[Klug-general] eBooks purchase/formats/readers

[Graham Todd]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:19:12 +0000
james snyder <snyder.webmaster at googlemail.com> uttered these words:

> > 2) Which of the formats have readers which work under Linux

Get Plucker - http://www.plkr.org/home

Its free (as in freedom and no cost) and works on Linux, Windows, and
other OS.  It'll also work on your Palm or smartphone.

> > 3) Which are the good sources of eBooks for those formats which are
> > readable on Linux?

Project Gutenberg

> > 4) What's the deal on ownership/copyright here?  As a complete
> > novice to eBooks I would have thought that the reason a
> > publisher/vendor wanting a proprietary format would be so that they
> > can sell you a book which only you have the key to read - so you
> > can't copy it to all your friends at zero gain to the
> > vendor/author.  Given that authors make a living by selling their
> > work that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.  I'd just like the price
> > to reflect the fact that I can't sell it on and that they are not
> > paying for the medium it is held on or the shelf space for
> > displaying it to me on the high street/airport etc.

Copyright resides with the copyright owner, which may or may not still
be the author of the work.  If the work has not had the copyright sold
on, it exists until 70 years after the author's death under the Berne
Convention.  However, a number of countries have not signed the
Convention and their domestic law may not coincide with its provisions.

Project Gutenberg publishes works in a digital form which the copyright
holder has agreed it shall publish, and works that are out of copyright
*in the U.S.A.*, so you should be OK with that but if you wish to pass
those works on in a different country, I suggest you get some legal
advice.

On the matter of proprietary formats, can I make a plea that you join
the FSF to put an end, or at least put a brake on DRM.  It ties you in
to one set of hardware to read eBooks.  But with a totally free and
open source alternative (like Plucker) that's cross platform compliant,
it should at least be an alternative that you can load on to your
reader.

-- 
Graham Todd