Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/I will never, ever purchase a book I can’t remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn’t know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD…DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I’d want to watch a show on my PC, but I’d just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn’t like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn’t stopping content being ripped. It’s just making life a pain for paying customers.
Offering a clean, ad free, usable storefront to purchase media would do more to prevent piracy than anything.
But corpos dont like that.
That could’ve been iTunes if their interface didn’t suck ass and if they didn’t go for the subscription-only model in Apple Music.
I swear for years it was THE place to buy music. I mean I never did, I didn’t have access to a card with online payments enabled as a teen, so I just pirated everything anyway. But it seemed like the default place.
I was so out of the loop a few years ago I found out they killed iTunes and was like WHY. idiotic.
Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.
Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.
Try explaining any of this to my friends lol. Obsessed with Google, the tok, xitter, and shitty data stealing llms. Disgusting garbage.
This is the entire foundational point Gabe made with steam.
Hell I still get a chuckle when people bitch able steam “drm”. Since it’s entirely optional and can literally be turned off by just adding a text file with the steam ID in basically every case. If it’s even there to begin with
99% of the time the “drm” people bitch about is just the steam overlay dll crashing if steam is off. Cause you know trying to load something that’s off doesn’t really work.
You can literally just remove a single dll from like 95% of steam games and you have an entirely “drm” free game.
Silksong is a great example with how popular it’s been Iv seen thousands of people bitching moaning and crying about how it has drm on steam when it for a fact doesn’t. It just has the single dll so it can use the overlay. Just deleting the dll so it doesn’t load up the overlay and ta-da its fucking drm free.
I couldn’t get Netflix to play at high resolution on my old Roku because of some DRM crap. And I was a legit customer! Once again, piracy would have provided a superior experience.
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
Fuck you Jeff!
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
Source?
The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.If you scroll down a bit, I actually already answered that question in this exact threat, one reply down.
In general I agree, but I am going to have to ask you for a source on that last one.
Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.
weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.
As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.
so he only served ~2y.
Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…
You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
They actually walked that back using blu-rays as an excuse. If there’s any sort of DRM/encryption/etc, you’re completely unallowed to circumvent it, even for personal backup.
The goold old analog hole.
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
Switched to kobo.
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get them free at the library. This just fucks over the authors and people who want to buy their books legally. People don’t buy books because they have to, they want to.
Yep, I could pirate all my books and audio books if I wanted. All it would do is fuck over the author tho.
As much as I hate audible it’s the only legal choice I have for many of the books I listen to. Since basically every other legal option has out of the nearly 500 or so audio books I have less then 50 of them.
It’s annoying.
Books were among the first things to be pirated and are still among the easiest because the amount of data is so small. People we’re doing that on dial up Internet.
And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don’t actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
Log2(8.2billion) is about 33. That means if each word only had 1 synonym, you only need to change 33 words to uniquely identify who was responsible.
21 words need to change if each has 3 options. 17 words for 4 options.
Then we change an additional 100 words in the process, and their tell becomes a tale.
There’s no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.
Bottom line, they’re just kicking payers off their network when it’s easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.
Something something, piracy is a service problem. That’s why Spotify et al. still thrive, but more and more the Netflixes of the world are being replaced with yaaar
It’s also a pricing issue as well.
The analog hole works on a lot of stuff
That’s my post apoc Youtube plan. Play on a sanctioned browser with videos and use comskip, write them off to my storage.
We’re going back to my TV->AVI setup from 2003, only maybe we’ll use HVEC this time.
but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.
Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only takes a bit longer.
Especially engineering people get creative out of interest if they’re denied access. And that’s a beautiful thing.
MakeMKV is in AUR :) Sure, it’s not playing a disk…
require you to screenshot/OCR it
So just like what people do with paper books.
What GOOGLE did WITHOUT PERMISSION to paper books. ;)
I’ve imaged a few short books with a cellphone and page correction software.
It takes dedication to make a pleasant final product. But those vacuum book scanners are freaking amazing.
I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It’s not there for a reason; I want people to share.
The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.
Curious, as someone who’s an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to put DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?
Likely not, Amazon is a private market place and if their requirements to use it requires the drm his option is very likely use the drm or fuck off.
Not having good publicly controlled legal market places is one of the biggest failings of the internet.
But have you considered that Jeff needs another few billies?
Thank you!
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
I don’t know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
Plenty ? Really ? And what are those ?
Four times the prices and from four years ago ?Kobo e-readers are 1-to-1 alternatives that allow you to easily transfer epubs or PDFs to it with a USB cable.
As far as I can tell, Kobos are bootloader locked now https://old.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/1ewadpc/kobo_is_now_using_secure_boot_on_at_least_one_of/
It’s not necessarily about the devices. Kobo books are very easy to remove DRM from, and don’t require owning a physical Kobo device or their app to do so. All it requires is two Calibre plugins. And EPUB is not a proprietary format, unlike AZW3 and KFX.
Also, I might be wrong, but it seems Kobo has a lot more DRM free books in general, compared to Amazon.
Kindle has always required either the Kindle app or an actual physical Kindle to de-DRM.
You can still transfer epubs and most books on the kobo store are sold without DRM (publisher choice)
That’s a far cry from
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
mentioned in the first comment
Not arguing with your point, it’s valid. But I wanted to make it clear from OPs point about book DRM that this is not an issue with Kobo. The books themselves as mostly DRM free and you can put whatever you want on the device.
Having your cake and eating it too isn’t on the menu
Kindles were loss leaders to get you in their ecosystem, just like all the shitty cheap tablets they sold.
The from four years ago part is real, but honestly, 4 year old devices read books about as well as current devices as long as you’re not trying to go all fancy.
It’s just matter of time before they’re all locked down, even the bad ones from 2020.
Just like android where basically it’s all bootloader locked, except for a few suspiciously special models like the Pixel. Or a “new” 1000$ model with hardware from 2018.
Instead of pretending there isn’t a problem because there are still option, you should realize the WINDOW IS CLOSING
A Raspberry Pi with an E-INK screen is surprisingly doable.
The raspberry pi has no low power modes / suspend states, to prevent it being used as a cell phone or tablet.
The standalone eink display are also very expensive, more than a entire eink reader and there is very little choice and they cannot be harvested from a working device.Low power states is a good call,
Looks like there’s a lot of work on using ESP32 for this kind of thing, even a couple open projects, but they end up bit-banging the screen into submission. not super elegant.
You can get 7" eink panels for $50.
Unless Kindle prices came way down, Boox are comparable in price, nicer in features, and allow side loading any eBook or Android APK (including the Kindle APK, if you can still get a copy of it.)
I don’t think you’ve used anything but a Boox in a long time, and have forgotten what the standard is. Boox has 1/10 the battery life, takes forever to wake up, and doesn’t support deep sleep properly (so it either drains battery when sitting idle, or shuts off entirely taking 5+ minutes to power back on). It’s decent hardware with very badly designed software. Neither Kobo or Kindle devices have these problems, they have battery that actually lasts, deep sleep when idle for any length of time, and power back up, even from deep sleep in 10 seconds or less.
Agreed, the battery life is way worse. I find the features of full unlocked Android to be a worthwhile trade.
But my point is that the prices of various eInk Android tablets aren’t unreasonable anymore.
Edit: Although, for anyone worried - I literally don’t remember the last time I charged my Boox. It was sometime last month - and I read with it most days.
The battery life can be fine, when configured with conservative screen refresh settings.
But I think there is still a difference - when I binge-read something for many hours multiple days in a row, I’ll notice that I need to recharge my Boox sooner than my Kindle needed.
Oh yeah definitely. It’s a slow EInk Android tablet on a very old version of Android. If you need more than just an EReader it’s the only reputable brand.
You can read books for free on just about any general purpose computer.
My wife doesn’t let me bring the Thinkpad to bed anymore
I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it’s not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!
I love Amazon.
Their website makes it so easy to look up books for Anna’s Archive.
It’s a great way to find the ISBN to chuck into annas or MaM
