Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader.

Re:Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. by kijin on Saturday March 24, 2012 @06:52PM (#3751031)

How does this help "end DRM"? The book was already in the public domain, so the only thing you did was to take a non-DRM'd copy and convert it into a proprietary format. Just because you can take a text file and convert it into .doc doesn't mean that you've "liberated" MS Word.

If you could take an e-book purchased at B&N and freely transfer it to your Kindle or vice versa, that would be the real end of DRM.

Here's an interesting question. Suppose you bought a book by a long-dead author in an e-book store, just for the sake of convenience, or maybe because Project Gutenberg doesn't have it yet. Then you decide that you want to read it on a different vendor's e-book reader, and it happens that some software can break your e-book's DRM. If you use this software, are you violating the DMCA even though the DRM is not protecting any copyrighted material?

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Re:Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. by DanBC on Saturday March 24, 2012 @06:59PM (#3751051)

Yes, because you're circumventing a copyright protection mechanism. Even though the mechanism isn't, in that case, being used to protect copyrights.

IANAL and welcome corrections.

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Re:Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. by bigmetalman on Saturday March 24, 2012 @11:19PM (#3751601)

kijin,

I used "The Idiot" because that was the book that I was reading at the time of this writing. Using Calibre doesn't directly combat DRM, but the time you spend using it as a broker for consumption is time you are not spending in the B&N store buying books in a restricted format.

Though it may seem silly to read public domain books when there may be something new that you want to consume, if you can forfeit that experience of a new book, it is a great form of protest.

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