Quote:
Originally Posted by geertm
Might this even be related to HarperCollins going to use a digital watermark as an extra layer of DRM? Is this the start of an offensive by the publishers to end ebook piracy? Have the publishers somehow become convinced that they can win such an offensive?
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It may have nothing to do with the publishers and simply be a poorly-thought-out attempt to compel customer lock-in by ensuring that the greater difficulty to use one's content as one sees fit keeps one inside the walled garden.
Apple has done something similarly annoying with the new iBooks on Mac app in OS X Mavericks. It used to be that iBooks were fed through from the iTunes store and showed up as .epub and .ibooks files which could be easily seen in one's iTunes Media folder and moved about and used on other readers (in the case of DRM-free ePubs).
Now, no longer. The mere opening of the iBooks for Mac app auto-migrates all your present and future iBooks from the iTunes Media folder into some hidden place deep within your ~/Library and also unpacks them all, in some obscure encrypted format (even the DRM-free ones), so you no longer have your handy individual title files, and can't econstruct or even manually read the contents of the unpacked HTML in your formerly DRM-free ePubs.
And you can't even move the contents of said hidden ~/Library folder and symlink them if you're running out of disk space on your boot hard drive petition. iBooks just flat-out refuses to see them any more and then wants you to reset your library and re-download again.
My next project, after the B&N downloads are complete, will be to boot into an older version of OS X & iTunes, and manually re-download all my iBooks from the cloud as their original individual files so I can at least pick and choose which titles to keep on my laptop and which I can put into storage on the external drive. Maybe this time I'll even be able to get the iBooks DRM-removal thingy to work.
