[FRIAM] Ebooks

[glen]

Right, sorry. I was referring to another book, not Doctorow's new one. His will be available DRM-free.

The one I bought from Routledge is only on https://www.vitalsource.com/ and its apps on windows, mac, android, etc. I could have bought the Kindle version, I guess. But I loathe Amazon. And it's more expensive on amazon anyway.

I linked to his kickstarter mostly to exhibit the monopolistic quagmire of ebooks and audio books. The same thing is happening in music and movies/tv, as well. Piracy is the only *sane* solution. To support the creators (authors, mucicians, etc.), the best thing to do is send them money directly, then pirate the content. Yeah, it's a crime. But it's like speeding or smoking dope on your own property in your off time.

Note that I'm NOT advocating piracy ... only claiming it's the sane thing to do. >8^D I [would|have] never pirate[d] anything.

On 9/17/25 6:10 PM, Sarbajit Roy wrote:
> Glen
> 
> Your link says the book will only be available in Oct 2025
> 
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 3:56 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     FWIW, if you're a fan of Doctorow:
> 
>     https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook>
> 
>     There's the same problem with Ebooks. I figured I'd try buying one because it hasn't made it to Z-Library, yet. Normally I buy the paper version and get the PDF or Epub from libgen or wherever. So this one's from Routledge, which has it's own damned format VBK. And AFAICT, I can't use DeDRM or whatever with Calibre to convert it. So I manually cut-n-pasted it all into markdown, then used Calibre to create an Epub. Works OK in my epub reader on the phone as well. I didn't convert all the hyper links and I didn't take the time to add page numbers. But it works. Sheesh. It's a lot of work just to "have" my copy. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to deDRM a book. But the Routledge one allowed me to cut&paste. So that's probably not illegal. I'm not technically violating the DMCA.
> 
>     Alternatively, I coulda just bought the hardback and xeroxed it. Tesseract-OCR works pretty well these days. But Renee's already upset about the number of books I have. [grrrr]
> 
>     I'd be grateful for anyone who has a good workflow for this sort of thing.
> 
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