My books are among my greatest assets. So much so that finding room to store them all has long been a problem. So the emergence of ebook readers has been a big help to me.
However, to be of true value, certain aspects of the “dead tree” format must carry over and one of the most important ones is that when I buy a book, I own the book. I don’t “buy a license” for a book. Especially when you consider that ebooks typically sell for about the same price as their physical counterparts.
In order for a book to be truly “buyable”, however, certain principles must apply. On my side, that means that I treat it just like I would a real book and don’t go giving away freebie copies to my friends. Ideally, I could sell “used” ebooks or give them away, but that’s an idea whose time has yet to come.
On the seller’s side, that means a minimum of intrusiveness. I have to be able to read the book without being in direct contact with its “Big Brother” server out on the Internet. I will not tolerate sellers who yank back or alter books without my express permission. No “1984”s down on the Animal Farm. And my library shouldn’t “burn down to the ground” if the vendor goes under a la Borders Books.
The Barnes&Noble system generally meets those criteria. There’s DRM, but it’s (presently) “locks for honest people”, which I can live with. If for any reason, B&N shuts down their servers and exits the business, I have local backups and the means to keep reading them. My means of obtaining local backups has been tampered with on the Nook Tablet, which “hides” the purchased books from the USB storage device, and that’s a feature I hope that they’ll reconsider, since I’ll be keeping it in mind as I make future purchases, but for now, I can deal with it, if not appreciate it.
However, once I’ve made my local backups, I needed a way to be able to browse the local library. The B&N ebook filenames are based on their ISBN numbers, which makes them unique, but hard to locate. So I wrote this little app to be able to scan epub-format books and list their names and authors in a format that’s convenient for spreadsheets and database to take in.
It also determines what encryption algorithm provides DRM. If I scan a library and see that someone’s using DRM that I can’t decode, that’s a red flag and WILL affect both my present-day opinion of the publisher (as in what I recommend to others) AND future purchases.
My sincere thanks to publishers such as O’Reilly and Associates, Baen Books, and others who have been brave enough to forgo DRM altogether. You have placed your trust in my honesty and I will uphold it. Late update: TOR has joined the no-DRM club according to an announcement I just heard today. I’ve helped them kill a few trees over the years!
Catalog application downloads
My ePub catalog utility is a Java application located at http://www.mousetech.com/ebooks-catalog-1.0.jar. To use it:
java -jar ebooks-catalog-1.0.jar f1.epub [f2.epub f3.epub ...]
Both source and executable may be freely redistributed as long as you don't charge for it or take away credit for my efforts.