Category Archives: DRM

International Day Against DRM

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No DRM for the Web FBToday, May 6th, is the ninth annual Day against DRM. Digital rights management in one of the primary limitations affecting digital goods. It places controls on the access to books, movies, software on devices. It is a feature that keeps us from truly owning the content we purchase.  As digital content continues to rise in popularity, DRM, geo-blocking, licensing terms and file format types are important issues that affect our digital lives.

You can visit the official Defective by Design website for more information.

#DayAgainstDRM

Image credit: From Defective by Design via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Daily Links: Kobo downloads, Bendgate, more

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From the Digital Reader, How to download Kobo books (including the ones they don’t want you to).

Apple apologizes for IOS 8.0.1, from Mashable and then denies the “Bendgate” problem, fromRecode.

From The Next Web, Google’s latest Chrome build has a hidden game that to play offline.

Cosmixology celebrates Nation Comic Book Day by giving away 25 free comics, from The Digital Reader.

From The Ebook Reader, How to export and edit those Kindle notes and highlights.

Daily Links are interesting links I discover as I go about my online day. The frequency and number of links posted depend upon the daily news.

 

 

Just the facts…

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I just listened to an interesting podcast of the Kojo Nnadami Show on E-Books: Chosing a reading device and a bookseller.

While there were some interesting points to the broadcast, as an ebook aficionado, I found it a little disturbing that people considered experts in the field could be totally unaware of certain facts about the ebook industry.

Among the misstated facts:

  • Amazon deleted 1984 off customers’ Kindles last year. In fact, it was 2009.
  • It is unusual for someone to own more than one ereader.
  • Typos and scanning errors are no longer a problem with ebooks.
  • It seems that there is also some confusion about the program Calibre and its capabilities. Calibre can convert one ebook format to another; it does not strip DRM from ebooks. There are third-party plug-ins for the program, however, which are rumored to do that.

The broadcast does make some valid points about the ownership issues surrounding ebooks.

May 4, 2012 is International Day Against DRM

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 May 4th is International Day Against DRM. The day is intended to protest crippling Digital Rights Management solutions which prohibit people from freely accessing and sharing files that they have legally purchased.

While most music files are now available DRM free, it is still a huge problem in the ebook world. Publishers, are, however, beginning to take notice. Tor Books recently announced that their titles are going to be offered DRM free.

There are a number of small presses that offer their titles DRM free. Please leave a comment with the name and website of small presses that offer freely accessible files.

Learn more at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm.

May 4, 2011 is Day Against DRM

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May 4th has been designated as the International Day Against DRM for 2011. DRM or Digital Rights Management, is the software that prevents copying of ebooks. It also prevents consumers from reading legitimately purchased ebooks on any device of their choosing.

If you are interested in getting involved, you can sign up for the 2011 Day Against DRM Mailing list.   There is also a 2011 Wiki page where you can learn more and take part in making plans for the day.