, just the first chapter of which the Evil Genius has gotten through. Dave goes on:

I paid $10 to get the annotated Fire Upon the Deep, in which I’ll never be able to dig through the annotations again. With this situation comes a bit of resolve from me. I will never again spend one cent on any e-book that involves a form of DRM that leaves me at risk for not being able to read it later. I will happily pay for electronic reading–I plan on retaining my electronic subscriptions to F&SF and Asimov’s SF–but never again will I pay for DRM books. I’m not putting my cash at risk to ease publisher nerves. If you think I as your customer can’t be trusted and must be treated like a criminal under house arrest with an ankle bracelet, you can kiss my ass. I’ll keep my money in my pocket and not give it to you. I’ll give it instead to your competitors who don’t treat me that way. God forbid, I might even read more Baen books! I love how they do business, if only they published more books I wanted to read.

Ironically, this moment of resolve comes at a point where I really am trying to purge the enormity of paper books from my life. I continue to try to reduce them, knowing that we have at least one more move in our lives in the next few years. I’m the absolute perfect consumer for e-books–you might find someone equally close to the ideal target demographic but you will not find someone closer.

I love to read. I love to hoard, but I’ve hit the limits of my physical space. I enjoy the act of reading on a small device. As a geek I have no problems with the weaknesses of e-text. I love the ubiquity of having a library in my pocket at all times. I have disposable cash and the willingness to spend it on this product line. E-publishers couldn’t hope for more. However, because of their business practices a significant number of them have lost access to me and my money that I will be spending somewhere, just not with them. What a shame for them, what a boon for the publishers who are trusting enough not to lock up their documents in proprietary DRM and who understand that the risks of unauthorized file trading are far lower than the risks of not making the money in the first place.

Yo, Open eBook Forum? Got that? Although I’ve been writing about e-books for years, I myself have yet to buy my first DRMed e-book in a “secure” proprietary format. Download a freebie? Sure. Borrow from KnowBetter.com’s library? No problem! But I’m not gonna let the industry shaft me with a book to which I may be denied access someday because of a situation like Dave’s. I want to own books for real.

Before I’ll plunk down money…

Mind you, I would be open to compromise. What if the industry could do a nonproprietary form of an easy-to-live-with DRM Lite, as I’ll call it, and included buyer protection either through a consortium or a partnerships with librarians–ideally through a TeleReadish approach. Then I might actually plunk down money.

Until then, at least as a buyer rather than a borrower or freebie-downloader, I’ll do my best to boycott “protected” books in proprietary formats. Way to go, Dave! Glad to see you feel the same! If the e-book industry wants to grow worldwide revenue from a pathetic $10-$20 million a year, it should kick the proprietary DRM habit–because otherwise you and I and zillions of others will keep saying “No” to unadulterated consumer abuse.

More details from the Evil Genius on his Evil past with Intertrust: “All the key exchange and credential redemption stuff was what I did for them, and we did it well, but Intertrust imploded without ever understanding the value of what we delivered. 6 months after bringing the project in on time and under budget, we were all laid off.

“Somewhere in the time after that, I had my Saul of Tarses to the Apostle Paul conversion and realized the many ways in which DRM subtracts value. Today is the first day where that realization actually translated into a real-world situation that cost me money, which is what I write about.”

In fairness to Palm Digital Media–before I strike again, which I’ll do in most of this paragraph: Palm Digital Media’s DRM is actually gentler than for the industry as a whole since it’s keyed to credit card numbers rather than individual machines. And who knows? Maybe PDM will eventually come out with a version of its reader for the Zaurus and other Linux PDAs. But meanwhile both human readers and Sharp, the maker of the Zaurus, will pay the penalty. If I were a PDA or tablet hardware vendor, I’d be screaming-angry at the DRM lobby for holding back technological progress.

To give another example, last I knew, Palm Digital Media wasn’t coming out with another version of its reader for the Microsoft Smartphone–not unless enough of a market developed. For that matter, even Microsoft wasn’t going to do a Reader for the Smartphone. Just what does that tell you about those DRM stalwarts’ concerns for the consumer? Plenty, and it isn’t flattering.

The library angle: Librarians, beware of commitments to books in formats that may become obsolete–perhaps much sooner than you’d think! Make sure the vendor can and will update and change proprietary formats as needed. And never, never stop reminding vendors of the need for a Universal Consumer Format–with nonproprietary DRM Lite for publishers insisting on copy-protection–to rid the e-book industry of its growth-stunting Tower of eBabel. Here’s to a UCF as soon as possible!

Update, 2:03 p.m. on March 1: More from Dave Slusher’s blog: “I placed the Zaurus order yesterday. I was dawdling around and got this horrible feeling that I was about to replay my Clie fiasco by waiting too long. It would really have sucked if either the 5600 was sold out or not available at the $330 price (a third off of the nominal $500 list price) so I just did it. I’m a ditherer by nature, so I had to get active. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to use the Amazon gift certificate (the code number was in invisible white-on-white HTML text just to piss me off) but the order is in.” The EG also says:

David, it actually gets better. For unencrypted Fictionwise books my format of choice was iSilo, which isn’t on Zaurus and has a closed format. For similar reasons, I’ll be dropping that as well. A while back the guys at FW were asking if there was any interest in Plucker formatted books from FW. I liked Plucker on the Palm and would be happy for it to be my primary ebook/web page reader on the Zaurus.

I’m a little weirded out by being the spokesmodel for this transition of dumping the closed (Clie/PalmOS/Palm Reader/iSilo) for the open (Zaurus/OpenZaurus/Plucker) but [the TeleBlog] posts are an accurate summation of what I’m doing and why. Although I can’t say I’m dying to fart around with the OS layer or the rendering code or file formats for my books (and in fact I hope that I never do), it makes a world of difference to me between having that option and not having that option.

The last closed app that I’m really going to miss: Vindigo. On a webpage I heard a whisper of a rumor that someone is working on a Zaurus Vindigo solution. Man, I hope so. I’m still paid up through July.

Hey, Dave, best of luck with your transition, and keep us posted!

Update, March 1, 10 p.m.: I see Dave just did another item, carefully making clear how he ended up at Intertrust and exactly what he did there.

Meanwhile, one of Dave’s human readers notes that there is a PalmReader for OS X (that’s a Rothman-supplied link). But, hey, Dave wants to read e-books on a Linux PDA, and in that respect he is still out of luck. As the EG puts it: “I paid my money to be able to read these books away from the computer on the small ubiquitous device I keep on my person. If the option was ‘Pay $10 for FIRE UPON THE DEEP and you can only read it sitting at your Mac,’ I would have kept my money. I want the open solution. I went with the Zaurus ultimately because it was more open than a Clie, and I want the same from my documents. I want to be able to do with them what I see fit and that includes moving them from device to device in the future, on OSes that haven’t yet been invented and in uses I haven’t yet dreamed of.” Amen.