Then I bought an iPhone. For some reason (the Mobipocket user forum speculates that it may be connected to Amazon’s ownership of Mobipocket), there is no Mobipocket e-reader for iPhone, nor will Amazon license the Mobipocket DRM format for use by any other e-reader.

So, I lost hundreds of books I’d purchased. Do we buy DRM books, or only rent them?

Before and after buying my iPhone, I bought a great many books at Fictionwise. Recently (some time last year?), they started marking many books as “only available in the US” or “only available in the US and Canada”. Their Help section kindly advised that books were available to nearly everyone, and only countries like Australia and New Zealand were likely to be excluded. Why?

I still don’t have a good answer for that, and I’ve asked repeatedly and in various places. Apparently publication contracts haven’t caught up with the digital age. But in that case, why were ebooks unrestricted for so long? Why are new titles being restricted now?

These restrictions are particularly frustrating. I can’t complete series I’ve previously bought (e.g. volumes 1-4 were available to me, but volumes 5 onward are not) or authors I’ve previously read, and in some weird cases books from the same series or author are inconsistently restricted (you can get some of them now, but not others). I fail to see how this helps the publishing industry.

I read ebooks because I think they’re a good idea, but also because I’m disabled. I can’t hold a physical book, and the large but fine-motor movement of turning pages is very difficult and exhausting for me. I can prop up an ebook and just tap it to turn the page. My vision varies: I can change the font-size in an ebook reader. I can’t read well on a white background: I can set the background colour in an ebook reader. I can’t handwrite: an ebook reader allows me to mark pages and insert notes.

In short, I want to use ebooks, I need to use ebooks, but the inconsistencies in publication and retail are discouraging me, outside oases of sanity like Project Gutenberg and Baen (who very generously offer all ebooks free to disabled readers).

(Note: for other people with reading difficulties, you can use the Readability bookmarklet to make webpages more readable.)

wait wait wait wait wait … maybe copy

Leadership and innovation not in the vocab.

You raise some good points. I have bought a lot of e-books from a US publisher (Baen.com) who sell non-DRM e-books in most standards, and even GIVE BOOKS AWAY.

Eric Flint has some very good articles on http://baen.com/library/ about the Baen Free Library and the publisher T. K. F. Weisskopf had a very good article, which I cant find at the moment. If it was not for Delimiter Australia focus, I would be gleefully pimping Baen’s Webscription.net and screaming “These people get it!”

The wisdom of baen is that I have never lost a book because I have changed platform. I own the book forever, in whatever format I want. If i need another copy, I can download again. Heck, they even sell books in HTLM and RTF. And I have, from Pocket PC, to laptops, nokia phones to iPhone.

Compared to another US marketplace which I wont mention, where I could not even Download a book due to draconian DRM. Guess where my money goes now?

In addition, it may that the market is missing the point a little by focusing on books as what E-Readers are all about. There is a raft of great stuff out there on the web in blogs and every other format that has never been available in ANY hardcopy format. And it’s easily available in most cases in full RSS.

Something like Calibre makes any site with RSS full text feeds available on any E-Reader, automatically, just as you’d subscribe to a podcast on iTunes.

I had a significant collection of e-books as far back as 2003 using Microsoft’s Reader application and the .lit format. The DRM on Microsoft Reader and the .lit format is tied to the actual computer’s key and requires a WindowsLive ID to validate purchased books. I now have a Kindle and it looks like I’ll have to do without my previous library and I’ve lost the investment. To replace those books I would have to buy them again because the notebook I had at the time died and I no longer use Windows. The forums at http://www.mobileread.com are helpful for most matters to do with e-book readers and books.

I use Calibre to manage my e-book library as it works on Windows, OS X and Linux. Calibre can convert many of the commonly used formats, but the DRM needs to be removed separately. There is a DRM script available on the internet but it has some limitations. Sadly, it can’t de-DRM my 2003-2004 book collection. I stopped buying e-books back then because of that problem and a failure of DRM which caused me to lose an expensive engineering standard in protected pdf format (not Microsoft’s fault, but Adobe’s).

Don’t forget the huge range of free books from Project Gutenberg. Most of them have been coverted to various e-book reader formats. Manybooks.net has most of these available and will do the conversion prior to download.