How do you write a book in lrx format

[p3aul]

My wife wants to write children's books and is leery of ebooks because she thinks they can be copied too easily, thus cheating her out of sales. I think it would be a great idea. No middleman..etc, but I don't know what kind of software would be needed to make a copy-protected book. Leaning toward lrx because I think their attempt to make a lower priced reader than Kindle is on the right track! Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Paul

[grooks]

I would not go the lrx route but instead look into mobipocket and epub. LRX is a Sony proprietary format and cannot be used on any other device. Mobipocket and epub are much more universal and would cover current and future devices.

As to how books get DRM'd, I will let other chime in on that question.

[Elfwreck]

I'm not sure you can create .lrx files; I thought only Sony had the software for that, and it wasn't distributed to end users.

[khalleron]

Originally Posted by p3aul

My wife wants to write children's books and is leery of ebooks because she thinks they can be copied too easily, thus cheating her out of sales. I think it would be a great idea. No middleman..etc, but I don't know what kind of software would be needed to make a copy-protected book. Leaning toward lrx because I think their attempt to make a lower priced reader than Kindle is on the right track! Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Paul

Your wife might want to check out this essay by Eric Flint, as to why he started the Baen Free Library

http://www.baen.com/library/

The thing is, since the Baen Free Library was started several years ago, and Baen began selling DRM-free ebooks at reasonable prices, Baen's sales have skyrocketed. It's one of the few publishers that is not in trouble right now.

If you publish DRM-free, will there be copies out there that someone didn't pay for? Almost certainly, BUT, it's not actually ever been demonstrated that DRM *increases sales*, and lots of evidence that it decreases them.

Something to think about.

[wallcraft]

Scribd just announced a service that will sell ebooks in PDF and ePub format and they will apparently add Adobe DRM for you if you want. The service is new, and Scribd seems much more PDF orientated than ePub.

The other alternative is MOBI, and you can add DRM using MobiPocket Creator. However, you then have to upload either to mobipocket.com or to Kindle DTP as a "publisher" and the author's cut isn't very high. Note that if you upload a non-encrypted (non-DRM) MOBI to Amazon DTP the Kindle ebook will be DRM-free.

The DRM from Adobe and MobiPocket is very easy to strip using scripts easily obtained from the Internet. Popular books available in paper form only are also available as computer files, either scanned or scanned and OCRed. Overall DRM just annoys your readers.

[p3aul]

Overall DRM just annoys your readers.

Sure they're annoyed, The ones who want to copy your books are, anyway. Who cares? I don't care. Would you want someone stealing your creation that you've worked long and hard over? You have worked 12 hours day for months, and this is like your baby. you make it into an ebook hoping to recoup some of your time and effort. Suddenly its all over the internet and there are illegal copies everywhere! Somehow I think authors like J.K. Rowing would agree with me.

Owning an ebook reader that can hold thousands of ebooks doesn't mean you use bittorrent to download files containing thousands of ebooks like those people who download the songs do. I've got no sympathy for them when they get caught!

[deltop]

Originally Posted by p3aul

Sure they're annoyed, The ones who want to copy your books are, anyway. Who cares? I don't care. Would you want someone stealing your creation that you've worked long and hard over? You have worked 12 hours day for months, and this is like your baby. you make it into an ebook hoping to recoup some of your time and effort. Suddenly its all over the internet and there are illegal copies everywhere! Somehow I think authors like J.K. Rowing would agree with me.

Owning an ebook reader that can hold thousands of ebooks doesn't mean you use bittorrent to download files containing thousands of ebooks like those people who download the songs do. I've got no sympathy for them when they get caught!

The point is books are stolen anyway, even if you don't release them as ebooks. People scan them in, ocr them and proofread them before passing them on to others. Is this wrong, sure. Is it illegal, yes. Can it be stopped, no. J K Rowlings books are already available in ebook format all over the internet, and by not releasing them officially all she is doing is losing sales.

I'm quite happy to buy drm'ed ebooks, but only if the drm can be removed. Why? because I don't ever want to be left in a situation were I can no longer read the books I've legitimately purchased. What if the format I've bought my books in is rendered obsolete in the future? Look at what happened to amazon's first foray into ebooks. What if my next reader doesn't support the format my current books are in? Without drm I can easily convert them, with it I can't.

DRM doesn't work, it can either be removed relatively easily (look at epub or mobi) or if not rendered pointless by the scanning in of hard copies.

So I have to ask you, why would you want to use it if it can so easily be bypassed?

If the books are reasonably priced and people want to read them, they WILL pay for them.

[JSWolf]

Take J.K. Rowling for example, her books are all available on the net as illegal copies because she didn't want to release legal copies. The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings are also available as illegal copies yet they are selling now that they are legal. Rowling is losing lots of money due to her shortsightedness.

The people that share eBooks already know how to strip away the DRM. So all you are doing is bothering your paying customers. Charge a fair price without DRM and if the books are any good, they will sell. Also, your costs will be lower as you won't have to pay to have DRM added. But in the end, it is your choice to have DRM. It's the wrong choice, but still your choice.

If you plan on offering these to everyone, then you'll need to do so in every format and there are costs associated with DRM. You might not be able to use the nice easy tools provided in Calibre to do the conversions. eReader is a bother DRM or not anyway (at present). But feel free to add in the extra work.

Thinking of your customers as crooks is not going to endear yourself to them and they'll just go online to get them for free without DRM since you don't care about them.

So if I get annoyed at your DRM, does that make me want to copy your books?

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by p3aul

Sure they're annoyed

What I should have said is:

Overall DRM just annoys your paying readers.

It does not annoy the moochers, or the uploaders, because they don't see it or consider it laughable.

As JSWolf says, add DRM if you want. It isn't as easy to do for independent authors, because DRM tends to be centralized, but I indicated two ways to do so.

There are also PDFs with passwords and MOBIs with a password (although the MOBIs are rare). These may be easier to provide from your own web site than DRMed ebooks.

[p3aul]

With that kind of thinking, I'm wondering if you are all from Somalia! Just like the CD generation! You think nobody should keep you from owning any kind of computer file you want. What kind of distorted thinking is it that "If you can get it for free, you're going to run out and purchase it!" Just like the signature say's in one of Mobilereads' members " If you don't pay authors, soon you won't have any books!" And I doubt very seriously that pirated books are increasing J.K. Rowlings sales. What kind of logic is that? Before most of you were born, probably, J.R.R. Tolkien had a blurb in his books that said" This publisher, only, has the write to print these books in America. Those who have respect for living authors will buy this book and no other" He did this for the obvious reason we are discussing now. But no, I bow to your superior knowledge. The financial departments of all these publishing houses have concluded that copying books in digital format hurts their sales and hurts the authors, but what do they know? Do you think that, knowing it would increase their sales, that they would forbid it?

Don't you think it a bit selfish to want authors to write for the sheer love of writing. I think that's a bit idealistic. Experiments have shown that websites who cater to budding writers, who sell their books for little or no cost, soon fold. The writers who don't write well would never even get published in the big publishing houses. That's just how the system works. If all you want is quanity, not quality, then by all means continue to support free books, but please give recompense to authors who request it.

[khalleron]

Originally Posted by p3aul

Sure they're annoyed, The ones who want to copy your books are, anyway. Who cares? I don't care. Would you want someone stealing your creation that you've worked long and hard over? You have worked 12 hours day for months, and this is like your baby. you make it into an ebook hoping to recoup some of your time and effort. Suddenly its all over the internet and there are illegal copies everywhere! Somehow I think authors like J.K. Rowing would agree with me.

Owning an ebook reader that can hold thousands of ebooks doesn't mean you use bittorrent to download files containing thousands of ebooks like those people who download the songs do. I've got no sympathy for them when they get caught!

Read the Eric Flint piece, really, please.

There are a lot of legal ways to read books for free that no one objects to - libraries and loans from friends - or very cheaply - used books. And yet people still buy books.

The points people here are trying to make about DRM, which you seem to be missing, is that a) it doesn't stop piracy anyway, and b) it's a barrier to sales. If you want to sell lots of ebooks, the way to do it is to provide an easy purchase experience for your customers - as many different, nicely done formats as you can; a fair price; and no DRM. All DRM really does is make the book hard to use. It doesn't do anything else - not for the publisher or for the readers. Publishers who forgo it are doing *much* better than those who rely on it.

[p3aul]

So am I to assume you know more than the financial depts of publishing houses? DRM doesn't make the book hard to use. Prove it!

Publishers who forgo it are doing *much* better than those who rely on it.

again, prove it. Someone once said, "47% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including this one!"
I'm for free enterprise and "Supply and Demand" If you want to circumvent a legal copy protection then go for it! But, I hope you get caught and you don't want me on your jury!

Why would you be for DRM free books and music if you weren't planning on copying it at some point and giving it to some one else?

[deltop]

Originally Posted by p3aul

With that kind of thinking, I'm wondering if you are all from Somalia! Just like the CD generation! You think nobody should keep you from owning any kind of computer file you want. What kind of distorted thinking is it that "If you can get it for free, you're going to run out and purchase it!" Just like the signature say's in one of Mobilereads' members " If you don't pay authors, soon you won't have any books!" And I doubt very seriously that pirated books are increasing J.K. Rowlings sales. What kind of logic is that? Before most of you were born, probably, J.R.R. Tolkien had a blurb in his books that said" This publisher, only, has the write to print these books in America. Those who have respect for living authors will buy this book and no other" He did this for the obvious reason we are discussing now. But no, I bow to your superior knowledge. The financial departments of all these publishing houses have concluded that copying books in digital format hurts their sales and hurts the authors, but what do they know? Do you think that, knowing it would increase their sales, that they would forbid it?

Don't you think it a bit selfish to want authors to write for the sheer love of writing. I think that's a bit idealistic. Experiments have shown that websites who cater to budding writers, who sell their books for little or no cost, soon fold. The writers who don't write well would never even get published in the big publishing houses. That's just how the system works. If all you want is quanity, not quality, then by all means continue to support free books, but please give recompense to authors who request it.

I'm having a hard time understanding what your trying to say here.

"If you can get it for free, you're going to run out and purchase it!"

No one is saying this. What we are saying is that people are basically honest. Do you really believe that most people are thieves? That they are quite happy to steal people's work if they can? I don't. Sure some will but that can't be helped, there's no way to stop people committing copyright infringement. So just get over it already. Plenty of poeple will pay for the books if they're a good read. If they aren't any good they won't. They'll buy other books instead. Make it easy and convenient for people to pay and they will.

Also no one is saying that pirated books are increasing J K Rowlings sales, what we are saying is that because you can't buy the Harry Potter books in ebook format she is losing sales. People are downloading illegal copies when most would be quite happy to actually pay for a properly formatted and proofread official copy. Rowling is just an example to show you that drm and a fear of ebooks is just unfounded. DRM doesn't stop pirates and not publishing in ebook format doesn't stop the either.

I also don't see anyone in this thread arguing that authors should just write for the love of writing.

We also aren't arguing that authors should sell at "little or no cost", just at a reasonable cost.

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by p3aul

Why would you be for DRM free books and music if you weren't planning on copying it at some point and giving it to some one else?

Most folks here just want to be able to move the books between their own personal devices (computer, iPod, Kindle, 505 etc). Having books without DRM makes it easier to do that. No one is advocating giving the content away for free and we all would be happy to pay a fair price for the content.

After you've spent some time here you will see that all but very few of us frown on piracy and don't we don't even allow links to pirated books.

[deltop]

Originally Posted by p3aul

Why would you be for DRM free books and music if you weren't planning on copying it at some point and giving it to some one else?

I've already explained this. Say for example I bought all my books in the epub format. But amazon through the sale of the kindle eventually succeeded in making mobi the dominant format and all future devices moved to mobi support only.

All my legitimately purchased epub and lrx files would then be useless and once my old reader broke I'd be stuck with hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars worth of ebooks that I can't read.

My current reader is a Sony PRS-505 but what if the kindle is launched here in the uk and is a huge success? What if Sony stops selling ebooks readers? Without drm it's a simple case of using Calibre to convert to mobi from epub. With drm I'm stuck with useless files I've paid for.

Music is now sold drm free by most stores, people want to be able to play what they've bought on any device they own, not be restricted to a few devices deemed acceptable by the drm provider. Is that not reasonable?

Anything could happen since the market for ebooks is still very very immature. All I want to do is ensure that my purchased books are readable in the future. I have no interest in pirating books or giving away what I've bought to someone else. If they want a book they should buy it.

I got burned by buying into Toshiba's HD-DVD format. Hundred of pounds worth of discs later and the format fails due to Blu-Ray winning the war. HD-DVD players are no longer produced, if I hadn't have sold them all I would have been stuck with unplayable movies if my player ever broke down.

DRM DOES NOT STOP PIRATES. They either remove it or find a way round it. Legitimate customers who however don't know how to do this are stuck if they ever want to say go from a Sony device to a Kindle.