Why the publishing industry is going under
This and this and this (and several other "help" pages that I'm not bothering to link to) is why the publishing industry is in a bad state. I wanted to read Naomi Novik's "Empire of Ivory," which recently came out. I can't read it with my eyes at this time of year. It's a mass-market paperback, with too tight a binding to allow me to scan the text into my computer. So I decided to check whether my library had an e-book version. It didn't, but it had the audio book version to download. I don't normally listen to audio books but, well, this is Naomi Novik. So I checked to see what I needed to do to access the book. 1) Download special software to read it. 2) Check to see that I have the right version of Windows Media Player. 3) Perform a Windows Security Update before I can access the DRM-protected audio book. I can't do the latter (no Internet access from my main computer), but regardless - how many people do you think are *likely* to do all this? I certainly won't, and I'm a semi-geek. And this was the *easy* task - accessing the e-books would have been far harder. I'll just borrow the CD from another branch, thank you. And thumb my nose, yet again, at the publishing industry's incompetent efforts to persuade people to read books on their computers.
This and this and this (and several other "help" pages that I'm not bothering to link to) is why the publishing industry is in a bad state. I wanted to read Naomi Novik's "Empire of Ivory," which recently came out. I can't read it with my eyes at this time of year. It's a mass-market paperback, with too tight a binding to allow me to scan the text into my computer. So I decided to check whether my library had an e-book version. It didn't, but it had the audio book version to download. I don't normally listen to audio books but, well, this is Naomi Novik. So I checked to see what I needed to do to access the book. 1) Download special software to read it. 2) Check to see that I have the right version of Windows Media Player. 3) Perform a Windows Security Update before I can access the DRM-protected audio book. I can't do the latter (no Internet access from my main computer), but regardless - how many people do you think are *likely* to do all this? I certainly won't, and I'm a semi-geek. And this was the *easy* task - accessing the e-books would have been far harder. I'll just borrow the CD from another branch, thank you. And thumb my nose, yet again, at the publishing industry's incompetent efforts to persuade people to read books on their computers.