Oh boy. This started as a small exercise in venting and turned into a full-scale rant. At this point I don’t even know if there’s any content left to it except “Grr, big publishers only sell ebooks in formats I don’t want.” It would be a shame to waste all that typing though, so here it is. After all, that’s what the internet is for, right, uninformed and ill-considered angry ranting? (Apart from porn, that is. Which I don’t write. And digressions. Which I do. And pictures of kittens. Which… Let’s get on with it, shall we?)

I just read Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, released as a free pdf by suvudu. It’s a clever idea: they’re giving away the first books in a few particularly addictive series, with the expectation that they’ll gain more sales in new addicts (who won’t be able to resist the non-free continuations of the series) than they lose by the free release. And it’s worked for me. I’m hooked on Temeraire, like crack (“first time is free…”).1

Only trouble is, they’re not selling the rest of the series.

That’s not quite true: if you do a lot of digging about on the site you find links to places you can buy the books from. The suvudu website is not very well put together, so it takes some time to get to grips with the idea that you can’t get anything directly from them.2 Ok, then it’s off to the plethora of alternative sites, all selling content that comes originally from one of suvudu’s bit publishing backers (Del Rey, Random House, I’m not clear how they all fit together).

It takes a bit longer to realise that … none of the rest of these folk will take my money and give me a pdf.

Judging by the comments on the announcement of the suvudu free library, I’m the only person left in this post-millenial world who still wants to read pdf. Greg Montague writes

Publishers and authors may believe they are doing readers a service by offering a free PDF, but they may just be keeping an outdated format in the digital ICU ward. Obsolescence is an essential part of technological growth. It’s time to hang the DO NOT RESUSCITATE sign. That means readers need to say no thanks to free offers of a PDF ebook.

Well, there is something to be said for pdf as a distribution format. The main advantage it offers over most of the alternatives folk are asking for in that thread is exactly why they don’t want it: it fixes the dimensions of the page and the layout of the text on that page, so that if the page isn’t the same size as the screen you view it on … tough luck.3 Why is that a good thing? Well, it lets someone with some design skills and typographic sensibilities design the page and know how it’s going to look when you read it.

If you’ve got a device that makes reading a page formatted for any roughly standard-sized paperback comfortable, a pdf that closely replicates the design of the paper-and-ink book is going to look good on it. I’ve got one (an iLiad) and that’s how I want to do my reading. The Amazon Kindle that everyone is buzzing about looks like it has a similar size screen. Now I don’t know what other formats look like on a Kindle, but I would be surprised if anything looks better than a well-designed pdf.4

Of course there are other factors beyond looks. A format dedicated to a particular device can have features that target that device. A format that has to be read in a particular piece of software can integrate with that software for, again, extra features. One such feature is managing a library, with search features and tracking of which books you have and haven’t read, and so on. I imagine the Kindle probably does this quite well.5

There’s another ‘feature’ which formats locked to one device or piece of reader software offer, though: DRM. And that’s what I find when I try to buy any more of that tasty Temeraire crack: the only formats anyone will sell it in are DRM locked.

That means they’re useless to me. Very few of these locked-down formats can even be read on the relatively marginal iLiad. And those that can are certainly not providing the high-quality typography that I’d like to see. (His Majesty’s Dragon is nicely typeset, admittedly unlike many rough-and-ready pdfs you will find being offered as free tasters.)

I’m not sure that DRM for ebooks is as braindead a proposition as DRM for music was, at least at this moment in technological history.6 Unlike in the case of music, many of the people who will be willing to put effort into circumventing DRM technology (and providing the de-DRMed results to the rest of us) will also be content with severely degraded output quality: just plain text, for example, or ragged-right alignment without pagebreaks. There aren’t very many ebook-reader platforms out there yet, and they don’t interoperate; that means no semi-universal format (like mp3 for music) letting the hackers centralise their efforts. And there just aren’t very many people reading (and ripping) ebooks, especially compared to the numbers ripping and listening to cds.

But all that is a little bubble, a breathing space for hidebound traditional publishing models that will collapse within the next twenty years, sure as eggs are eggs.7 I don’t know what will take its place. I hope that whatever it is will leave room for high-quality typography, which means something that takes over at least some of the points we’ve learned during umpteen centuries of book design. I’m quite sure that it will involve some sort of format standardisation or interoperability; unless one device gets an improbable stranglehold on the entire ebook market, there is going to come a time when it will be unthinkable that I could be prevented from reading the rest of my series by not having the right format available. (What do you mean, you can’t play that audio file? Convert it to mp3, anything can play that!)

Until then, though, I’m going to have to put up with not having the rest of the Temeraire series. Because there’s no way I’m going to pay good money for software that is deliberately crippled (that’s what DRM is: it’s about limiting the things you can do with the files you’ve got, which means crippling the tools you use to work with them), and which will only give me the text I want to read in a typographically substandard substitute for real quality. It’s like accepting that the music you pay money to download will play with a constant background hum or hiss, which doesn’t need to be there but which the company providing the recording has added to all the files they release.

Why are they doing this? I guess it’s because they’re scared. People who listen to music these days carry around portable hard drives with hundreds of gigs of mp3s on them, none of which they’ve paid for. Hundreds of gigs of ebooks adds up to more words than you will ever read in your lifetime; it’s easy to see why this is a worrying prospect for digital publishing. The problem, however, is not going to go away; loading everything down with DRM is only going to delay its arrival very slightly.

Well, that and make me very irritated.

Notes:

  1. This is slightly embarrassing, since it’s not exactly intellectual fiction. I never enjoyed Harry Potter, but now I think I understand how Potter fans with otherwise literary interests must have felt. I don’t think Temeraire is literature for the ages, but dammit I like it. I’ll try to stop being defensive at this point. Also, I’m not suggesting I’m hooked on crack. [↪]
  2. That might even be false, but it’s held up for the Novik stuff I checked out. Things might work differently by publisher, or by author, or by the phase of the moon and the star sign of the webmaster’s latest girlfriend, for all I know. [↪]
  3. I believe Adobe has done something about adding reflow; whether that involves changing the pdf format itself or just making their readers more clever I don’t know. Since most –all?– non-Adobe reader software is completely incapable of reflowing a pdf that’s still pretty much irrelevant at the moment. [↪]
  4. Another bonus to pdf is that you can synchronise things like page numbering across paper and e-publications. That’s obviously more important for non-fiction than for fiction, so I’ll leave it aside for the moment. [↪]
  5. The iLiad doesn’t do it at all, which is a pain. On the other hand it lets me do geeky things like connect to it over a network and write and run my own programs on it, which is quite some compensation. [↪]
  6. Why is DRM for music braindead? You have to get audio output to play to your speakers. All you need is audio output to make a fresh copy … in whatever format you prefer. The completion of this argument is left as an exercise for the reader. [↪]
  7. Time estimate may be based on uninformed grabbing of nice round numbers out of the air. [↪]