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Cam writes in with just about the perfect parable about why DRM just sucks:
I thought you'd be amused to hear the circumstances which caused me to pick up and read Little Brother.
Being a pretty big nerd (I'm a tech director at Electronic Arts by day), I was excited to pick up a Sony ebook reader. I got the last one in the shop, which was actually a return - but the sales guy assured me that they'd "reconditioned it".
After taking it home and installing Sony's terrible, terrible ebook software I was only moderately surprised to find that I couldn't "authorise" my new reader to read their DRM-laden ebooks. It gave me the always helpful error code of "3-013". Googling this code told me that (of course) the reader was already authorised (presumably to the person who bought it the first time).
I contacted Sony's only means of support, which was a web form on their site. Hours later, I received a response telling me that I needed to call their support line, which was open until 6PM. Naturally this email arrived at 5:58PM, and the support line kindly informed me that I should call back the next day. I think their time calculation function must suffer from some floating point inaccuracy.
Cursing my now apparently totally useless $300 device, I decided to read a free ebook to tide me over until I could call Sony the next day. I'm a regular boing boing reader and remembered your posts on Little Brother, so I downloaded it and started reading.
Needless to say, not only did I really enjoy reading it (and yes I know it's nominally a book for kids!) but I've yet to make that call to authorise my device, and I've been reading more Creative Commons-licensed books.
So long story short, DRM turned me onto Little Brother and onto other CC-licensed works. I thought you might find that amusing.
Regards,
Cam Dunn
PS Nice work making Little Brother technically accurate in so many ways (ignoring the "near future" technologies). I get the impression that you'd lose your tech-savvy kid readers these days if you didn't get that stuff so right.
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Cam should check out Calibre, an excellent open source, cross platform ebook management app. Works great with my Sony Reader.
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
I agree with NAte. Calibre is awesome, I use it here as well. I never even installed Sony's crappy software... Go open source!
Similar problems with audible.com--where they don't even sell you a device, just make it nigh impossible to listen to their DRM-laden audiobooks on your device--drove me to seek out great podcasts, which was how I discovered Cory's reading of "The Hacker Crackdown".
DRM is lame. I circumvent it wherever I reasonably or fairly-legally can.
Thanks guys, I'll check out Calibre. Looks like an attractive and capable piece of software. Plus, it'll work on my mac!
It's the tragedy of DRM - the ebook device itself is gorgeous, and i genuinely wanted to buy some books to read on it.
Anne, if you enjoyed The Hacker Crackdown I'd recommend picking up an issue of 2600 magazine. Even if you don't intend to actually carry out any (eg) "DNS Spoofing on a LAN", just holding it in your hands carries incredible cool factor :-)
Oh the irony! Someone at EA complaining about DRM...
Hey John,
I think you'll find that it's bitterly ironic :-)
Sadly it's actually not ironic at all because as a TD I don't have anything to do with the decision to use DRM or not.
Which is a pity, imagine if my role at EA was VP of Digital Copyright Enforcement or something. That would have been awesomely ironic.
Cheers,
Cam
Cam said that Little Brother is "nominally for kids" and while this may be so,I, as a 60-year-old British reader rather in tune with Marcus's mom,think its appeal is far wider. As long as you are intelligent and understand computer stuff then you will enjoy this great unputdownable thriller. I bought it in Barnes and Noble in NYC (branch closing soon probably because of Amazon) today for 18 dollars. So far I'm a quarter of the way through and I have understood every word. I even know about XBox. I had not heard of Cory D, and I bought it off the shelf on the basis of the blurb, while my eye was caught by his unusual surname that he shares with one of my favourite writers - E.L.D. - any relation? Anyway, a great read, so far. I will look ouy for more, but meanwhile I do recommend the sheer pleasure of spending time in actual bookshops. At home, in London, my neighbourhood independent bookshop owner knows me and my eclectic tastes (I buy average 3 books a week and own literally thousands), discusses and recommends, and looks out for forthcoming titles from my favourites (I know, I know: Amazon will do all that automatically). It is so easy to dismiss people like me as old-fashioned, but I am happy to prefer communicating with a human being (even like now) for some, not all, things to dealing with automata.
Good fortune to you,
Andrew Leigh