Quote:
Originally Posted by sonofthe
I just bought a book published by Tor from Kobo and they provide no download link in my library section of the website. There was one other story from Tor (actually Tor.com) which had the same problem. It's frustrating and confusing because Tor and Tor.com books/stories all say "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied" at the end of the product description. Other books/stories from Tor[.com] have a non-DRM epub download link.
I haven't contacted Kobo about this week's purchase, but I did with the previous one. They gave me the run-around and ended up lying to me. With that phrase in the description, this is a case of false advertising.
The problem is, I like purchasing through Kobo because it's the only ebookstore where my money will also support my local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
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This was discussed to death a while back regarding John Scalzi's
Lock In. The book claims to be an epub3 not an epub2 ebook (content.opf version is set to 3.0). Given that epub3 ebooks can range from displaying without issue using an epub2 renderer to looking like total crap, Kobo is playing it safe by not making epub3 ebooks available as epub with a direct download link -- the ACCESS renderer used by Kobo's kepubs is epub3 compliant (kind of) while the Adobe RMSDK renderer used for epub2 ebooks is not. However, the ebook was not protected by DRM.
If you are using the Kobo desktop under Windows, you will find the downloaded ebooks in the %APPDATA%\Local\Kobo\Kobo Desktop Edition\kepub folder, on a Mac, they live off the library folder. The file name will look like, and probably is, a GUID with no extension (e.g. 4514114c-8f83-4805-bb97-0d96c9d8645e). You can copy the files to another location, add a .epub to the filename and then try to open it with your favourite epub reader. If it is not DRMed, it will open and you can try reading it. A couple of cookbooks I've purchased looked like crud when I tried this since they were fixed layout epub3 ebooks but there was no DRM in use.
Lock In looked fine and when I opened it with Sigil, it had both the epub3 toc.xhtml table of contents and the epub2 toc.ncx file.
To put it simply, you may not be able to download an epub3 ebook as an epub2 ebook but that is not the same as the ebook being protected by DRM.
I would suggest that you probably owe Kobo's CS an apology for your intemperate comments.