I know that most of you who read my blog daily don’t care about my toying with eBooks, and only read it for the technical articles; on the other hand, I feel like I can at least talk a bit about that, given that most of my personal life is uninteresting and thus I rarely write of that at all.
Anyway, you might remember I had some trouble finding where to buy eBooks and at the end I settled with – for non-technical books that is – WHSmith and Kobo as they both sell Adobe Digital Edition ePub books. Finding mainstream non-DRM ePub seems to be impossible; maybe only on Apple’s iBooks store, but it still doesn’t warrant me getting an iPad to try — even though, if you have an iPad or iPhone and can tell me whether that’s the case, I’d be curious. Finding a second-hand old-generation iPhone shouldn’t be too expensive and if that can get me access to mainstream non-DRM’d ePubs it might be worth it.
Anyway, the two sites above actually give me enough access that I don’t miss most of what I usually read; indeed, Kobo actually provided me with a few curious readings that I might as well try. Also, even though the Dollar is rising again, buying the books from Kobo is, for me, slightly cheaper than WHSmith.
Also, the fact that they are no simple eBook store makes them more intriguing; I’m not that enticed by their eReader (given I have already my PRS-505 and I’m not going to drop it any time soon), but the fact that they have applications available for a number of platforms (but not Linux, dang it! If they did, and it supported activation of Adobe DRM’d ePubs, they would be so great I could consider getting the eReader if only to fund them further). Even if I will probably not use those, I can still enjoy the fact that they let me read the books I buy on the web with any browser, on my reader in ePub format (and thus anywhere the ePub format can be read!) and since a few days also on my Milestone thanks to their Android application.
A word about the DRM here; while I’m one of those people who, I said already, prefer to abide to restrictions as long as they are an acceptable tradeoff (for instance the audiobooks DRM on iTunes is acceptable because they do cost a lot less than on unencumbered form). While I can understand the reason why most publishers won’t even consider not using DRM on the files, and I accept that at least this way I can get eBooks at all, I don’t think the tradeoff is useful to the user in this case. Indeed, given the fact that not all devices using ePub supports Adobe Digital Editions, it can be quite harsh to have it applied. add that to the not all ePubs are the same and thus you might have to access the content of the archive to change it into something usable, and you get the picture. Luckily, the ADEPT DRM has been long broken so it’s not difficult to get clean files.
Anyway, as I said, Kobo looks a nice choice to me because of the presence of the additional applications (just to put it into perspective, while I’m not considering buying an iPad, were I to, I could still read the books I bought from Kobo, without going around the DRM, as they have an iPad application); for instance I could easily read The Salmon of Doubt from my browser, even though the ePub version uses the infamous DTBook format above. Unfortunately they don’t have *everything*… not yet at least.
Anyway, last night I didn’t sleep so I could finish reading Assassin’s Apprentice (somebody suggested this to me a few years back; on the other hand I decided to read this because me and some friends were to a fair where also the author was…). Nice book indeed, just a bit “slow” (took me almost a month to read it fully, and it was just 400 pages). Next step, though, I wanted to come back to Dresden’s Files; Butcher’s style is enchanting. Three books out, I was up to read Summer Knight — Grave Peril I got from Kobo so I assumed they had the next as well; somehow, they don’t. So at the end I got it from WHSmith; it bears little difference, but it still strikes me as odd.
And in all this, there seems to be no shop for Italian eBooks; sigh. If only ChiareLettere had ePubs available.. their books are quite bulky and I would love to give them away and trading them for digital copies of them. I wonder if I should get more (technical) skills about this kind of publishing and propose to handle that kind of stuff myself. I would also know where to start, maybe.
