Luna’s Prose Ramblings

Imagine having thought you bought a book and finding it missing. Scatterbrained ? Lended ? Delusional ? Paranoid ?

Not if you bought the book in e-version off of Amazon. Apparently, e-book sales are reversible according to Amazon. Apparently, although you purchased your copy legally on Amazon and put it on your Kindle, Amazon reserves the right to go onto your Kindle and erase your purchased content, or so they think they do. Of course, only after crediting your sale charge back into your account ! Goodbye, book…

After a move that deleted a range of books from customer’s Kindles, including 1984 by Orwell – How Ironic ! – Amazon sent out a press statement that the company that added the books to the online store did not have the copyright to do so and were in fact uploading illegal content. However, does this give Amazon the right to go onto Kindles and delete ? Apparently not, if you read Amazon’s license agreement and terms of use.

I know that if I buy a Kindle and buy Amazon e-books instead of the traditional dead trees, I will not be able to lend my e-books to my friends and I accept that I can’t resell my purchased digital copies either when I am finished with them. But now I will not even know that I will have them for myself to read ? And I will have to make due with my money back ? Are you adding extra credit for devaluation too ?

It seems like David Pogue is right; “As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

Don’t we know that technology is engrained in our society when we get the urge to back to how it used to be ?

If you ever have the urge to turn your computer into a no-nonsense, two finger operated, no editing allowed, old-fashioned typewriter, this is the freeware for you !

Google is a company to set itself goals. A million books for instance – scanned for its users to peruse at leisure.

It started years ago, the quest of Google to bring obscure and forgotten books to the masses by way of search engine. But how to do that with enough accuracy and without damaging the often fragile or valuable tomes ? The patent that was filed in September 2004 and approved by the United States Patent office in March of this year, divulges all the secrets. How do they do it ? 3D-infrared cameras !

It has been over a year since Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, called for the ‘Big 3′ to stop attaching Digital Rights Management, or DRM, limitation to music. A new contract between Sony BMG, Universal, Warner Music and iTunes might just do the trick.

In a move to limit the influence of iTunes on the sales numbers, over the years the big three supplied iTunes with DRM limited music while supplying open rights to other outlets. But the time has come for the unabated and ever growing influence of Apple’s iTunes in the music marketplace to show its strength.

The BBC reports that at the Macworld conference in San Francisco Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, said in his keynote address that after contract renegotiations ‘[s]tarting today, 8 million songs will be DRM free and by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs will be DRM free.’

However as we all know, music is not the only thing iTunes exploits. Videos are still rights protected and so are audiobooks purchased via iTunes, thanks to supplier Audible, making access to files on other machines than the one that downloaded the file impossible. Unfortunately, the wishes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs for a DRM free iTunes store will have to wait to be granted as Apple just renewed their exclusive audiobook contract with DRM-holist Audible. The rights protection is mandatory for files to be sold on Audible and by extension iTunes, even if it goes against the wishes of the publisher and author of the work.

As Cory Doctorow rightly questions; ‘if DRM is so foul that it can’t be borne when it comes to music sales, why is it acceptable for other kinds of media in the iTunes store?’

Luckily, there are ways around DRM, even if they are somewhat elaborate and might be on the more shady side of the sun. Let me just say that any audio that is relayed from memory to speakers can be recorded in the process. And if one does not have the patience for this, there are always the New Media heroes such as Mr. Doctorow and the good people over at Podiobooks and the heroes of Old Media over at LibriVox, who will supply you with DRM-free audiobooks to your heart’s desire.

I must say, I was very happily surprised by the wonderful people at Apple yesterday. Not only have they produced the leading brand in usability and design in computers and software, but their jewel-amongst-rip-offs iTunes is now available in a book lovers version !

Apple yesterday released iTunes 8. Another new and improved version of the nifty music library and podcatching software. But to my elated astonishment, Apple has finally realised that such is certainly not all their niftiness is used for. Since long, I have had more iTunes gigs archived in the Audiobook section than the Music one. The weathered audiobook consumer will know that most audiobooks are provided in the regular MP3 or M4a format, a format that iTunes until now archived as music. Wrong !

Previously, after I had edited my audiobooks to the state I wanted them in — tracks by chapter and no silly ‘end of disc’ notifications in the middle of them ! Hmpf ! — I would get out my Mac Automator and change all track extensions from M4a to M4b so that iTunes would archive them as audiobooks instead of music. But the wonderful people at Apple have now also seen the light and built in a selection pull-down in the file options, so that I can change the archiving at the click of a pull-down ! Saves me having to use the Automator.

Now if only they would develop the iPod software in such a way that the Audiobook section is formatted the same as the Music section. Then I would be able to browse it by chapter name, artist and album on my iPod. And I wouldn’t have to work with a gihugic number of playlists to keep my audiobooks organised….

Oh well, one can hope !