DRM for ebooks will probably be the last to go

Music DRM is already dead because it never made sense in the first place. Every work of music was and is available in a DRM-free lossless digital format called the compact disc. Music also never had a history of copy-protection. Video still has DRM, but that's because the content holders are out of touch with reality. DVDs may be DRMed, but the DRM is useless and effortlessly cracked by even a novice with an outdated computer. Video does have a long history of copy protection though, going back to Macrovision for VHS (Macrovision is still around in DVDs, but it's much better to copy DVDs digitally than by hooking a DVD player up to a DVD recorder).

Books are a whole different animal. Paper books aren't copy protected, but copying them requires a multi-stage process. The first part, scanning them, is either very labor-intensive or requires very expensive equipment. The second part, OCR, requires expensive software if you want good quality image-to-text conversion. The final part, proof-reading, is also labor-intensive. Even some publishers aren't bothering with that. The Victorian Internet, a great little book about the history of the telegraph, is one such example. It is full of blatantly obvious OCR errors in the Kindle edition. I've been meaning to complain about that, actually.

So I don't expect publishers to offer DRM-free ebooks any time soon. I suspect it will take DRM-stripping of Kindle/Nook/Etc. ebooks to become truly pervasive before it's even considered. It will also require book piracy to reach the level of music piracy.

Stallman thinks we should boycott ebooks

I don't agree with that, but I do think that DRM in general is damaging and mainly punishes people who don't pirate. All DRM can be cracked or worked around, through the analog hole if nothing else, and if there's sufficient interest in a artistic or literary work, it will become generally available on the Internet with or without DRM.

The only place where DRM makes a real difference is in less-popular works, since it increases the barrier to pirate and they might not reach the heightened threshold. Popular works will already surpass that barrier; no amount of DRM will change that. It is debatable, I suppose, whether the higher exposure easy piracy provides to lesser-known works ends up making up for the readers who don't pay.

I don't think that legalizing file-sharing and instituting a quasi-communist author-compensation scheme is the answer (enact an Internet tax and have it paid to the artists based on the cube root of their popularity on p2p, BitTorrent, etc.). I do, however, think a new model is required for the new technology.

Workaround to the Calibre double-l problem

I wrote about Calibre's double-l bug before where words with "ll" in PDFs would have the second l replaced by a blank space when converting to another format. Fortunately, I discovered a workaround. After I realized that not all PDFs were subject to this, I had a stroke of genious: what if I converted the PDF to a PostScript file and then back to a PDF again? It works! But only if you use pdftops for the initial conversion: pdf2ps makes a graphic-only PostScript file, which is no good.

Update: I thought I wrote about it, but can't find the post. Now that I think about it, I was writing a somewhat irritated post about the downside of open source endeavors being that failure of project b that project a is dependent on can lead to project a not fixing a really grating bug because the developer community is unwilling or unable to fix the bug for project b. Since I love Calibre, as it is a phenomenal tool provided totally free, I thought better of bitching about it and deleted the post either before publishing it or shortly after.

You mean it's not available in ebook form already?

J.K. Rowling is considering releasing Harry Potter in electronic format. Really, it's ridiculous that it's not in that form already. Legally, that is. In my wild, lawless youth, I read half of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on a Palm m100 series PDA while I was waiting for the hardcover to arrive from an Amazon affiliate (media mail sucks).

As the article writer pointed out, the latter four books really beg to be in digital form. Each one gives the whole Lord of the Rings a run for its money.

Free Kindle?

Okay, no one is apparently suggesting it would be truly free as in you go put it in your shopping cart for $0.00 and have it show up at your door a couple of days later. There is the possibility floated that you could get a free Kindle as part of an Amazon Prime subscription, which could make sense.  I still think it's more likely you'll get a very cheap Kindle with Amazon Prime. The problem with giving away physical goods for free hoping to make the money back with subscriptions or ads or book purchases or whatever is that people might take the physical good just because it's free and/or repurpose it. That's what happens with alternative newspapers, and they have built their business model around that, hoping that something will catch your eye from the bottom of the birdcage. I doubt that could work for the Kindle.

The idea of a free Kindle with the purchase of a bundle of books is an intriguing idea. Having to buy a whole bunch of books would prevent abuse by repurposers and it would aid in getting Kindle everywhere. Short of stuff like that, though, I don't see Kindle for less than $99 to non-Prime subscribers anytime soon. That seems like the magic price-point that they're looking for.

For Kindle users, Calibre is the way to go

It is amazing just how good Calibre, a free, open source program, is. It will allow almost anything to be converted into the Kindle-viewable MOBI format and the books look great too! I used it on other kinds of ebooks, PDFs, and even an ebook published as a whole folder full of HTML and it converted them. The only thing it wouldn't turn into a .mobi ebook was a Word document, but that was easily fixed by exporting it as a PDF in OpenOffice and converting that. Awesome. It is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.