Thread: Can JK Rowling bring on e-book standardization?
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Old 07-27-2011, 12:01 AM   #83
EatingPie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark View Post
Why wouldn't they? I see no logical reason why mobi couldn't have watermarking. There is no dearth of options for watermarking a mobi book. it can be as simple as a metatag, something hidden in an image, arrangement and styling of characters, number of characters (hey, did you see those blank characters after each chapter?), or even a mathmatical formula used based on encoding extra info in based on all of the above and more.

When you have something that is nothing but info, you can always hide more info in among it.
I actually was just thinking "how are they going to accomplish watermarking at all?" Your ideas are actually very good. There's only one problem, but let me start with ePUB.

There are obvious meta tags in ePUBs, but that is not a watermark. A watermark works best when it pervades the data, and cannot be destroyed by changing the data. Look up Cinavia to see what I'm talking about; it's actually amazing (and awful at the same time, but in a way that would not effect books). With Cinavia's audio watermark, you can change the audio, make it lossy, make it a different format, change the volume level, add noise, etc., and the watermark remains intact! I don't know if it's been successfully removed yet! Compare that to an ePUB meta tag: you just remove the meta tag, and you've removed the watermark, way too easy!

Your other suggestions are better, and I'm betting it would be something along those lines. But, again, it would have to be pervasive, and non-degradable: eg. adding extra spaces is destroyed by deleting the spaces! Something, for example, that would have to survive breaking the book in to individual chapters; or even possibly individual paragraphs: it would have to stay intact to the point that piracy became impractical.

Okay, all that said to get back to the debate: if you can do this with ePub, you can do it with mobi. Unless they're taking the easy way out with watermarking (meta tag), it can be implemented in any format.

I still want to see Amazon forced to ePUB, but watermarking isn't going to do it.

-Pie
Last edited by EatingPie; 07-27-2011 at 06:29 AM. Reason: MADE MY MOST HATED TYPO!!! To instead of Too.
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