FSF Prioritizes Creation of a Free-Software eBook Reader, Urges Avoiding DRM eBooks

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is that if I was to stop buying eBooks with DRM, I'd be missing out on eBooks I want to read.

Same. As long as DRM can be removed, I buy what I want where I want. The day it can no longer be removed, I'll stop buying ebooks. As to the unread ebooks in my library, I should be good for a couple hundred years, at least.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Same. As long as DRM can be removed, I buy what I want where I want. The day it can no longer be removed, I'll stop buying ebooks. As to the unread ebooks in my library, I should be good for a couple hundred years, at least.

Similar view here.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

After initial set up, I never put a kobo device back on the internet, I just use the cord into the laptop to update the firmware, and access calibre.

Same here. I have a few patches installed on my KA1, so I definitely don't want the reader updating without my knowledge. I also don't want to pull in a few hundred books I have on my (Dutch) Kobo account.

So if I get a new Kobo, I set it up on a (Dutch) dummy account that has one free/public domain book in it, so I can see if everything works. After the reader is set up, I clean it up, and disconnect it from the internet forever. I also always keep the reader's current firmware when upgrading (which I do manually), because Kobo is known to break things.

I'd love to have an open source e-reader running Linux and a good e-book reader, but I don't think the FSF means that. I think they mean the software only, when they speak about an "e-reader", or I'm missing something. That would be useless; there are already several very good open source programs that can read all kinds of e-books, calibre among them.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is that if I was to stop buying eBooks with DRM, I'd be missing out on eBooks I want to read.

Yes, but that is the stance of the open source world on many things. "If I can't buy book X without DRM... then I just won't read it. If I can't buy game Y without DRM, then I just won't play it."

You can do that with your personal stuff, but if you are in university for example, and they do all of their programming assignments in Visual Studio (i.e., the teacher _expects_ you to send in a Visual Studio solution), then you will have to run Visual Studio... and thus you will have to run Windows.

You just can't say: "I won't run Visual Studio or Windows because they're not open source. I won't buy Windows." If you do, you can't do the assignments. And I think not many people are THAT hard-core about it that they are going to try and find a university that uses open-source software only.

(Back when I was in university, 20 years ago, there were no such requirements; the professor just required the C / C++ files, and an executable that ran on Windows 2000. What software, compiler, or OS or whatever you used to create the files and executable was of no importance. So if you ran Linux, or a Mac, and could cross-compile to Windows that was sufficient.)

Originally Posted by rantanplan

You can use KOBODL, it works without the need to have ADE. It has a very nice UI as a bonus.

What's this? I've been out of the book buying loop for some time. I'll have to look into this. I (still) use ADE 2.01 because version 3, 4 (and newer?) uses a different DRM-scheme that can't or isn't yet cracked (if that hasn't changed since I last looked into it a few years ago).

[orebmur]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

You can use KOBODL, it works without the need to have ADE. It has a very nice UI as a bonus.

Here is a link to the actual software:

github.com/subdavis/kobo-book-downloader

Thanks, this looks very useful!