Adobe Digital Editions 3.0 released

[pssquirrel]

Originally Posted by hwlester

... Edit: Actually, I misread the dates. The T1 was last updated in November 2012 and the T2 was last updated in November 2013 ...

The last T2 update I see on the Sony U.S. site is 1.0.04.11081, released on 11/27/2012: http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-...f#/downloadTab

An update for the T1 (1.0.05.11130) was posted the same day: http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-...OC=3#/howtoTab

Both updates are Nov 2012, over a year ago.

[Lynx-lynx]

Cybmole posted this in the Sony forum - Anyone buying backup Readers?, but I think the link and greater discussion should be here, although some of the info in the article has already been aired here, I'm not sure it all has (although the Mods may have different ideas)

Publishers Weekly has written an article that includes info like this:

Adobe India supports and runs several well known applications, such as the Macromedia suite, and it is full of skilled and adroit engineers. When the ACS ball was tossed to them, they went around and asked publishers and ACS resellers what kinds of improvements they wanted to see.

Of course, that’s like asking a bank if more fees on customer services is a good idea, and sure enough, publishers said, “Please make the DRM harder, so we can break all the pesky DRM hacks that have spread around the Internet.”

And the Adobe India engineers did just that, as well as adding improved support for EPUB3.

The article has a number of interesting links, including the Datalogics blog

After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers. “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9.

ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe.

“We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”

[taming]

Not sure what to make of this in the Publishers Weekly news blog: It is in line with what Lynx-lynx posted.

When it became obvious to Adobe resellers what was planned, a series of very hasty conversations took place, and Adobe India, being both smart and sane, rapidly walked back from the cliff. Adobe released a PR indicating that ACS4 systems would be supported indefinitely. The hidden crisis of February was over, and most readers never found out anything might have gone horribly amiss with their e-books or readers.

[Katsunami]

If it's indeed the publishers asking for more, new and better DRM, then they STILL don't understand.

DRM will always be broken, at some point. History proved it. Result: pirating is better than buying, because in the former way you get books without DRM and without restrictions. They are free, which is ice on the cake.

DRM encourages people to pirate books, if they can't remove it themselves.

Ask a fair price.
Don't impose restrictions.
SELL like a maniac.

For frack's sake, start understanding this.

GOG.com proves that it works with 15 year old computer games. It also works with new games. Why wouldn't it work for bestseller books?

If people could get the last bestseller hit for $5 without DRM, sales would skyrocket. Nobody wants to pay $14.99 fora DRM'd book.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If people could get the last bestseller hit for $5 without DRM, sales would skyrocket. Nobody wants to pay $14.99 fora DRM'd book.

True, but the problem is that all the BPH's economy is based on first releasing hardbacks at $22.50 and then paperbacks at $14.95, if they can't charge that then who is going to support the NYC restaurant businesses?

[Katsunami]

Then change the plan.

Instead of selling one hardcover at 22.99, sell 6 e-books at 4.99. Hey, more money!

People who want the hardcover will always buy it. People who want the book cheaper, will always NOT buy it. Just release the hardcover, paperback and ebook, for 22.99, 6.99 and 4.99 all at once, and everybody will immediately buy the version they want.

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Ask a fair price.
Don't impose restrictions.
SELL like a maniac.

But then people would torrent 40,000 books each, feed them into Calibre, and not pay $400,000.

[Akshayy]

@Lynx-lynx, as I said nobody wants to break things and cause too much inconvenience. nice find..
of course if a particular publisher decides to.. then I don't know what's up.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Mivo

But then people would torrent 40,000 books each, feed them into Calibre, and not pay $400,000.

No, I don't think so. There is only a small number of people that do this.

There is a LOT of crap floating around on pirate sites. At one point, I downloaded a book that was unobtainable because of regional restrictions.

It was an unconverted retail EPUB (It can determined by looking at the CSS), but made to be as small as possible. EVERYTHING (even the maps) was stripped out of it, except for the text itself. That's no book anymore. That's TXT-file in a renamed ZIP.

Other books have been converted and reconverted so many times that not only the code is mangled up, but the text as well, probably due to people setting different layouts in Calibre.

Pirate stuff isn't worth my time anymore. Finding a good unmangeld version of that book cost me so much time that, had I equated it to my salary, I could say that this book cost me €30; maybe even more.

I'd rather spend €5-6, and then KNOW that I get a good book. (Although, there are some early ebook releases still around. Sometimes you get official books that look as if they are pirated versions...)

[Mivo]

I wasn't being serious. But this seems to be how publishers think: an illegally downloaded book is a lost sale. It's nonsense, but explains the obnoxiously large "damage done by pirates" numbers we see every so often, in various fields of entertainment.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Mivo

I wasn't being serious. But this seems to be how publishers think: an illegally downloaded book is a lost sale. It's nonsense, but explains the obnoxiously large "damage done by pirates" numbers we see every so often, in various fields of entertainment.

Obviously.

I also know people who have hundreds of thousands of songs, and many thousands of movies. If they'd read, they'd have tens of thousands of books as well. That's useless. Nobody can consume that much entertainment. It just wastes hard drive space.

Most people who want a movie, book or CD go looking for that (be it officially, or pirated); only the data hoarders cast a net so wide it includes every torrent and usenet posting on the planet and save it in NSA-like fashion, "in case I may want it someday".

I've done so twice: with the Baen CD's, and with a website that provides very well laid out public domain works. Both could disappear at any time, without there being a good alternative. (There may be for the PD works, but I just like that site's very simple but nice layout.)

[fjtorres]

Some people are compulsive hoarders.
They grab everything they find simply because it is available not because they are going to consume it.
The real "threat" are the commercial pirates who monetize those "unauthorized editions".
One particular pirate site highlighted in a Cnet antipiracy report (thereby driving traffic to the site) cheekily lists pirate epubs for download next to a link to buy a legal copy for Kindles.
Others merely host google ads and monetize the downloads that way.
Those folks are not going to be stopped by switching DRM; if anything, they can afford to scan and ocr print editions with professional grade gear.
As with classic napster, the only way to minimize downloads of "unauthorized editions" is by offering readily affordable legal editions. Piracy will always exist, especially if by obsessing over it the publishers drive customers away by penalizing legal behavior. But it can be minimized by treating customers fairly.

[Katsunami]

Look at GOG.com! Look at GOG.com! Look at GOG.com! * jumps up and down *

(I feel some moderator is going to suspend me someday for fanatical behavior....)

[ReadTillYouBleed]

Originally Posted by Akshayy

... as I said nobody wants to break things and cause too much inconvenience.

I will relate my own story of "inconvenience", which doesn't involve Adobe. Back in 2003 I bought a REB1100 reader, built around the *.rb ebook format. I mostly used the reader for public domain content, but I did also buy several books from the manufacturer's online bookstore. These books were encrypted. A couple of years later the manufacturer left the ebook business, and three years after that turned off the content servers. This made me an owner of several encrypted books that can only be read on a single and now utterly obsolete device. It was just a few books, not a large collection, so I didn't lose my sleep over them, but this experience made me aware that investing in a large collection of encrypted ebooks must be done with caution, if at all.

What may offer some protection to the consumer nowadays is the sheer size of the ebook market. The market was considerably smaller when Adobe migrated from ACS3 to ACS4, so all they got were a few angry customers the wider world didn't know or care about. Pulling a stunt like that today might lead to attention from regulatory government agencies or even legislatures, so the companies are more likely to exercise caution during transitions. Hopefully, the following will be observed:

(1) The top priority is protecting the user's access to his or her encrypted files. Ideally, the existing ACS4 files will be readable on all future devices, and the keys allowing the new readers to decrypt this content will continue to be installable through ADE in perpetuity for a given account, even for new ADE installations. Less preferably, the company could at least build into the ADE the option of creating an ACS5 ebook file from an ACS4 ebook file for the same account, and make sure not to time-limit this feature. I don't know if this is technically feasible.

(2) The next issue is protecting the user's existing ereader devices. Now, if a publisher decides to force their content to be ACS5 only, there is little Adobe can do, except to make sure the existing ACS4 files are still usable, as per item (1) above. Trying to add the option of down-converting an ACS5 file to an ACS4 file if ADE detects an older reader, even if it were technically feasible, may not sit well with some publishers since it would open the door to the presumably more easily circumventable ACS4. (This assumes ACS5 will be more cumbersome to break, or prove to be unbreakable altogether.) However, Adobe can make sure the ACS4 option remains available to the publishers who want to continue supporting customers with older ereader models.

Long term, Adobe can still get out of the ebook DRM business, or it can go bankrupt, as has happened to any number of companies over the years. Or the epub format may get abandoned, without it being possible to convert an encrypted book to a newer format. In the end, the only truly safe approach is to own no encrypted files. But, if one must, the above measures may at least ameliorate the dangers.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Look at GOG.com! Look at GOG.com! Look at GOG.com! * jumps up and down *

(I feel some moderator is going to suspend me someday for fanatical behavior....)

If that were likely lots of us would've been booted ages ago for citing Baen.