eBook dis-satisfaction
 

Being a complete fool, or very nearly so, i paid for an ebook, assuming it would be like a paper book in that i could carry ot from 'puter to 'puter if i so desired, after all, i paid for it. NOT SO! I made the error of downloading the thing on my work station meaning i can only see it at work and when IT gets around to wiping and reloading the os of this pc i'll lose the book in question and not be given a replacement!
The very idea pisses me off and i want to find a way to at least print the damn thing onto paper so I won't lose it when the hard drive gets replaced. But the format of the book is not an 81/2 by 11 sheet. This sucks.
ANy body got any tips on how i can at least back the thing up or print hard copy?
Thanks,
Martin

That is irritating. You need somebody somebody smarter than me.

I have no help to offer, but I will feel outraged with you.

Apparently, digital formats are not a new, more convenient way to deliver products. They are in fact a way to severly limit the quality of "ownership" that a consumer has after exchanging their hard-earned money for something which is claimed to be for sale. If you purchase a book from Barnes & Noble, you can take it anywhere you want, and show it to whoever you want, you can give it away to charity, or cut it up with scissors and make a collage. This is entirely expected, and has been from the dawn of time, because you paid your fucking money for it - it's yours now (YOU BOUGHT IT)!!! This basic premise has ceased to apply, in many situations. A "new way" of doing things has arrived.

The physical, mechanical products (cars, toaster ovens) we purchase are designed to fail, necessitating replacement. And the digital products we purchase are similarly designed to fail, or more accurately, designed not to deliver what an unsuspecting consumer thinks they promise to deliver.

Oh, and (doesn't help you this time) I think they sell audio books packaged with an internal player, although I don't know if this is cost effective.

what is the file type? ext? maybe you can find a file converter?

Take a pic of each screen, copy it to a jpeg and convert it to a file that you can move to another pc.

Or just download uTorrent and download books.
So far I've downloaded...

Kalil Gibran
4000 pages of Asimov
nearly a hundred Heinlen books
all of Terry Pratchett's books
the Bible
all of Neil Gaiman's books
Orson Scott Card's Ender series
all of Douglas Adams' books
two George Orwell books
all of Kurt Vonnegut's books
a Michael Crichton book


...And more tonight, if i think of any.

will it allow a cut and paste into word?

You want to talk ebook dissatisfaction ... I'll bet you didn't pay $250 for one of these.

It's the most beautifully cool paperweight I own.

We have a scrutload of open-format ebooks on our household network; most of them harvested from torrents. In a related development, my Abacus PalmOS WristPDA has been retired in favor of a Treo 680 with unlimited data plan.

It rocks hard. Cellphone, web browser, media player, PDA, ebook reader, digital camera, audio recorder, all in a single gadget.

With an itty bitty screen.

It looks huge next to the watch. :-)

If I want to read on a big screen, I use my lappy, 8" x 13". Or the 19" LCD on my Linux box.

Bit the Treo is with me all the time, and I can grab more material no matter where I am, or drop in another SD card. Having the phone integrated with the PalmOS calendering and address book stuff is a big win. I can even talk to machines on our home network.

It also has Gmail and Google Maps, spreadsheet, games, etc, etc, etc.

http://www.phonemag.com/images/uploa...0_cingular.jpg

eBook bitching.
 

The "book" i'm dealing with is essentially a scan of Russel Bourke's publication of schematics and text of his engine design, a very neat idea. When i try to copy the images they show up as bitmap. I find that i can copy them into Kodak Imaging for Windows. This is a big imrovement; Previous attempts to print from within the eBook application cut off the right margin of the pages of both the blueprints and the text pages.
It's still awfully unweildy and a pain in the ass.

Edit: been playing with this and i can print (finally!) the graphics, that is the engine drawings. The text i still cannot print without the margin being cut off. Previouse attempts to deal with the seller have left me unwilling to ask him for help. After all, he thinks this crippleware is a _good_ thing, and fair.
second edit:
LJ, the engine drawings show up as bitmaps, the text document saves as print files. The bitmap drawings i can use in kodak image viewer. The text doc i cannot do anything but simply print them, and they come out with the right margin cut off.
Poo.

Will CutePDF work?
 

Have you tried to print this out using CutePDF?

CutePDF is a free version of the Acrobat printer which installs itself as a printer and allows you to make PDF files from anything.

It's an awesome program, and I've even used it to make PDFs of Visio diagrams and Print Screens (from MS paint).

I also find it quite strange that Microsoft is building in roughly the same technology into Vista (trusted path) that has been used on Top Secret /SCI workstations by the US and foreign governments. This incident reminds me of that.

At least with the TS workstations you knowingly sign your life away before you use them.

The ultimate goal of new media formats is, in my opinion, to try to force the buying public to repurchase the same product every time technology changes. I've got a thousand DVDs, but they're a paltry 420 lines. Blu-Ray will give me a real 1020 lines of rez on a high-def TV...and so on and so on...

It is all about separating you from your money. But then, it is hard to argue with the fact that HiDef pictures are enormously superior to regular NTSC standard analogue TV.

Sigh.

But in what sense? If the goal of technology is simply to be technology then we could sit around and stare at the owners manual of expensive products, and marvel at the specs (is that where the emphasis belongs?). If the goal of a TV is to be a monitor to display a series of images designed to evoke emotional respsonse while telling a story, then 25% better hardware isn't going to improve that basic premise. It could be argued that higher resolutions and more lifelike colors could "fool" our brain into "being there" but the question is: did we find movies un-enjoyable 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 50 years ago? If we didn't know a "better" picture was available we wouldn't be complaining about an "old" TV. In fact, the latest TV technologies display an image that contains more detail than the human brain is designed to process - visual technologies have progressed into the realm of audiophile electronics, where thousands of dollars cannot produce an audible difference to the human ear.

Next you're going to tell me it's a waste of money to upgrade my Windows XP with Office 2000 so I can have Vista and Office 2007.

It's not about the technology...
 

It's not about new tech. We all love that :).

It's about people attempting to put artificial restrictions on tech, ostensibly for the purpose of copyright protection, which also restrict usage of the product.

If someone wants pirated content, they're going to get it, no matter what. The rules of the marketplace dictate that one (see: Xbox, Playstation Mod Chips, pirate DVDs, pirate copies of Windows Vista and XP).

People will accept a lower quality pirated product than a full quality retail product (see: Windows XP that fails WGA and half the movies sold on the streets that are bad cam copies of the original) as long as they are easy to use.

Companies haven't woken up and fully realized that no matter what, protection of digital data from unauthorized duplication is never going to be a 100% solution. They (esp. in the case of these eBooks) are taking measures which are very draconian to protect this content. They are taking measures reserved for governments to protect their innermost secrets by compartmentalizing the OS and its programs. Like I said before, the only other time I have seen the copy-paste functionality disabled in such a way is by the systems used to enforce Bell-LaPadula type security on TS workstations.

They need to strike a balance by realizing the usage patterns of their users, and designing a scheme by which users wish to pay for product (see: iTunes) by providing financial incentive to do so (see: iTunes costing less than the record store and allowing single-track purchases most of the time), and most importantly an easy way to recover lost data (when you transfer your paid-for tracks from one machine to another, you just need to reauthorize yourself).

In other words, they need to provide good customer service :).

In this case, if the eBook vendor offered these incentives, we would not be having this discussion.

CutePDF
 

MBPark, CutePDF will print my eBook one page at a time. A great improvement!

wrt drm
 

I just loved the title of this article:

Windows DRM is the 'longest suicide note in history'

I believe it.