Good-to-know's

Some information that you might find useful or interesting.

DRM

Ah, DRM. Just three letters, but so may fond memories. At its core, DRM is a form of a digital lock that's been specifically implemented to prevent users from messing with stuff they shouldn't. While initially applied to digital products such as music and films, nowadays DRM can appear in all kind of places from consoles and washing machines to cars and fridges. This has many wonderful implications for the notion of ownership in its own right, but since our primary focus is books, we'll examine the application of DRM on those.

So what's so bad about DRM on ebooks for the end user? Seems like it's meant to protect your favorite authors from insidious pirates, which is always a noble pursuint. It is true that DRM is capable of at least somewhat hindering pirates, but this inevitebly comes at the cost of ownership. You see, in order for DRM to work, it has to have the ability to tell whether a user attempting to read a DRM protected ebook actually purchased one, which means tying the actual file you are accessing to your account that you used to make the purchase. What this means is that in order for you to be able to read the book you "bought", your device will have to phone some authentification server to confirm that you have the permissions to do so. The process itself seems fairly straightforward, but, aside from already placing quite a few restrictions on the reader, it also means that it can all very easily go south. Don't have any internet connection for a prolonged period of time? Got your account blocked/suspended/deleted? The company's servers shut down? Well, buddy, Ive got some bad news for ya - that ebook that you've "bought" is now just a bunch of useless bytes on your hardrive.

Yet not all DRM implementations are equally bad, or, rather, some of those are worse than the others. Even though there are multiple sellers and distribution platforms, the number of actual DRM solutions is significantly more limited:

• Adobe DRM - liekly the lesser of the DRM evils. Used by various ebook sellers like Kobo and Google. Has once per device authentification (meaning that your device won't have to keep phoning home every time you want to read the book), is supported by a variety of devices from desktop PCs and smartphones, to most e-ink reader models. If the book you want to purchase is only available with DRM, Adobe DRM is the DRM that should be sought out. It gets a begrudging 7 on my ownership scale.
• Apple FairPlay - an umbrella term for Apple's content protection measures applied to a a variety of multimedie products sold on their platform. Inflexible and uncrackable, FairPlay nonetheless supposedly also features a once per device authentification, but, as is customary for Apple, offers very little cross-platform support, with your purchased ebook being restricted solely to Apple devices, which, considering a rather obvious absence of an I e-ink reader in Apple's device line-up, makes purchasing ebooks protected with Apple's FairPlay a rather dumb idea.
• Kindle DRM - the big bad of ebook DRMs. Forcefully enabled for all ebooks on the platform, doesn't work on any e-ink readers except for Kindles and a few android e-ink readers that can have Kindle mobile app installed, only supports once-per device authentification on Kindle e-ink readers, all other versions of the app require you to be logged into your accound and occasionally phone the core server for verification, and even the e-ink reader version has a tendency to mess with the files in your library when connected to the internet. In short, it's pretty clear that it's there as a way for Amazon to exploit its dominant market position by forcing people into bying their mediocre e-ink devices, rather than to protect writers from piracy. The only good thing about it is that there are a lot of people exposed to it, and thus a lot of individuals willing find a way to circumvent it whenever Amazon attempts to tighten its grasp on the Kindle ecosystem again. -3 on the ownership scale.
• B&N Nook DRM - mysterious and enigmatic, but, from what I've heard, just as shitty as Amazon's. Keep well clear. ?/10 on the ownership scale, but it's likely also in the negavitves.

Digital formats: pros and cons.

On your bookreading journey you may encounter a veritable zoo of different ebook file formats, and while few of them would actually cause you trouble, some might suit you better than others. (I admit that this section is at least partially there to give me an excuse to rant about people using PDFs for fiction.) Of course, cataloguing all the text formats out there is an undertaking far more substantial than the creation of the availability table that is the centerpiece of this website, still, I'll list a couple of the more popular formats one can encounter in the wild:

• Epub - an HTML-based file format. Its use requires no license, which, along with its impressive level of flexibility, made it a go-to format for ebooks. I'm sure that real ebook nerds would tell you about all of its quirks and unique features, but the important thing in practical terms is that it is supported by the vast majority of e-ink readers, and works quire well, allowing for image and metadata inclusions, text formatting and somewhat advanced formatting. Do note, however, that it is not supported out of the box on PCs and mobile devices, althouth it won't be difficult to find an app that would allow you to read it.