Posted by davidm on April 02, 2012 at 11:49:32 user davidm.
In Reply to: Re: S&A in Kindle ebook posted by Jon on March 30, 2012 at 04:49:25:
Over the past six months I have bought the entire S&A set, except GN, from GoSpoken.com (http://beta.gospoken.com/shop/). These are in epub format, and DRM protected. They are all by Random House. They were equally downloadable in UK (in GBP) and Europe (in EUR), unlike any other supplier. I think this may be because GoSpoken judge nationality by credit card address rather than ISP location.
The entire set also appears to be currently available from amazon.uk, where they are also cheaper. However these are in a modified mobi format, and therefore only readable on Kindle readers (soft or hardware). Epubs can be read on any Adobe DRM recognising reader, and there are a number of these available. They are far more flexible, as they can be downloaded as an identifiable file, and moved around between readers (I use a linux and windows PCs, plus an Andoid tablet). However you use up one of six licences for every reader (not machine) that you open the book in, and the licence files are locked to the location that you down-loaded into.
Quality is reasonable. One or two OCR errors (eg 'dad' for 'clad'), but proof reading is definitely better than for other converted ebook conversions.
DRM can be removed easily, and I believe legally in the UK, but possibly not the US. You still have to buy the book's licence first, and it is obviously illegal to sell or give a copy to anyone else. Without DRM, books can be processed and opened by Calibre, the six downloads limit no longer applies, covers can be replaced and files backed up and restored to anywhere.
I have found that the (software) readers vary considerably in quality and flexibility, and none are perfect. Text display looks OK in most of them, providing that the screen is a reasonable size - 5 inches or more, and they are a very convenient way of reading in ad-hoc locations. Otherwise there are faults such as covers disappearing, hyperlinks failing to work and pictures displaying poorly on all the readers that I have tried. Also the book files tend to replicate themselves and disappear into different locations for each reader. In the end I chose Mantano as a preferred reader as this gives best control over file locations, although Kindle probably has better internal navigation.
I am interested to hear what other Tar-Boarders have found. In particular does anyone know of a soft reader that handles illustrations well? And does anybody have a view (ethical or legal) on breaking DRM on ebooks for ones own use?