By the way, I wonder if the enforced use of proprietary DRM might be an area for the European Union to investigate. What do you think?

Thanks,
David

Other platforms, such as Content Reserve and eBooks.com, currently do not allow a publisher to publish DRM free ebooks, AFAIK. Perhaps we should start another campaign to encourage these to allow DRM free books.

Martyn

Thanks so much for these instructions. I have to say it seems inconvenient at the least to have to borrow a Kindle in order to tell if my books are DRM’d. That would mean every author and/or publisher who posts stuff to the Kindle store would need to have one (if they care about DRM).

When you say an alternate method is to test create a file and examine it before it goes on sale, you’re not talking about the preview function, are you? You upload a file and see if it’s formatted the way you want. When you’re happy with it, you press Publish. But once you do, you don’t have access to any of your data until the book actually goes on sale, so you can’t get to the file anymore.

No worries about the PC vs. Mac thing, though. I’m a lifelong PC girl. I’m happy to help other authors who only have Macs, though. Just let me know, and I’ll see if I can open your .mobi files on my Win XP machine.

1. To download your Kindle books, you may need a K machine. Borrow one and use the USB cable to copy over the file to your desktop. A memory card might work in the case of the Kindle 1. Please note that another approach would be to test-create a file and examine it if Amazon will let you do so before it goes on sale. Almost surely, since you used HTML for creation and presumably fed them into the Desktop Publishing Platform, you’ll find that files are not DRMed. Check out Joshua’s assurance in the first comment above.

2. Use your desktop machine to rename the files to test ‘em with the .mobi extension. Use a right click on a file list to call up the rename command, at least if you’re using a PC.

3. To try to read the .mobifiles, you can use Mobipocket on a PC at least. It’s not open source but is a free download from Mobipocket.com.

I invite others to point out errors in the above or come up with better or more appropriate ways for Paula, especially if she has access only to a Mac.

Best of luck, Paula, and keep us posted!

David

A commenter at Boing Boing made a good point – the DRM issue is important for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the control of information they thus gain; and the more control Amazon gains, the more their apparent discrimination against gay/lesbian-themed books matters.

I really feel like a dummy about this.

I contacted the Amazon DTP support folks a while back with the question on DRM and got back this response:

“Using Amazon DTP, publishers have the ability to add or omit DRM from their submissions. If you use the DTP conversion, the default will be DRM-Free. You can, however submit a mobipocket file through DTP, which can have DRM when it was created. If this is the case, then DTP will honor the DRM.”

As for creating DRM-free content for the Kindle store, any file that is not a DRMed Mobipocket file (.prc or .mobi) will be published without DRM. That means that the large majority of books published through the DTP are not DRMed, because most authors and publishers are not making Mobipocket files.

Joshua Tallent
http://KindleFormatting.com/book
eBook guru and author of the complete guide to Kindle formatting