OK, what's Kobo SDRM?

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The social DRM (for the Harry Potter eBooks) was from Pottermore. The ePub with DRM or Kindle with DRM did not have social DRM.

Hmm. Long ago I bought the first Harry Potter in Japanese off Kobo through their partnership with Pottermore which was always "DRM-free". Now the download options for it now give me the option of "DRM-free" or Kobo SDRM humorously.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Kinda reminds me of old copy protection in games that would mess with the game in non-obvious ways if it detected it was pirated. You're really only weeding out the "low-hanging fruit" of people trying to commit piracy, while the ones who do it for a living will have long figured out how to remove such obvious watermarks.

That said, I would still vastly prefer it over Amazon's cat-and-mouse DRM.

The one ePub I've looked at from Kobo is very easy to remove the SDRM. Losslessly compress all images. and remove one HTML file. That was all I needed to do. I cannot say if the metadata in the images contained any personal info, but do the lossless compression just in case.

[pdurrant]

If they're going to customise every copy with social DRM, I'd like the option to have an "Ex Libris" page added for me.

[Readirect]

Originally Posted by graycyn

...
Social DRM is what the ebook industry should move to if you ask me, but I won't hold my breath.

Presumably, the "ebook industry" would be smart enough to know that those smart enough to evade such would be smart enough to

1. Simply delete that data
2. OR change the data to someone who is not them; someone who has it coming. Like Stephen Miller. Or Donald Trump.

Not too surprised that KOBO evidently isn't that smart, though. It used to be that KOBO had great hardware but god-awful tech support and moronic marketing.

THEN stupid migrated into their hardware group, took over their firmware folks & now seems to be making impressive inroads into their book store as well.

I'm thinking that the last smart person at KOBO has now left the building. Let us hope they didn't turn off the lights because those remaining are doubtless incapable of operating the light switches.

Then again, perhaps I'm a bit judgmental BUT 2 bricked devices while sideloading will do that to a person. Adding insult to injury, those replacements for my much-loved, much-dead Forma were not in the same neighborhood of good, even before the brickings.

On the bright-side, I wouldn't have discovered the joys of Pocketbook & Boox devices but for Kobo's stupidity.

So see ya, Kobo, it's time for our relationship to end and, yes, it IS you.

[ownedbycats]

You sound like you want eBooks to be harder to backup. No thanks.

[JSWolf]

I agree that Kobo has some stupid people making decisions. Otherwise we'd have an updated Sage BW and an updated Libra 2 BW.