Illegal Potter copies were on sale in E via Kindle store: Another example of publishing’s e-mess
Harry Potter books last night were illegally on sale via Amazon’s Kindle Store until taken down.
So when will J.K. Rowling authorize e-copies of her Potter books for real, so pirates don’t get all the e-business?
Dear Author thinks that e-publishing needs to grow up. In fact, maybe publishing in general needs to grow up, as shown by Rowling’s obstinacy.
Excerpt from DA: “The JK Rowling books are not allowed to be released in digital format, but piraters had the book scanned and turned into a digital copy within hours of their release. Somehow…a couple of these unauthorized versions were for sale on the Amazon site last night.”
Here at TeleRead, we’ve made similar points for years. Just when will publishers wise up not just on availability and price issues but also on DRM, another reader-repellent? Many houses could also be more aggressive in the fight against eBabel. Take a look at Diesel eBooks’ listing for Catch Me if You Can. Prices without discounts range from $8.73 in Mobipocket to $14.23 in the Microsoft Reader format. Don’t blame Diesel. It’s the eBabelers who are responsible for this mess, which punishes Linux and iPhone users, who have no way to read DRMed Mobi books without violating the U.S. DMCA and stripping the “protection.”
Walking the walk: The Solomon Scandals, my D.C. newspaper novel, is now available not just in PDF and HTML but also in the ePub standard—nonDRMed, of course. Fittingly, Jon Noring, whose OpenReader helped jog the IDPF into doing ePub, handled the conversion. An eReader version is on the way. While eReader is a proprietary format, with DRM options, its protection is much gentler on readers than Mobipocket’s, which has a nasty device limit.
Update 11:04: WordPress somehow switched off the commenting capability. It’ll be back shortly.
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