Comments on: Tor Books goes completely DRM-free

By: Jer_00

Jer_00 — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:46:00 +0000

The misunderstood how much power they were giving to the device creators.

If Amazon can use its market position to wipe out competition in the eReader market, publishers are screwed. It’s in their best interest to keep as much competition in that field as possible. DRM helps Amazon more than it helps individual publishers – it’s good to see they finally might be figuring this out (and figuring out that despite selling their books, an Amazon monopoly on book distribution is a really, really bad idea for the market).

By: Jer_00

Jer_00 — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:44:00 +0000

I got one a year ago for reading books from Project Gutenberg (Nook Color). It was completely worth the investment in gift cards from Christmas/Birthday to get it too. It’s become my most used electronic gadget at this point – and I’ve read a number of classics that I’d never gotten around to reading before.

Once I figured out how to get Overdrive’s stupid client to work so I could get ebooks from the library, that was icing on the cake.

By: Jer_00

Jer_00 — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:41:00 +0000

Yeah – the DRM on ebooks is well-known to be pathetic.

The only thing that has been saving ebooks is the same thing that saves anything else sold digitally – most readers will pay for what they want to read so long as the fee is reasonable and the quality of the material is good. And the folks who won’t pay are people who wouldn’t pay for it anyway.

By: It's me!

It's me! — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Good news! This might actually convince me to buy an e-reader. (An e-paper one, my tablets shiny screen just won’t cut it).

By: traalfaz

traalfaz — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:10:00 +0000

Awesome, they just shot up to my #2 preferred ebook vender behind Baen (they’ve been doing it right since day one).

By: Andrew Timson

Andrew Timson — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:58:00 +0000

The text will be intact, but going from ePub to Mobi is going to lose image quality, all but the most basic text styling, and custom fonts.

By: enkrates

enkrates — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 01:54:00 +0000

Although, these two situation do differ technologically, even though the customer service issue is the same. ebook formats ought to be able to be converted without any loss of information, while wma and mp3 are both “lossy” audio formats and some audio information is lost anytime you encode a file into one of those formats. So, converting between wma and mp3 over and over again will eventually result in a file of audio noise, but converting between epub and mobi should keep all (or, at least, most and all of the most important) information intact.

By: travtastic

travtastic — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:47:00 +0000

There’s no point in dealing with conversion software if we just use well-engineered, standardized formats. I don’t expect apps to convert my .wma songs to .mp3, I expect to not have to even worry about it in the first place.

By: travtastic

travtastic — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:44:00 +0000

You think that was a misunderstanding? If DRM had been successful, it would have virtually guaranteed repeat purchases of the exact same item, at virtually no production cost.

By: Jot Kali

Jot Kali — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:57:00 +0000

Thank You Tor. JK Rowling recently did the same when she released ebooks of the Harry Potter series.

Good to see publishers are realizing they have been hoodwinked by DRM. It was sold to them as a fix for pirating, but all it actually did was tie to the user to a particular hardware ereader. What a horrible trade off.

Now there is just step left in the publishing industry. I really wish hardcover books would come with a code to redeem to get the ebook version.

By: The SF Reader

The SF Reader — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Seconded… I will probably go the extra mile and buy the ebook versions of Jacqueline Carey’s books (which I already have as paper).

By: Soon Lee

Soon Lee — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:48:00 +0000

*applause*

By: Thomas Needham

Thomas Needham — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:40:00 +0000

I guess I can purchase from TOR now also. BAEN has been DRM free for years.
I have about 130 of their books on my Kindle as of today. (Many were free!)

By: Sarge Misfit

Sarge Misfit — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:29:00 +0000

Now I’m willing to buy an e-reader :-D

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Not really. If you know what you’re doing, removing DRM already takes less than a second with all normally used formats. It is trivial and has been for years.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:58:00 +0000

It’s hard to be specific without knowing something about your tastes. Tor are such a prolific publisher of SF, fantasy and drama that there’s bound to be something you would like a lot, but I can’t guess what it is.

Personally, I’d start with anything by (flicks rapidly through Tor’s web site at random) Brandon Sanderson, Ben Bova, Jacqueline Carey, China Mieville, Vernor Vinge, or Susan Shwartz. But that’s my taste; YMMV.

By: ferd

ferd — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:51:00 +0000

A nice move, but I’d rather see retailers be able to discount Tor ebooks so they are at least as cheap as their Tor discounted paperbacks.

By: Paul Weimer

Paul Weimer — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:54:00 +0000

Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear. Just came out. Kick-ass “Silk Road Fantasy” done right.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:46:00 +0000

Now then, on to getting Hollywood to drop their wet dreams of functioning DRM.

By: Chesterfield

Chesterfield — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:32:00 +0000

What are some great books published by Tor? I’d love to hear any recommendations that I could purchase to support Tor in this move.

By: Max Gladstone

Max Gladstone — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:13:00 +0000

Yes!

By: MrJM

MrJM — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:12:00 +0000

Huzzah!

I’m going shopping!

By: Matt Dana

Matt Dana — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:04:00 +0000

Awesome! This is going to make pirating e-books so much easier. Thanks, Tor!

I keed, I keed.

By: Frank Warta

Frank Warta — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:56:00 +0000

This makes my heart happy.

By: Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:56:00 +0000

Great news!