DRM

In The News: DRM nightmare: After recent upgrade, Kobo customers report losing Sony books from their libraries

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 In The News – Articles Of Interest For Authors

It is laughably easy to get around DRM in eBooks. Not only does it not deter would be pirates, DRM punishes those who purchase titles legally. Case in point – the most recent episode of legal users loosing purchases from their libraries after an upgrade courtesy of Sony and Kobo. This also brings up another issue with electronic goods. You don’t technically own them, you “rent” them. Again punishing the legal users. Sound off your thoughts in the comments below.  Chris Meadows at Teleread reports.

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DRM nightmare: After recent upgrade, Kobo customers report losing Sony books from their libraries

Gold skull and crossbones isolated on white.By Chris Meadows

I mentioned my trouble with losing one of my eReader e-books from Barnes & Noble a few weeks back. In that case, the matter was resolved amicably, but it seems Barnes & Noble isn’t the only store to have trouble with e-books ported from other companies. Over the last week, some Kobo users on the MobileRead forums have been discussing problems they’re having with their Kobo libraries, including with books from the customers’ Sony Reader libraries that Sony had passed over to Kobo when it exited the e-book business.

One of the issues has to do with concealing the option to download ACSM files in order to be able to pull Kobo EPUB files down to the desktop reader. Unlike Barnes & Noble, however, Kobo hasn’t actually removed the option to do so—just hidden it under the three-dot menu at the far right of the listing for the e-book in question.

Another issue is that the “Trash” folder has been removed from the library. Now books customers delete from their library are simply automatically removed, though they have the option of searching the book in the Kobo store to add it back at no cost.

Some users are reporting that some or all of the books they’d added from their Sony Reader libraries are missing. They were apparently removed from their library during a recent software upgrade, and the customers now have to search them in Kobo’s store and add them back individually. One reader reports missing around 460 Sony books from her library, which is an awful lot to have to add back one at a time! Some customers also report that the Kobo site wants them to repurchase some of the missing volumes. (“This is why I back up and ‘future proof’ all my ebooks,” writes MobileRead user MGlitch, and he wasn’t the only forum regular to cop to making Calibre backups.)

Read the full post on Teleread

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You Know What You Can Do With Your DRM

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 9/7/14.

Okay, folks. You heard it here first. I’M NEVER GOING TO BUY ANOTHER BOOK WITH DRM ON IT.

Yes, that’s me shouting. Do I hear you asking why?

I’m so glad you asked. But first, for those who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially, it’s an attempt by suppliers to ensure that only legitimate purchasers of electronic content (books, software, music etc) are actually able to make use of their products. Wikipedia’s description is as good as any other. Or you could read this one, which describes the restrictions imposed by DRM.

You might think DRM is relatively new. It’s not. The acronym might be, but the technique has been around from pretty much the time when personal computers exploded onto the scene in the early eighties. Products such as dBase III, word processors, spreadsheets and the like were protected with licences. Without the licence key, you couldn’t run them or do anything else with them. Other software companies came up with dongles – a hardware device fitted to the machine running the program. The idea was supposed to be that pirates couldn’t profit from the developers’ hard work.

Uh-huh.

Two things happened.

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.