Viva eBooks!

Apprentice Alf's DeDRM AppleScript for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6

2010-11-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

E-books that you buy are usually encrypted with "Digital Rights Management," or DRM. DRM is copy protection; it's intended to keep you from making a copy of your book and letting someone else have it.

But DRM can interfere with uses of the book that are legal. Some of the books I have bought in the Adobe EPUB format, for instance, can't be moved to my iPhone for reading — unless, that is, I strip off the DRM encryption first.

I showed how to do that in an earlier post, iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks. It's a complicated set of steps. Now there's a way that is less complicated.

Unfortunately, the new way is available only to users of Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") and 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") but not to users of any Windows system. That's because DeDRM, as its author Apprentice Alf named it, is in the AppleScript scripting language.

Apprentice Alf, who wrote DeDRM, has gone into retirement, and his original blog post about it has been modified and no longer links to the DeDRM 2.6 download per se. You can instead download tools v3.8 ZIP file from here. It contains DeDRM 2.6. The link I just gave will take you to RapidShare, where you need to click on the Download button under Save File To ... your computer. A popup window will require you to wait a couple of minutes and then click on a second Download button. Then the actual download will begin. It will normally (depending on how you have your browser set up) put the tools v3.8.zip file on your Desktop. Double clicking that file will expand the ZIP file into a tools v3.8 folder. Open the folder. A DeDRM 2.6 AppleScript "droplet" should be the top item. Option-drag it to the Desktop to make a copy of it there. You can then (after possibly doing the setup I describe below) drag the icons of e-book files that you want decrypted and drop the icons on the DeDRM 2.0 droplet to have the e-books decrypted.

After you put the DeDRM 2.6 droplet on your desktop, you will see something like:

I took that screenshot when using an older version of DeDRM; the current version is DeDRM 2.6. What I describe below pertains to version 1.1, but it remains about the same in later versions.

I'll assume you'll leave/put the DeDRM 2.6 icon on the desktop, but you can optionally move it to any folder you like.

To use DeDRM, you'll simply drag an e-book file's icon over to the DeDRM icon, and drop the e-book's icon there. You can also drag the icon of a folder that contains more than one e-book, and DeDRM will decrypt them all. The decrypted e-book(s) will show up in the same folder as the original e-book(s) are in.

Before you start dragging and dropping e-books, though, some setup may be required. (If you want to bypass it and just try your luck now, skip down to Using DeDRM.)

Optional Setup

Double-click on the DeDRM icon to see:

When you click Continue, you'll see:

You can click None for this dialog ... unless you have Kindle e-books in the Mobipocket format from Amazon.com. In that case, you can enter the necessary PIDs (Personal IDs) for your Kindle device(s) here, clicking Add after each one. (How to learn what those PIDs are is a topic beyond the scope of this post.)

If you, like me, want to bypass Mobipocket PID specifications for now, just click None. You can always re-launch DeDRM as a standalone application, using the double-click method, and enter Mobipocket PIDs later.

You'll now see something like:

You can enter, one at a time, any Name:Credit_Card_Number "key pairs" you use to buy e-books at Barnes & Noble or eReader.com, and click Add. Once you have entered them all, you will click on the No More button which has replaced the None button.

Each key pair represents:

the name on your account at Barnes & Noble online or on eReader.com
the number on the credit card registered for that account.

These two items must be entered with a colon (':') — but with no spaces or other characters — between them. If the card number is for an eReader account, you can opt to enter just the last eight digits of the card number. If it is for a B&N account, you will need to enter the whole 16-digit card number.

If you don't want to enter any Barnes & Noble or eReader.com key pairs, just click None in the dialog box above.

Next you'll see:

The intention here is for you to specify any adeptkey.der key files that you may have generated previously. These are key files that, again, you may have generated using a Python script, ineptkeymac_v1.py, as shown in Step 4 of iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks. If you do happen to have any previously generated adeptkey.der key files, you can use the Add... button at this point to tell DeDRM about them, one by one.

But you don't really need to specify any previously existing adeptkey.der key files! DeDRM can generate the "local" ADEPT key file you need on the fly for you.

ADEPT stands for Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology, by the way.

The only time you'll need to specify your own existing adeptkey.der key files is in a situation where you in fact have some older Adobe EPUB e-book files lying around, ones that were downloaded when you were using a different Adobe ID/Password combination than you currently use.

For purposes of this post, I'll assume all your Adobe EPUBs were downloaded (possibly using Sony's Reader Library application) with an Adobe ID/Password combination that is still current. So all you have to do in the dialog box above is click on No More. At that point, the DeDRM script merely quits.

Using DeDRM

Now you're ready to use the DeDRM script for real. I suggest you consider moving or copying the DeDRM "droplet" icon to a folder you've created, named something like DeDRM Folder. Alternatively, you can leave the DeDRM "droplet" icon right on your desktop.

The next step is to locate in your Mac's folder hierarchy any Adobe EPUB e-book file that you want to strip DRM from:

If you got the file via the Sony Reader Library application, it's in ~/Documents/My Books/Reader Library/{book title}.epub. (The '~' node stands for the Home folder of the user account you are using on the Mac.)
If you obtained the Adobe EPUB online in any other manner and then imported it into the Adobe Digital Reader application, you can expect to find it in ~/Documents/Digital Editions/{book title}.epub.
If your Adobe EPUB e-book can be found in neither of those two locations, you can probably locate it by doing a Finder filename search on the book's title.

You might want to make a copy of the Adobe EPUB in your DeDRM Folder folder (or, alternatively, on the desktop, if that's where your DeDRM "droplet" icon is) by dragging its icon to that location while holding down the option key.

Using a copy of the adobe EPUB is not, strictly speaking, necessary. However, DeDRM will produce its decrypted output copy in the same folder location (possibly the desktop) as the location of the input original Adobe EPUB that you drop onto the DeDRM icon. So if you want the decrypted version to be created in a more convenient folder location than ~/Documents/My Books/Reader Library/ or ~/Documents/Digital Editions/, it's best to work with a copy that you have previously established in the desired output location.

Now drag the copied Adobe EPUB e-book's icon onto the DeDRM icon and drop it there. DeDRM will open. After a brief delay, you should see something like:

Click Thanks. DeDRM goes away. It's that easy!

If the input file was called The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog.epub, as above, an output file called The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog_dedrmed.epub will appear in the same folder (possibly, the desktop). The filename will be that of the original file with _dedrmed added. The filename extension will continue to be .epub.

The output file is just like the input file — except that it's no longer copy-protected. It can be read in any application or on any device that can read "open" (i.e., non-DRMed) EPUB e-books:

Stanza for the Mac or Windows
Reader Library for the Mac or Windows
Adobe Digital Editions for the Mac or Windows
Any iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch app that reads EPUBs, including Stanza, Kobo, and Borders
etc.

You can also read it in the iBooks app on an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. To do that:

Import the open EPUB file into iTunes by dragging it into the Library portion of the main iTunes window
With the open EPUB now visible in the Books section of the iTunes library, sync your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch

The open EPUB will now appear in the Library of the iBooks app on the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch!

You can use a similar procedure to use DeDRM to remove DRM encryption from:

PDB files that you obtain from Barnes & Noble or eReader.com online
Mobipocket e-books, such as those from Amazon.com
Amazon Kindle e-books — provided they're not in the dreaded Topaz format! (You can open your Kindle e-book in TextEdit and look for the characters TPZ0 near the top. If they're there, the book is Topaz and you'll need more powerful mojo to decrypt it.)

Wonderful, no?

iPhone as eReader, Part Deux

2010-08-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

In my earlier iPhone as eReader article I talked about four iPhone apps that let you read e-books:

Kindle for iPhone
Stanza
eReader
B&N eReader (now discontinued)

Since then a lot has changed:

B&N eReader has been replaced by the free nook for iPhone app from Barnes & Noble. This app allows owners of the Nook, B&N's rival to Amazon's Kindle — as well as non-owners of Nooks — to read Nook e-books on their iPhones.

There is a new app from Apple, iBooks for iPhone. It's the iPhone app you need to use to buy e-books from Apple's iBookstore, an arm of its iTunes Store.

Kobo is another new e-reader app. It lets the iPhone read e-books meant for the new $149.99 Kobo eReader device being sold at Borders stores in the U.S. That device supports open ePUB, open PDF, and Adobe DRM e-book formats.

The Borders iPhone app is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the Kobo app except in minor details.

All of these apps are available (often in separate versions for the two devices) for the new Apple iPad, not just the iPhone.

Turning Amazon Kindle DRM'ed eBooks into iBooks

2010-08-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have an iPhone 3GS. The iBooks app on it allows me to read e-books in the open EPUB format. In earlier posts such as Turning DRM'ed PDB eBooks into iBooks, iBooks♥B&N: Let's Get Ignoble!, iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks, and Breaking Adobe DRM — Tips, Tricks, Workarounds I talked about how to remove the Digital Rights Management encryption for various types of e-Books (those in the eReader PDB format; those in the Adobe-encrypted EPUB format used by Barnes & Noble; those in the Adobe-encrypted EPUB format used by Adobe Reader software) so that they can be read on an iPhone or an iPad.

Now I've discovered how to do the same for e-books from the Amazon Kindle Store.

Click on this image ...

... to read how I did it for Kindle books I'd purchased somewhat earlier for use in the Kindle app on the iPhone. They still work in that app, of course, but I want all my e-books in iBooks so I don't have to keep track of which e-books are where!

The same basic procedure should work in the future if I buy more Kindle e-books.

The procedure is geared toward Mac users. The Skindle app that decrypts the e-books runs on Windows, meaning that I have to run Windows in Parallels Desktop for the Mac, available here. As far as I know, there is no equivalent on the Mac platform to Skindle for Windows.

If you have a Windows platform, the basic procedure still works — with fewer complications! You will need Skindle (available here) and calibre (available here), to go with Amazon Kindle for PC (K4PC), available here. When you follow the procedure linked to by the image above, some of the steps which are intended to bridge between the Windows/Parallels and Mac environments drop out. Instead of running calibre in the Mac environment, you will run it in Windows. Ditto, iTunes.

Be aware that Skindle Version 06 works with K4PC Version 1.2.0 (30413) and possibly with some earlier K4PC versions. Amazon has in the past modified its DRM for new versions of K4PC such that decrypters like Skindle no longer work ... until their authors revise them for the new K4PC version!

Turning DRM'ed PDB eBooks into iBooks

2010-07-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Suppose you, like me, have e-books that you've purchased and downloaded in the PDB format, also known as the eReader format, and now you'd like to read them in iBooks on your iPhone. If they're copy-protected using DRM, no dice ...

... unless you decrypt them first.

(Warning: decrypting a DRM-protected e-book, thereby removing copy protection and other forms of access control, is a violation of the law ... even if the decrypted copy is never shared with others. Sorry about that.)

eReader2html is a Python script that does exactly that. You can view and download the eReader2html Python script here. Then you can use it on your Mac OS X platform — as well as on Windows and other platforms — to turn your PDBs into HTML files. (My platform is Mac OS X 10.5.8 "Leopard.")

You can then read the HTML version in any web browser ... or you can use calibre to turn it into an EPUB for use in iBooks. More on calibre later.

Don't know how to read Python code? Never mind ... just click on the Download button. Your browser (mine is Safari) will put the downloaded script file into whatever folder it is set to put downloads into, using the filename f1fc790cb.txt. If, for you, the folder does not land on the Desktop, you should move the downloaded file manually to the Desktop. Then, for comprehensibility, you should click on the f1fc790cb filename and change it to eReader2html. (The original filename extension, .txt, remains.)

Now open Terminal (it's in the Utilities folder) and type the command python, followed by a space. Drag the icon of the eReader2html.txt file into the Terminal window and hit Return. You should see something like:

iMac:~ eric$ python ~/Desktop/eReader2html.txt
eReader2Html v0.03. Copyright (c) 2008 The Dark Reverser
Converts eReader books to HTML
Usage:
ereader2html infile.pdb outdir "your name" credit_card_number
Note:
It's enough to enter the last 8 digits of the credit card number
iMac:~ eric$

If you get an error message indicating that the python command is unknown, you probably need to install the Python interpreter. Make sure the optionally installed Apple Developer package is present on your Mac.

If you already, at the outermost root level of your Mac's folder hierarchy, have a folder called Developer, you're fine — and something else must be wrong. Post a comment to this blog entry, and I'll try to help you.

If Developer is not there, create it by inserting your OS X 10.5 Install DVD and navigating to and then double-clicking Mac OS X Install DVD:Optional Installs:Xcode Tools:Xcode Tools.mpkg. You will be led, by the installer program which opens, through the necessary steps to install the Developer Tools package, thereby creating the Developer folder.

Once you have a Developer folder, try invoking python again in Terminal. If that works, try python ~/Desktop/eReader2html.txt again.

Now do something like:

iMac:~ eric$ cd ~/Desktop
iMac:Desktop eric$ python eReader2html.txt "The Lost Symbol.pdb" "The Lost Symbol HTML" "Eric Palmer Stewart" 4264********0937
eReader2Html v0.03. Copyright (c) 2008 The Dark Reverser
Processing... done
iMac:Desktop eric$

Notes:

Before I did this, I'd made a copy on my Desktop of my original The Lost Symbol.pdb file as downloaded from eReader.com. To do this, I'd dragged the icon of the original file to the Desktop with the Option key held down.
I'd also created an empty folder, The Lost Symbol HTML, on my Desktop.
eReader2html.txt, the Python script file, was also sitting on my Desktop.
To enter commands in the Terminal command line, I simply typed them in. If I made a mistake, I used the Delete key to back up over (and erase) some or all what I'd previously typed, and then I retyped it correctly.
First, I typed cd , followed by a space. (A space needed to be typed in after each part, other than the last part, of each command line.)
Then I typed ~/Desktop and hit Return. That caused the first command to be executed.
The first command, cd ~/Desktop, made the Desktop the "active" directory in Terminal. Later on, when I executed my main command, any non-"qualified' references to files and folders would implicitly point to the Desktop.
In that first command, ~ represented the current user's (my own) Home folder, so ~/Desktop represented the Desktop of the current Mac OS X user: me.
After cd ~/Desktop was executed, the prompt on the next line in the Terminal window changed to iMac:Desktop eric$. , since eric represents the short name of the current user at the time, me.)
The main command line began when I typed in python, followed by a space.
I then typed in eReader2html.txt, followed by a space. That was to tell Terminal to find the eReader2html.txt Python script file sitting in the currently active directory, i.e., the Desktop.
I next typed "The Lost Symbol.pdb", in double quotes, followed by a space. This was the name of the input PDB file, sitting on my Desktop.
The filename was enclosed in double quotes so the embedded spaces wouldn't cause confusion. If I didn't like the typing-filenames-in-double-quotes method, then instead I could simply have dragged the file's icon from the Desktop to the Terminal window at the point when I would ordinarily have typed in the argument — following the manually typed-in space character, mind you — resulting in /Users/eric/Desktop/The\ Lost\ Symbol.pdb. This is the so-called "fully specified path to the file." It has \ characters strewn within it to tame the included embedded spaces. No enclosing double quotes are necessary.
I next typed "The Lost Symbol HTML", in double quotes. It pointed to the empty The Lost Symbol HTML folder, sitting on the Desktop, where I wanted the output of eReader2html.txt to go.
Again, I could simply have dragged the folder's icon from the Desktop into the Terminal window, following my manually typed-in space character, to enter the fully specified path to the folder, /Users/eric/Desktop/The\ Lost\ Symbol\ HTML, into the command line.
I next typed "Eric Palmer Stewart", in double quotes. It was the name under which I had purchased the original PDB version of the original The Lost Symbol.pdb e-book from eReader.com. My "your name" specification had to be capitalized in the exact same way as on my eReader.com account.
Finally, I typed in 4264********0937. No double quotes were needed, since there were no internal spaces, dashes, etc. It was the 16-digit number on the credit card that I used to buy the The Lost Symbol.pdb e-book from eReader.com. I have obfuscated the middle eight digits here, but what I actually typed in in Terminal was the correct credit card number in its entirety. I could alternatively have entered just the final eight digits, ****0937 — without obfuscation, of course — instead of the whole 16-digit number.

It took a few minutes for Processing... done to appear in the Terminal window. Once the processing was done, my The Lost Symbol HTML folder contained:

The Lost Symbol HTML folder's contents
(click to enlarge)

The book.html file is the main item. The .png files are graphic elements, most of which are illustrations from the book. cover.png is an image of the book's cover:

The Lost Symbol Cover Image
from cover.png
as seen in Preview

I double-clicked book.html, and the whole book, graphics and all, opened for inspection in my Safari browser:

The Lost Symbol HTML folder's book.html file
open in a Safari window
(click to enlarge)

Instead of turning pages, I was able to use the scroll bar to slide vertically through the book.

+++++++

Now it's time to use calibre to convert the HTML into an EPUB:

Open calibre (website here; download page here; online manual here).

(Click on this and the other screenshot images to enlarge them.)

Click on the Add Books icon.

Navigate to and open the book.html file.

Wait a minute for the Adding... window to disappear.

Make sure the e-book you just added is highlighted.

Now, since calibre won't necessarily use the cover.png file, you can give the e-book you just added a cover:

Click on the Edit Metadata icon.

Click on the Download cover button in the Edit Meta Information window, and after the cover downloads, click OK.

Verify the downloaded cover in the Edit Meta Information window, then click OK.

Verify the downloaded cover in the main window.

Now you can convert the e-book to an EPUB:

Click on the Convert Books icon.

When the Convert (your e-book name) window appears ...

... choose Output format: EPUB, then click OK to dismiss the Convert (your e-book name) window.

In the main window, wait a minute for the spinning progress icon next to Jobs: 1 to stop spinning.

Now, with Jobs: 0 again, the main window looks like this.

Click on Click to open to reveal the EPUB file in the Finder ...

...and (in this example) the new EPUB file is shown as The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown.epub.

Next, import the EPUB file into iTunes by dragging it into the Library, as per this movie:

(You can play a larger version of the movie in QuickTime by clicking on the image above. You can also just position your mouse pointer on the image above and use the scroll wheel to move through the movie.)

The EPUB is now visible in the Books section of the iTunes library:

To copy it into iBooks on your iPhone or other iDevice, connect the iDevice to your Mac, and it will automatically sync. If it's already connected at the time you import the EPUB into iTunes, just highlight the iDevice on the left side of the iTunes window and click on the Sync button at lower right:

Now the EPUB shows up in your Library in iBooks on the iDevice:

Very neat!

iBooks♥B&N: Let's Get Ignoble!

2010-07-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

ignoble is the moniker that I♥CABBAGES has chosen for his tools to decrypt e-books from Barnes & Noble that are in the EPUB format. This post by him tells generally how to use these tools. Herein, I show how to do that on a Mac running OS X 10.5 "Leopard."

First, some background information. B&N sell e-books here. For purposes of making my post more concrete, later on in this post I'm going to buy and decrypt the e-book version of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is the first of (currently) three books in the author's Millennium Trilogy Series. The books in Larsson's series are among the most popular e-books around, and presently you cannot buy them in Apple's iBookstore. So one of the things I'll be doing in this post is showing how to use ignoble to decrypt that B&N e-book so that it can be imported into an iBooks library.

What is iBooks? It's the main e-book reader app for Apple's new iPad, and it also works on iPhones and iPods that run the new iOS 4.0 operating software. Using iBooks, you can buy e-books at the iBookstore, part of Apple's familiar iTunes Store. However, Apple has failed to line up iBookstore support from the largest publishing concern, Random House. Hence a huge number of e-book titles are missing from the iBookstore!

That's presumably why Larsson's books are absent. Their absence is not intolerable for those who are OK with, using their iDevice, switching between iBooks and the B&N eReader app, available for free at the iTunes Store. But then they have to remember which books are in which apps — not fun! In this post I'll show how to move your B&N downloads into iTunes and hence into iBooks.

Here's what you have to do to get and use ignoble:

• Get a Python interpreter

For the Mac platform, you do not need to download Python at all, as Python 2.5 (which works fine for purposes of ignoble) can be installed from the "Leopard" install DVD.

Even though Python 2.5 is part of the Mac OS X software package, in order to use it you do need to make sure the optionally installed Apple Developer package is present on your Mac. If you already, at the outermost root level of your Mac's folder hierarchy, have a folder called Developer, you're fine. If not, create it by inserting your OS X 10.5 Install DVD and navigating to and then double-clicking Mac OS X Install DVD:Optional Installs:Xcode Tools:Xcode Tools.mpkg. You will be led by the installer program which opens through the necessary steps to install the Developer Tools package.

• Get PyCrypto, the Python cryptography toolkit

Go here and click on the "Download" button for PyCrypto 2.0.1. The pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz file you'll receive will most likely land right on your Desktop (depending on how you have your browser configured for downloads; if it doesn't download right to the Desktop, you can just move it there). Upon being double-clicked, the pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz file expands into a pycrypto-2.0.1 folder, also on the Desktop. You can move this folder wherever you like, or leave it right on the Desktop.

Next, click here to download PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer.app.zip, which, when unzipped — which will probably happen for you automatically — expands into an AppleScript app called PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer. Double-click PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer to run the installer itself. It will ask you to navigate to and "Choose" your pycrypto-2.0.1 folder, the one you created in the preceding paragraph of these instructions. Once you have clicked "Choose," PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer will open a window in the Mac's Terminal application and execute some Unix commands in it.

The first time you use the PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer, the Unix commands will produce a large amount of output in the Terminal window, due to the fact that the PyCrypto software is, for the first time on your computer, undergoing a full "build." Any subsequent times you use PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer, an "install" without a preliminary "build" will be done, and you will see less output in the Terminal window. In either case, the final line of the Terminal-window output should say Writing /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info.

At this point you can quit Terminal. If you look in Finder — starting at the root-level directory, not at the Home folder for your user account — and navigate to /Library/Python/2.5/, you should find a site-packages folder. In it there should now be a Crypto folder and a pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info file.

• Get the any-platform key-generation script, ignoblekeygen

ignoblekeygen is a Python script that will generate, and save to a file, a Barnes & Noble EPUB user key derived from your name and credit card number.

Before you download this script, create a folder on your Desktop called ignoble. In Finder, click on the Desktop and type Command-Shift-N. A new folder appears with the name untitled folder highlighted for editing. Type ignoble to replace that generic name, and hit Return.

Open the Safari web browser and type Command-, (Command-comma). In the Preferences window that opens, click on General at top left. In the Save downloaded files: popup, choose Other... . In the File Open dialog which appears, navigate to and select the ignoble folder you just created. Click on the red close button at the upper left of the Preferences window.

Now, go here to download the ignoblekeygen script. This is a page at Pastie.org, and in the upper right corner is a Download link. Click on it. A downloaded file called pastie-753985.py will appear in your ignoble folder. (If Safari's Downloads window remains open at this point, click on the red close button at the upper left of the window to close it.)

Rename the pastie-753985.py file ignoblekeygen.py. To do that, double-click on the ignoble folder to open it in Finder, then click twice (but do not do the second click too fast, or it will cause a double-click) on the filename pastie-753985.py. The main part of the filename, pastie-753985, will be highlighted. Type ignoblekeygen in its place and hit Return. This will cause the name of the file to become ignoblekeygen.py.

Now right-click on the ignoblekeygen.py file. In the resulting popup menu, select Open With: Build Applet (default).

If you do not see that option in the popup menu, chances are you do not in fact have Python installed on your Mac. Go back to the first step of this post to see how to install it.

If you see multiple Build Applet choices, choose the one whose version number begins with 2.5.

When you select Build Applet, you may see a warning dialog, "ignoblekeygen.py" is a script application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it? Click Open.

After you have run Build Applet — which takes only a second, after which Build Applet disappears — an application file called ignoblekeygen appears in your ignoble folder.

• Run ignoblekeygen

Double-click the ignoblekeygen application file (not ignoblekeygen.py itself). You will see:

Click on the ... button to the right of the Output file field. Type bnepubkey.b64 (or use any other filename you prefer, but make sure you use the .b64 extension) into the Save As: field of the window that appears, then navigate to your ignoble folder and click Save. The Output file field will now contain a fully qualified path name to the key file that is about to be created in your ignoble folder.

Now type your name and credit card number into the appropriate fields. The name should be the one on your account at Barnes & Noble.com. (If you don't yet have a B&N account, click here to set one up.) Likewise, the credit card number you enter should be the one you are using for your B&N account.

Forgotten those details? If you sign in at B&N and then click on the My Account link, you'll see, under PERSONAL INFORMATION just above your e-mail address, the name you specified for your B&N account. You need to make sure that you use that name exactly in Ignoble EPUB Keyfile Generator. For example, if it contains your middle initial on the B&N website, then be sure to use the middle initial for Ignoble EPUB Keyfile Generator.

Under PAYMENT SETTINGS on the website you'll see Default Payment and, beneath that, ****nnnn, with nnnn representing the last four digits of your credit card number. Type the name on your account into the Name field of Ignoble EPUB Keyfile Generator, and the full 16-digit number of your credit card (without spaces or dashes) into the CC# field. Then click on the Generate button to generate the key file (by whatever name you have chosen to give it).

After you have done that, click on the Quit button. You only have to run the Ignoble EPUB Keyfile Generator once ... unless you have multiple B&N accounts, that is, in which case you should generate one key file for each, and the filename you enter in the the Output file field should be different for each — for example, bob's B&N key.b64 and mary's B&N key.b64.

The Ignoble EPUB Keyfile Generator saves your name and credit card number in its output key file in encrypted form, so no one who inspects the contents of the key file will be able to steal the information.

• Get the any-platform book-decryption script, ignobleepub

ignobleepub is a Python script that will use the key file just generated to decrypt any encrypted B&N EPUB e-book.

Go here to download the ignobleepub script. This is a page at Pastie.org, and in the upper right corner is a Download link. Click on it. A downloaded file called pastie-751366.py will appear in your ignoble folder. (If Safari's Downloads window remains open at this point, click on the red close button at the upper left of the window to close it.)

Rename the pastie-751366.py file ignobleepub.py. To do that, double-click on the ignoble folder to open it in Finder, then click twice (but do not do the second click too fast, or it will cause a double-click) on the filename pastie-751366.py. The main part of the filename, pastie-751366, will be highlighted. Type ignobleepub in its place and hit Return. This will cause the name of the file to become ignobleepub.py.

Now right-click on the ignobleepub.py file. In the resulting popup menu, select Open With: Build Applet (default).

If you do not see that option in the popup menu, chances are you do not in fact have Python installed on your Mac. Go back to the first step of this post to see how to install it.

If you see multiple Build Applet choices, choose the one whose version number begins with 2.5.

When you select Build Applet, you may see a warning dialog, "ignobleepub.py" is a script application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it? Click Open.

After you have run Build Applet — which takes only a second, after which Build Applet disappears — an application file called ignobleepub appears in your ignoble folder.

• Buy and download a Barnes & Noble EPUB e-book

I'm going to buy Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which at the moment of this writing costs a reasonable $7.16 as a B&N e-book. To do that, I go to the webpage for that book and (having already signed in) click on the BUY NOW button. A dialog box appears in which I need to confirm my order. I click on the Confirm button. A "Thank You for Your Order" page appears, on which I click the Go to Your eBooks Library link.

On my My eBooks Library page there now appears:

I click on the . button. That causes Safari to download the file 9780307272119_Stie_TheGirl.epub into my ignoble folder. (Close the Safari Downloads window manually at this point if you desire.)

The filename extension, .epub, indicates that this file is indeed an EPUB. B&N used to sell e-books with a .pdb filename extension. That outdated so-called "eReader format" does not work with ignoble. It cannot easily be converted for use with iBooks.

Tip: If you have e-books that you downloaded some time ago from B&N, go to your e-books library and re-download the books. Click here, then sign in, then click on the button next to each e-book you want to re-download in turn. The newly downloaded copy of each book will very likely have an .epub extension and will therefore work with ignoble. If you like, you can trash the old .pdb versions. Likewise, if you are using a Nook or any mobile device (such as an iPhone) with the B&N eReader app, you can and probably should re-download your legacy .pdb e-books that are already on that device, so that you will have up-to-date .epub versions on the device instead.

• Decrypt your e-book

To convert 9780307272119_Stie_TheGirl.epub, I just double-click on ignobleepub (not the original script, ignobleepub.py) in my ignoble folder, and I see:

Using the ... button next to the Key file field, I navigate to and select the bnepubkey.b64 key file I generated earlier, using ignoblekeygen.

Using the ... button next to the Input file field, I navigate to and open 9780307272119_Stie_TheGirl.epub from my ignoble folder.

Using the ... button next to the Output file field, I navigate to my ignoble folder and enter Girl Decrypted.epub as the output filename. It does not really matter what output filename I use ... but I must be sure to specify the .epub filename extension.

To see what the full contents of the three fields are, I drag the resize corner at lower right of the window rightward, to see:

Now I click the Decrypt button and quickly see:

Unless I want to buy and decrypt another e-book, I click Quit to exit the ignobleepub application. At any future time I can buy more B&N e-books, download them, and use ignobleepub all over again to decrypt them. I do not have to run ignoblekeygen again, unless of course I have misplaced my bnepubkey.b64 file.

At this point, I have a file called Girl Decrypted.epub that is no longer encrypted, so iBooks can use it. I now have to ...

• Import the Decrypted E-Book into iTunes

I simply drag the Girl Decrypted.epub file onto the LIBRARY area at the top left of my main iTunes window (click image to enlarge it):

This causes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to be imported into the Books area of iTunes (click image to enlarge it):

Behind the scenes, iTunes has copied the e-book into a /Books/StiegLarsson/ folder it creates in the folder structure of my iTunes library (click image to enlarge it):

The filename is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.epub. iTunes has figured out what the actual title of the book is, along with the author's name!

This all happens in part because I have used the following iTunes Advanced Preferences (click image to enlarge it):

You may need to type Command-, (Command-comma) while in iTunes, click on the Advanced icon at top right, and click on the check marks for Keep iTunes Media folder organized and Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library, if you haven't already done so.

Notice that after I imported my e-book into iTunes, its cover image showed up automatically in Cover Flow view. That doesn't always happen. If you end up with a missing cover image, you can ...

• Manually Give the E-Book a Cover Image

First, go back to the B&N page from which you purchased your e-book. In my case, it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Now, click on the cover image you see there, bringing up a new window with a larger version of the cover image.

Right click on the larger cover image and choose Copy Image from the pop-up menu that appears.

Now, switch to iTunes and, with the new e-book selected in the Books portion of the Library (here, my e-book already shows its cover image, but never mind )...

... type Command-I to bring up its Get Info window. Then click on the Artwork tab, to see:

Now, click in the empty artwork box — it's empty even though my cover image was already visible in my main iTunes window — and type Command-V to paste into it the cover artwork that presently is residing on the Clipboard, in order to see:

Click OK to dismiss the iTunes Get Info window. A few seconds later, the new cover artwork appears in the main Tunes window (replacing the cover image, if any, that was already visible there).

Now you're ready to ...

• Sync your iDevice to iTunes

Your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch will generally be synced to iTunes automatically, each time you connect it to your Mac. Syncing books requires iTunes version 9.2 or later. But syncing doesn't necessarily include e-books, unless you (click image to enlarge it) ...

... have Sync Books checkmarked in the iDevice's Books tab, as I do here. I've likewise checked Selected books rather than All books, so only the e-books that I've put individual checkmarks by are going to get synced to my iDevice. Notice The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is shown at lower left of the Books pane, and it does have a checkmark by it. So when I click on the Sync button, at lower right of the window, I expect it (and all other checkmarked books) to be synced to my iDevice.

And that is exactly what happens in iBooks on my iPhone:

Here's my e-book actually being read in iBooks:

You can read more about iBooks, the free app from Apple that runs on iOS 4.0 iDevices — iPad, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch — in my iBooks Cook! post.

The iBooks app itself can be downloaded here.

Apple offers this iBooks: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to fill you in on the basic capabilities of iBooks.

If you read that FAQ, notice that there is no mention of any ability to read iBooks e-books right on your Mac, in iTunes or in any other app, even though the e-books reside within the iTunes library. For B&N books that you have decrypted according to the procedure herein given, you can just open them in the B&N eReader app for your Mac, available here.

Unfortunately, I know of no way to read, on your Mac, e-books (other than those that are not DRM-encrypted) from the iBookstore.

• What about Windows?

Windows users can also use ignoble, but installing Python and PyCrypto requires a different strategy.

Python:

If you use Windows you can currently get Python version 2.6, which you can download and install in Windows by going to the Python download page and then clicking on (as of this writing) the hotlink to Python 2.6.4 Windows installer. (There is also a version 3.1, but I can't guarantee it will work with this procedure.) You'll download a file called python-2.6.4.msi which you'll proceed to double-click, and then you'll follow the installer's on-screen prompts that allow you to install the Python 2.6 package in a directory the installer creates,C:\Python26. The actual app within that folder is called python.

PyCrypto:

Windows users can obtain PyCrypto here (on that page, click on the link to pycrypto-2.0.1.win32-py2.6.exe). After downloading the .exe file, double-click on it to run the Setup Wizard. As long as you have already downloaded and installed Python as detailed above, the Wizard (after you click "Next >" on the introductory panel) will indicate Python 2.6 has been duly found in the Windows Registry, in C:\Python26\. The Wizard will accordingly use the subfolder C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\ as its installation directory. After you click on "Next >" once more, you will see a "Ready to install" panel. Click "Next >" yet again to actually perform the installation. Then click "Finish" to exit the Wizard. You should now be able to locate a Crypto folder and also a pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.6.egg-info file in C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\.

Notice that Windows users are going to be using Python version 2.6, not 2.5 as on a Mac. As far as I know, this is not a problem.

There will also be different OS-dependent mechanics involved with downloading, installing, and using ignoblekeygen and ignobleepub. I'm not going to go into detail on all of those mechanics, but I will give some hints.

After downloading the two Python scripts, you need to arrange for them to have the filenames ignoblekeygen.pyw and ignobleepub.pyw, respectively. Notice that the filename extensions in each case are .pyw, with a "w" at the end. The "w" stands for "Windows." It allows you to do the following ...

When you want to run, say, ignoblekeygen, you right-click on ignoblekeygen.pyw and select Open With: python to designate the python.exe app (which in turn is "hosted" by the cmd.exe interface, whose window, though empty, appears behind that of the Python script's user interface). Or, if you instead select Open With: Choose Program ... , you can check "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file," and then select python and click "OK." From then on, you will be able to double-click any Python script file whose filename extension is .pyw, and it will automatically open in python.exe.

• What about Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"?

I myself have yet to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6, so I don't have hands-on experience with "Snow Leopard." You will have to take what I say with a grain of salt ...

Based on comments that users have made to my iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks post, which involves using similar Python scripts from I♥CABBAGES to decrypt e-books that have Adobe DRM, it is my understanding that the instructions I gave above basically work on Snow Leopard, except ...

... some Snow Leopard users have had trouble with installing PyCrypto, the Python Cryptography Toolkit. The basic problem has to do with Snow Leopard's use of two Python versions. Version 2.5 is the one that you need to use to run the two Python scripts, ignoblekeygen and ignobleepub, that my instructions call for.

Some users of Snow Leopard have been finding that the PyCrypto installer is putting PyCrypto in

/Library/Frameworks/Python.frameworks/versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

That is the wrong place! The right place for it is

/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/

Solution: after installing PyCrypto as per the procedure above, simply copy all of the contents of the

/Library/Frameworks/Python.frameworks/versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

folder to

/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/

In Finder, you can do this by highlighting all of the items contained in the Python 2.6 /site-packages/ folder and dragging them with the option key held down to the Python 2.5 /site-packages/ folder. (Be aware that you may have to create the latter folder manually in the /Library/Python/2.5/ folder.) This option-drag procedure makes a copy in the destination /site-packages/ folder of all of the highlighted items.

Among the items that need to be highlighted and copied in this way are a folder called Crypto, along with all of its contents, and a file called pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info. You should check to make sure that these items and (in the case of the Crypto folder) their contained items get properly copied. If the latter file is named pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.6.egg-info, you should change the name to pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info manually.

Once you have manually copied the PyCrypto installation folder/files to where they need to be, I believe the remaining steps in the procedure above should work.

Well, that's about it for now. Happy iBooking, everyone!

Breaking Adobe DRM — Tips, Tricks, Workarounds

2010-07-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

In iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks I gave instructions on how to move Adobe e-books, which are normally DRM-encrypted, to an iPhone for reading in an "open" e-book format. Digital rights management: it's "copy protection" that locks an e-book into a particular handheld reading device or a particular piece of software on a Windows PC or a Mac OS X computer. Many people who have paid for an e-book prefer to read it outside its prescribed environment. Hence, posts like this one.

For example, those who have paid for an e-book encrypted with Adobe's DRM scheme may want to read it on a iPhone, and iPad, or an iPod Touch. That can't happen unless the DRM encryption is removed.

Caution: Removing DRM encryption is illegal! You might think that, as long as you do not share the decrypted e-book with unauthorized users, it should be legally permissible to de-DRM a legally owned copy of an e-book.

Alas, it is not. In the United States, according to Wikipedia, per the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 " ... circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself" is illegal. DRM ("digital rights management") amounts to "access control": who may gain access to what copyrighted stuff, and when and how. DRM is also copy protection. DRM does both.

So when we strip DRM in order to move an e-book to an iPhone, we are "circumventing an access control."

Actually, this and other blog posts of mine are likewise in violation of DMCA, in that they tell people how to strip DRM and provide links to software that does that. I guess I'll be seeing you all in the old proverbial cellblock someday ...

Anyway ... taken from the long series of comments people have left below that original post, here are some tips, tricks, and workarounds that may help those who run into trouble in removing DRM encryption from Adobe e-books.

The Unzip/Rezip Trick

Some users of the ineptepub Python script see ...

Error: problem decrypting session key

... when they shouldn't. This error message is a general one that basically means ineptepub couldn't decrypt the e-book, for any of a variety of reasons. One possible reason is that the internal format of the e-book is faulty.

Some ineptepub users get a more-specific message like:

Error: File name in directory "OEBPS/BookTitle_chap-nn ... "

This error is typically caused by the same problem with the e-book and has the same solution, and it likewise means that ineptepub has been unable to decrypt the e-book.

What is the underlying cause? The internal format of an Adobe e-book is the same as that of any standard EPUB: it's a ZIP file. (See this Wikipedia article for more on the "open" EPUB format.) The various folders and files that make up any EPUB e-book, including any EPUB e-book that uses Adobe DRM, will have been compressed into a ZIP format archive. (The Wikipedia article says that the "OEBPS Container Format (OCF) 1.0," defines the standard for how the e-book's contents, which are a set of folders that contain a bunch of files, are put in a single "container" file. The OCF container file "collects all files as a ZIP archive.")

Whenever the e-book is read, it first has to be expanded from its ZIP form. Normally, this is done by the reader app. ineptepub in fact tries to do the same thing, and when the internal format is not as expected, an error results.

This happens a lot on Adobe e-books downloaded by Adobe Reader on a Mac. It doesn't seem to affect Adobe e-books downloaded by Adobe Reader on a Windows PC.

A workaround that sometimes helps is to unzip the original Adobe e-book, rezip it again while using the correct internal format, and then use ineptepub with the rezipped copy as its input file.

That can be done in the Mac OS X environment in the following way. For purposes of this example, I'll assume that the name of the downloaded .epub file is The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub. Like most downloaded Adobe e-books, it is typically located in ~/Documents/Digital Editions/. (The first node, ~, refers to your username's Home directory. To open that directory in Finder, simply type Shift-Command-H.)

Here are the steps you will need to take after opening ~/Documents/Digital Editions/ in Finder.

Make a copy on the Desktop of The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub. (Working with a copy of the original file is a good idea because you don't want to take a chance on ruining the original.) The easiest way to copy the file to the Desktop is to drag it there from its original folder while holding down the Option key.
Change the filename extension on the copied version of The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub from .epub to .zip. To do that in Finder, click on the file itself as it sits on the Desktop, click on the name of the file to highlight it, double-click on the .epub extension, and use the keyboard to change that extension to .zip. Or, if the extension is not visible, select the file and type Command-I — or choose Get Info from Finder's File menu — and edit the extension as it appears in the Name & Extension text box in the Get Info window; you simply replace .epub with .zip in the text box. Then close the Get Info window.
If asked whether you really want to change .epub to .zip, select "Use .zip".
You should now have a file on your Desktop called The_Poisonwood_Bible.zip. It is exactly the same file as The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub, but with a different filename extension.
Double click The_Poisonwood_Bible.zip on the Desktop, so that Archive Utility on your Mac unzips it into a new folder, also on your Desktop. (If double clicking the .zip file doesn't start Archive Utility, you may have to right-click on the .zip file and, from the pop-up menu, choose Open With: Archive Utility. Or, if that option doesn't seem to be available in the pop-up menu, you can manually open Archive Utility from /System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app and choose Expand Library from the Archive Utility's File menu, then navigate to and select The_Poisonwood_Bible.zip on the Desktop in the standard file open dialog.)
You should now have a new folder on your Desktop called The_Poisonwood_Bible. (Check that it contains a file called mimetype and two folders, META-INF and OEBPS. However, the contents of this folder are not really of interest to you.)
Trash the The_Poisonwood_Bible.zip file on the Desktop, as you do not need the copy you made of your original e-book file any more.
Download and unzip ePub Zip 1.0.2.app.zip, if you don't already have it. Double click it to expand it to ePub Zip 1.0.2 on the Desktop. (See above for what to do if double-clicking does not automatically expand a ZIP file in Archive Utility.)
Drag the icon for the new The_Poisonwood_Bible folder to ePub Zip 1.0.2 and drop it onto the ePub Zip 1.0.2 icon. (Note: You must drag and drop your The_Poisonwood_Bible folder and not your The_Poisonwood_Bible.zip file, which should now be in the Trash anyway.) This drag-and-drop operation causes an AppleScript to run in the background. That AppleScript's function is to rezip your e-book the right way!
You should at this point see a dialog box, "The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub created successfully," and a The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub file should magically show up on your Desktop. This The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub file is your correctly rezipped e-book.
Use the new The_Poisonwood_Bible.epub file as the input file to the ineptepub script.

If ineptepub still doesn't work, the problem lies elsewhere than with the internal ZIP format of the e-book.

If you use Windows, I imagine something like WinZip might offer the ability to do the same unzip/rezip trick. Sorry I can't give you detailed instructions about that. However, as I said earlier, this problem doesn't seem to affect Windows users very often, if at all.

Installing PyCrypto on Snow Leopard

The instructions for Mac OS X users that I gave in iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks are basically for users of the 10.5.x (" Leopard") version of that operating system. Many users are now on the 10.6.x ("Snow Leopard") version. Though my procedure basically works with Snow Leopard, some Snow Leopard users have had trouble with installing PyCrypto, the Python Cryptography Toolkit, in Step 3 of my original procedure.

The basic problem has to do with Snow Leopard's use of two Python versions. Version 2.5 is the one that you need to use to run the two Python scripts, ineptkey and ineptepub, that my instructions call for. ineptkey is the script that generates the adeptkey.der ADEPT key file, and as such does not require PyCrypto, but ineptepub, which is the script that actually decrypts the e-book, does need PyCrypto. PyCrypto is basically a set of library files Python needs to access when it runs ineptepub. This set of library files needs to be installed in the right place in your Mac's folder hierarchy. (When I refer generically to just plain ineptepub herein, I mean specifically the ineptepub_v2 applet that is created in Step 6 of my original instructions.)

Some users of Snow Leopard are finding that the PyCrypto installer is putting PyCrypto in

/Library/Frameworks/Python.frameworks/versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

That is the wrong place! The right place for it is

/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/

Solution: after installing PyCrypto in Step 3 of the original procedure, simply copy all of the contents of the

/Library/Frameworks/Python.frameworks/versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

folder to

/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/

In Finder, you can do this by highlighting all of the items contained in the Python 2.6 /site-packages/ folder and dragging them with the option key held down to the Python 2.5 /site-packages/ folder. (Be aware that you may have to create the latter folder manually in the /Library/Python/2.5/ folder.) This option-drag procedure makes a copy in the destination /site-packages/ folder of all of the highlighted items.

Among the items that need to be copied in this way are a folder called Crypto, along with all its contents, and a file called pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info. You should check to make sure that these items and (in the case of the Crypto folder) their contained items get properly copied. If the latter file is named pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.6.egg-info, change the name to pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info manually.

At that point, you will hopefully be able to proceed with Steps 4-7 of the original procedure.

This applies to a Mac, by the way, and does not apply to Windows computers.

Which Build Applet Version To Use?

Some Mac users have gotten to Step 6 and had trouble where I tell them to right-click the ineptepub_v2.py script file and choose Open With: Build Applet. This is intended to cause an application, Build Applet, that is included with Python on a Mac, to change the text file ineptepub_v2.py into an "applet" — a double-clickable application — called ineptepub_v2.

Accordingly, right-clicking on ineptepub_v2.py brings up a menu that has an Open With: item, and one of the sub-items of that item should be just plain Build Applet.

But some users double-click on the ineptepub_v2.py script file and see, for example, Open With: Build Applet 2.6.0 and Open With: Build Applet: 2.5.4!

How you handle this problem depends on whether you are on Snow Leopard or Leopard.

(1) If you are on Snow Leopard, just choose Open With: Build Applet: 2.5.n — i.e., choose the version of Build Applet that has 2.5 in it.

(2) If you are on Leopard, which natively supports only Python 2.5, you probably have at some point tried to install some version of Python 2.6. The two versions of Python, 2.5 and 2.6, are different enough that ineptkey and ineptepub won't work properly with Python 2.6 on a Mac, and yet it may be the case that the default version of Python that your Mac is trying to use is in fact 2.6.

Since Mac OS X 10.5.n normally doesn't come with any version of Python other than 2.5, your having at some point installed (or tried to install) 2.6 may gum up the works.

I recommend that you do a clean install of Mac OS X 10.5.n, using the original install DVD, and also re-installed the Xcode Developer tools, which is a package that contains Python 2.5, at the same time. This will eliminate any vestiges of whatever Python 2.6 installation currently inhabits your Mac. (See the next topic for how to do a clean install.)

On the other hand, you may feel you have some reason not to do a clean Mac OS X 10.5 install. If so, your best bet may just be to choose Open With: Build Applet: 2.5.n, just as if you were on Snow Leopard. The result may be a usable ineptepub_v2 applet. If so, fine. If not, a clean install may be your only recourse.

Doing a Clean Install of Mac OS X 10.5.n

I recommend doing a clean install of Mac OS X 10.5.n, if you are on Leopard and not Snow Leopard and you are having trouble with getting the procedure to work that I laid out in my original post, iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks. This of course applies to Mac users only, not users of Windows PCs.

Mac OS X 10.5.n is the version that I currently use on my Mac, and the instructions in my original post apply mainly to it. As far as I know, they also work for Snow Leopard users, except for the problem mentioned earlier in which PyCrypto gets installed into the wrong folder. Snow Leopard users who run into other problems with my procedure may want to consider doing their own clean install of Mac OS X 10.6.n, but I cannot advise them about that.

To do a clean install of Mac OS X 10.5.n:

Click on this link to an excerpt from Mac OS X: Missing Manual — Leopard, by David Pogue. Scroll about halfway down the page to the The Clean Install ("Archive and Install") section. Follow the instructions there.

To install the Xcode Developer tools:

Using your OS X 10.5.n Install DVD, navigate to and then double-click Mac OS X Install DVD:Optional Installs:Xcode Tools:Xcode Tools.mpkg on that DVD. You will be led, by the installer program which opens, through the necessary steps to install the Developer Tools package.

(See "Complete Steps to Perform a Clean OS X Reinstall on Your MacBook Air" for a how-to on doing a clean install on a Mac that lacks a DVD drive.)

Once you have done the clean install, including the Xcode Developer tools, go back and right-click the ineptepub_v2.py script file and choose Open With: Build Applet, which now should be the only Build Applet choice available. The result should be a usable ineptepub_v2 applet.

(2) If you are on Snow Leopard, then there probably should be two versions of Build Applet on your Mac, just as there are two versions of Python! In this case, just choose Open With: Build Applet: 2.5.n. Again, the result should be a usable ineptepub_v2 applet.

Reading Your Adobe E-Books on an iPad in iBooks

My original post was about reading your Adobe e-books on an iPhone in a reader app like Stanza, but you can now read them on an iPad (or an iPhone or iPod Touch) using Apple's free iBooks app.

If the free iBooks app from Apple works the same on an iPad as it does on my iPhone — and I believe it does, except I'm not sure to what extent you'll be able to take advantage of the larger screen or the standard assortment of fonts with the "open" EPUB books you derive from Adobe DRM'ed e-books — you're definitely in luck.

If you follow the instructions in my original iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks post (and, if need be, the problem-solving workarounds detailed herein) then for each Adobe e-book you decrypt, you will wind up with an open EPUB e-book file that is no longer locked into the Adobe Reader world.

Add that file (it will have an .epub filename extension, whether or not that extension is visible in Finder) to your iTunes library. On a Mac, you can just drag the file's Finder icon to the iTunes icon in the Dock or to the Books icon on the left side of the main iTunes window. On Windows, you can use, I believe, similar shortcuts.

Once the file shows up in iTunes' Books section, you can, in iTunes, just sync your iDevice — your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, as long as that iDevice is running iOS 4.0, Apple's latest operating system for mobiles — and then you can read the book in the iBooks app on the iDevice!

I find that the Adobe-derived open EPUBs I have tried so far in iBooks work exactly the same as Apple-sanctioned e-books from the iBookstore.

Fixing Missing Cover Artwork on open EPUBs in iBooks

But I have found that some but not all of the e-books I have treated in the way just described do not show up as having a pretty cover, either in iTunes or in the iBooks app on the iDevice. Some have no cover at all. Here's how to fix that:

In your web browser, bring up Google and click on Google's Images tab at the upper left of the browser window. In the Google search box enter the name of your e-book book and, to make sure Google knows exactly what you're looking for, the author's name, both in quotation marks. For example:

"an echo in the bone" "diana gabaldon"

Then, click on Search Images. Most of the results you see will be images of the actual book's cover!

Click on any thumbnail image you like — the larger the dimensions in pixels of the actual image, the better. At the top of the page that comes up, click on See full size image. Then left-click on the image that comes up and select Copy Image. (This works on a Mac using Safari. If you are on Windows, or if you are using another browser, you may have to make adjustments.)

You now have a copy of the image on your Clipboard. In iTunes, click on Books on the left side of the main window, then select the book the cover goes with and choose the Get Info menu item. (Mac shortcut: Command-I.) Click on the Artwork tab, then click in the (typically empty) artwork box. Paste the Clipboard's contents there, and click OK.

In a few seconds you will see the new cover artwork show up in the main iTunes window. Now sync your iDevice in iTunes. Once you do that, the new cover artwork will show up on your iBooks library bookshelf!

iBooks Cook!

2010-07-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Once, alone atop the e-books pyramid, was Amazon's Kindle. Along came Barnes & Noble's Nook, trying to unseat it. Now there's Apple's iBooks.

iBooks is, like Kindle and Nook, a way to read e-books on a handheld device. But whereas Kindle e-books prefer Amazon's dedicated Kindle reader and Nook e-books prefer B&N's dedicated Nook handheld, Apple's iBooks can be read on any of several Apple iDevices: on the brand new iPad and on any iPhone or iPod Touch that employs Apple's latest-and-greatest mobile operating system, iOS 4.0.

iBooks App Icon

iBooks is an app that runs on those devices; it's not an integral feature. If you buy an iPad or iPhone 3GS, you don't have to get, or use, the free iBooks app. But reading e-books is the main reason you'd buy a Kindle or Nook, so the software that does that is bundled with the device.

iBooks is also an online store, the iBookstore ... part of Apple's iTunes Store:

iBooks Store in iTunes

The iBooks app is designed to make it easy for you to buy e-books from the iBookstore. You do it right in the iBooks app. Purchases go on the same credit card or PayPal account you use to buy music from the iTunes Store. Then they instantly download wirelessly to your iDevice. Later, when you sync your iDevice to iTunes on your computer, your iBooks purchases get copied to it, too.

That's also what happens with music downloads ... with one crucial difference. If you download an album but later delete it from your iTunes library and from your various iDevices, you can't get it back without buying it again. But with iBooks, you can trash all your personal copies of a book and later on go back to the iBookstore and download the same book again, for free, from the Purchases section.

That one's purchases stick around forever at the iBookstore allows me to do what I intend to do soon. I am now using iBooks on my iPhone while accumulating enough cash ($499 and up) for an iPad. When I get the iPad, I can just sync to it the books I currently have in iTunes ... but if there are books I have purchased but have removed from iTunes, I can retrieve them, at no further cost, from the iBookstore.

Using iBooks on the iPhone

Reading books in iBooks on my iPhone is just a wee bit more pleasant than using any of the other e-book apps I've tried, though many of the details are the same. For instance, to turn a page in iBooks you can either tap on the right side of the screen or swipe your finger from right to left. Some other apps make you choose between these two options, but iBooks recognizes both.

The turning of a page in iBooks actually looks super-realistic:

The few settings you can customize in iBooks ... there aren't many ... allow you to to choose a display font and size, alter the page brightness, and flip between a white page background and a sepia one. (I like the sepia one.) These settings are available as tiny icons superimposed at the top of every page:

You can dismiss the icons by tapping page-center, and then bring them back the same way. When the settings icons are visible, so is a button that exits you back to your Library. The Library's graphic metaphor is a bookshelf:

Another settings button brings up the table of contents of your current book:

Yet another icon brings up a standard search-for-text function that locates, in the current book, whatever text you type in, while another icon bookmarks the current page:

iBooks in Landscape Mode

The red symbol is the bookmark itself; it obscures the smaller icon you tap to create the bookmark. If you tap the red bookmark symbol again, the bookmark is removed from the current page.

When the superimposed icons are visible, there's a handy display at page-bottom that tells you numerically and graphically how far through the book your current position is, and a slider control which can be dragged to the right or left to move to a different page. "159 pages left" at lower right refers to how many pages are left in the current chapter. (Of course, these "pages" are really just screenfuls of text, with "page" capacity depending on font size. If you change the font size, the "page" numbering updates to reflect the change.)

Even when the superimposed icons are invisible, there remains at page-bottom a figure like "1468 of 2810": the number of "pages" you are into the book.

One advantage iBooks has over many other e-book readers is the ability to display color graphics:

iBooks lets you annotate text:

iBooks lets you highlight text in various colors:

Your bookmarks, annotations, and highlighted text show up in your book's table of contents for easy retrieval:

The iBookstore

You buy iBooks at the iBookstore — part of the familiar iTunes Store. The iBookstore give you access to "Featured" books ...

... to New York Times bestsellers ...

... to Classics, which are not necessarily free of charge ...

... and to all of the free-of-charge books from Project Gutenberg.

You can also search the iBookstore for specific titles and authors you are interested in. Here is one of my own search results:

(Notice that I'd already downloaded the book when I took the screenshot.)

iBooks Pricing and the New "Agency" Model

If you look back at the screenshot for James Patterson and Maxine Paetro's Private, at the iBookstore it costs $12.99! Here I come to one of the biggest complaints about iBooks: we lovers of e-books can no longer expect to pay the erstwhile norm, $9.99, for bestsellers. The reason can be read in "Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?" by Ken Auletta, from the April 26, 2010, issue of The New Yorker.

Basically, $9.99 was the price that Amazon chose to charge for bestsellers, back when the Kindle was new. Amazon was taking a sizable loss on each e-book sold for that price, since it had paid the book's publisher much more than that $9.99. This was fine with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, who was mainly interested in selling lots of Kindles and books to read on them, thereby establishing Amazon's e-book market supremacy.

Publishers hated it. Even if Amazon was buying e-books from them at acceptable prices, the publishers feared thatthe e-book market, as it grew, would erode their traditional market for printed books.

When Apple's Steve Jobs was lining up publishers for his new iBooks operation, five of the six biggest publishing houses signed on: Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan Publishers, and Hachette Book Group USA. But the biggest of all, Random House, wouldn't.

The problem? Random House wasn't thrilled with the new "agency model," according to the terms of which the others of the Big Six were agreeing to furnish e-books to Apple (their bookselling "agent") for a set to-the-public selling price: in the case of Patterson and Paetro's Private and of many other hot sellers, $12.99. Of that price, Apple would keep 30 percent, and the rest would go to the publisher. Out of the publisher's take would come authors' royalties and all usual costs of book publishing.

Random House chairman/CEO Markus Dohle feared the agency model's spread to Amazon and elsewhere. And well he should have ... according to the terms of the model, the publisher receives less money per e-book sold than with the old Amazon model! With 30 percent of $12.99, or $3.90, staying with Apple, the publisher is left with $9.09 — less than the erstwhile Amazon price of $9.99 for a bestseller, which in turn was significantly less than Amazon had originally been paying the publisher for the e-book.

Dohle was prescient. The Patterson-Paetro book is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for ... $12.99! A notation below the price says, "This price was set by the publisher."

Hello, agency model!

Random House and Apple are apparently still in negotiations, but for now you won't be able to buy (for example) Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol at the iBookstore. Brown is published by Doubleday, which is owned by Random House.

It's clear to me that this situation cannot long stand. If Steve Jobs cannot get Markus Dohle on board — on whatever terms — his iBooks experiment will flop.

Decrypting Adobe Digital Editions 1.7.2 eBooks on Windows

2010-02-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Readers,

My original post, which is preserved below for historical purposes but has its text struck through, was wrong in certain important details and quickly outdated in others, for which I humbly apologize. It was an attempt to help you cope with the release of the 1.7.2 update to Adobe Digital Editions. ADE 1.7.2 changed the way a crucial decryption key is stored when the ADE activation takes place — when, that is, you "authorize" your computer to use your Adobe ID and password.

Here is the latest (hopefully correct) information, which is fleshed out in iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks:

There is now (see Step 4 in iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks) a new version (v.4.3) of the ineptkey Python script for Windows users, the purpose of which is to derive a key to decrypt Adobe eBooks, and also a brand new ineptkeymac Python script (v.1) for Mac users, the purpose of which is the same.

Either the ineptkey v.4.3 Python script for Windows users or the new ineptkeymac v.1 script for Mac users will produce an adeptkey.der output file that can be input to version 2 of the ineptepub script. v.2 has been the "standard" ineptepub version for a long time now, and it is again. The purpose of ineptepub is to use the key generated by either ineptkey or ineptkeymac to decrypt Adobe eBooks.

Windows or Mac users can alternatively use ineptepub_auto_version3.pyw (v.3 of ineptepub) or aineptepub.pyw (v.4.1 of ineptepub, which is different from v.4), both of which decrypt whole folders/directories of Adobe eBooks rather than just a single Adobe/EPUB file.

Version 4 of ineptepub does not work with ineptkey v.4.3, the latest ineptkey version, but only with ineptkey v.4.2, which is already obsolete ... as ineptepub v.4 is likewise already obsolete.

While ineptkey v.4.2 was current, it generated an adeptkey4.der (not adeptkey.der) file in a different internal format than adeptkey.der. That file was intended for ineptepub v.4. When ineptkey v.4.3 came out, I mistakenly told readers in my original post below to input its output file to ineptepub v.4, which led to "index out of range" errors.

Any adeptkey.der file that was generated prior to ADE version 1.7.2 is no longer usable with eBooks downloaded with ADE 1.7.2. Even though it's the right format for ineptepub v.2, it will produce a "problem decrypting session key" error when used with ADE 1.7.2-downloaded books. It will work only with books downloaded with ADE 1.7.1 or earlier.

Users that have an old adeptkey.der file that was generated while ADE 1.7.1 was active can, if they wish, hold onto it and use it to decrypt books that they downloaded before the ADE 1.7.2 update. Or they can re-download those books in ADE 1.7.2 and use a newly generated adeptkey.der file, from ineptkey v.4.3 or ineptkeymac v.1, to decrypt the newly downloaded books in any version of ineptepub other than v.4. I recommend the latter course, as it avoids having to keep track of which books were downloaded with which ADE versions.

Again, sorry for all the mix-ups,

Eric

* * *

The original post:

Adobe Digital Editions 1.7.2 tosses a monkey wrench into the procedure for decrypting Adobe eBooks that I described in iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks. Using that procedure as originally described can produce

~~Error: problem decrypting session key~~

~~instead of decrypting an eBook.~~

~~First I'll give the remedy, then I'll explain.~~

This post applies, by the way, to Windows platforms, not Macs. Although ADE 1.7.2 can cause similar problems for Mac users, I will publish a general solution for them in a later post. Neither of the two new Python scripts I am about to discuss works on a Mac.

The remedy for Windows users is to download and use ineptkey.pyw version 4.3 and ineptepub.pyw version 4 instead of earlier versions of the Python scripts ineptkey.pyw and ineptepub.pyw, respectively. To get the new versions, just click on the two links just given. Each will download a zipped version that, if your browser doesn't unzip them, must be unzipped manually to yield the files ineptkey_v43.pyw and ineptepub_v4.pyw.

Version 4.3 of ineptkey can cope with the changes made by ADE 1.7.2 with respect to what cryptographic encryption/decryption keys are stored in the Windows registry, and how they are stored. Working in tandem with ineptkey version 4.3 is the new ineptepub version 4. These two new Python scripts allow you to decrypt Adobe eBooks that you have downloaded using either ADE 1.7.1 (the older version) or ADE 1.7.2 (the current version).

If you followed the instructions in my earlier iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks post, you already have Python 2.6 installed in C:\Python26\python.exe. You need to open ineptkey_v43.pyw in that app. It will produce a file called adeptkey.der in the same folder as ineptkey_v43.pyw. (An adeptkey.der file from an earlier version of ineptkey will not work with the new version of ineptepub.)

adeptkey.der contains more than one candidate decryption key for ineptepub_v4.pyw to try, any time you open ineptepub_v4.pyw in C:\Python26\python.exe to decrypt a particular eBook. The new version of ineptepub figures out which candidate key works, and uses that one.

~~Keep in mind that you need to run ineptkey_v43.pyw2 just once, to generate adeptkey.der. You then run ineptepub_v4.pyw every time you want to decrypt a new eBook.~~

~~* * *~~

Now for a more detailed explanation: On or about Feb. 1, 2010, Adobe Digital Editions 1.7.2 replaced 1.7.1 as the version that new users received. At the same time existing 1.7.1 users started to get dialog boxes warning that they had 44 days to upgrade. If they clicked "Upgrade Now," then tried to use ineptkey.pyw and then ineptepub.pyw, they got

~~Error: problem decrypting session key~~

from the latter. (If they already had saved an adeptkey.der output file from ineptkey version 3, ineptepub version 2 still worked with that saved adeptkey.der file. In fact, you can continue to use that saved adeptkey.der file indefinitely with any version of ineptepub prior to version 4.)

Existing ADE users could, of course, delay upgrading to 1.7.2, but they had no way of knowing not to upgrade if they had not previously tucked away a copy of the adeptkey.der file. New users had no choice but to get ADE 1.7.2 right off. (You can tell what version of ADE you have by launching ADE and, assuming you do not get a dialog box telling you that you need to upgrade, going into Library View and choosing the About Adobe Digital Editions menu item. In the box that appears you will see a version number such as 1.7.2.xxxx.)

Adding to the confusion, there were many reasons why the "problem decrypting session key" error could crop up. For instance, if you generated adeptkey.der and then re-authorized ADE using a different Adobe ID, your new eBooks would not decrypt using the existing adeptkey.der. Instead, ineptepub would produce the same "problem decrypting session key" error. Figuring out what was causing the "problem decrypting session key" error when ADE 1.7.2 arrived was tough.

Thanks to the anonymous author of the new Python script versions, the problem has now been solved. The problem has to do with the fact that in the Windows registry, there is a bunch of ADE activation data stored for each authorization of ADE that is done. Prior to ADE 1.7.2, a crucial key, privateLicenseKey, was itself encrypted a certain way. Earlier versions of ineptkey simply decrypted it the same way and stored that single result in adeptkey.der.

As of 1.7.2, privateLicenseKey is encrypted a different way. The anonymous author of the new ineptkey script didn't know how to modify how it is decrypted, but he found another key in the registry, pkcs12, that could be used as privateLicenseKey had originally been used. So he simply passed both keys into the adeptkey.der file. The first key is correct for ADE 1.7.1, while the second works for ADE 1.7.2. The new ineptepub script can tell which one is working, and uses that one.

iPad & iBooks (Part I)

2010-01-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

The iPad is here ... almost!

January 27, 2010: It's unclear which speech people paid more attention to, President Obama's State of the Union address or Steve Jobs' State of Apple Gadgetry exposition. The occasion, for Jobs, was the unveiling of the long-anticipated Apple "tablet" computer, now officially dubbed the iPad.

Starting in April or May 2010, the entry-level iPad will go on sale for a price of $499 (breathtakingly low; predictions of $999 had been heard).

Among the iPad features that aren't carried over from the iPhone and iPod Touch is the exquisite iBooks app pictured above. Jobs intends to do for the eBook business what Apple did for the online music business: become the source of choice and make competitors (primarily the Amazon Kindle and Kindle DX, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and the various devices in the Sony Reader series) eat Apple's dust.

In fact, if Jobs' latest venture takes hold, we'll have to start calling them iBooks instead of eBooks!

The iPad outsizes most of its book-reading competition. At roughly 7 1/2 inches wide, there's enough space for a 768-by-1024-pixel color touchscreen with a diagonal measurement of 9.7 inches.

The $259 Kindle is 5.3 inches wide, with a 6-inch-diagonal screen.

Lacking a touchscreen, it devotes much of its overall size to a keyboard.

The $259 Barnes & Noble Nook (which I myself own) replaces the Kindle keyboard with a color touchscreen, but its non-touch E Ink reading screen is exactly identical in size and function to the Kindle's.

Sony's largest book reader, the $399.99 Reader Daily Edition, is 5 inches wide and has a close-to-full-height reading screen — again, non-touch.

Sony's $299.99 Reader Touch Edition sports a true (albeit non-color) touchscreen, but at a width of just 4.8 inches, the device is diminutive by comparison to the iPad.

The Kindle's big brother, the $489 Kindle DX, is 7.2 inches wide, offering a reading screen whose diagonal spans 9.7 inches, exactly as does the iPad's.

The Kindle DX is taller than the iPad to allow room for the physical keyboard. Its screen is non-color and non-touch.

The iPad puts its keyboard on the color touchscreen when one is needed.

To my mind, the Kindle DX, due to its generous size, is the book reader to which the iPad is most comparable. So, at $499 versus $489 for the Kindle DX, the iPad looks like it could become the book reader of choice for Apple enthusiasts and maybe the world at large.

Here again is the iPad with its elegant iBooks app:

One iPad advantage over its book-reading competition: you can rotate the iPad into landscape position to show two pages side by side. I can't find an image to prove that, but you'll see it very briefly here in Steve Jobs' introduction to the iPad as an iBook reader and to the new Apple iBooks store that will supply it with content:

You can watch the entire 1-hour-33-minute video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPad by visiting this web page.

I'll have more to say in Part II of this post.

First Impressions of the Nook: A Review

2010-01-18T05:12:00.000-08:00

I've been using my new Nook eBook reader from Barnes & Noble for about three weeks now. It's quite a change from the iPhone I've been using to read electronic books. I like it. But it has issues.

The Nook (B&N insists on a lowercase capital letter, but to me "nook" looks wrong as a proper noun) is the company's answer to Amazon's Kindle. It costs the same as the Kindle ($259) and incorporates the same black & white reading screen, a 6-diagonal-inch E Ink Vizplex display with 600x800-pixel resolution using 16 shades of gray. At 7.7 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches, the Nook is a tad smaller than the Kindle, except that it's a bit thicker (Kindle's thickness: 0.36 inches) and a smidgen heavier (11.2 ounces, to Kindle's 10.2 ounces)).

My Nook, in its attractive and functional $30 (faux?) leather cover from B&N — it comes with no protective gear included in the package, so I picked up the cover at my local B&N store — weighs almost exactly the same as my copy of the iPhone: The Missing Manual, a trade paperback which is quite a bit larger than the Nook. In heft, balance, and ease of manipulation the Nook is actually as agreeable, in my estimation, as all but the lightest, smallest print editions. Your mileage may vary.

The main fly in the Nook's ease-of-use ointment is that flipping through multiple pages is clumsy, owing to the slow-as-molasses E Ink reading screen — see below for more. The iPhone, with its LCD touchscreen doubling as a reading screen, flips through pages almost as easily as a printed book.

In the picture above, you can see the Nook's distinguishing characteristic, the colored swatch beneath its black & white reading screen. It's a color touchscreen not unlike the iPhone's, in the spot where the latest Kindle (seen at right) puts a tiny physical QWERTY keyboard. Most of the things you do to operate the Nook are done on the color touchscreen — including, when necessary, a tiny virtual QWERTY keyboard for typing in text.

In the Nook pictured above, the touchscreen is showing thumbnail covers of books in its library. This is the so-called "Gallery View":

In Gallery View, you can browse through the book covers by swiping your finger left or right on the touch strip, or you can tap a cover to center it and tap it once again to open the book.

When opened for the first time, a book's title page appears in the reading window. Subsequent opens of the book show you the page on which you left off reading, as in the image at left.

To turn pages, you press > to go forward, < to go back — these are physical, clickable buttons that are duplicated on either side of the reading screen.

The Nook takes around 1.5 seconds to bring each individual new page up on its reading screen. You watch the page form with a certain fascination, almost like seeing a photo dissolve into another photo, then turn from a negative to a positive.

If you want to advance, say, twenty pages in one fell swoop, you can push the > button twenty times in rapid succession ... and then wait as the intervening pages form briefly on the screen and then disappear. In responding to multiple > clicks, the Nook speeds things up somewhat: you can turn twenty pages in fifteen seconds. This seemingly reflects the 740 ms "typical image update time" cited here for a 4-bit, 16-gray-level E Ink display. It also suggests that the usual page-turn lag of roughly twice 740 ms includes something like an extra 740 ms for the Nook software to initiate a page-turn operation. Apparently, rapid re-clicks of the > button avoid the need to re-initiate the software operation for each successive page. One might conclude that the software designers did that on purpose, to speed things up ... because they realized that the way the software ordinarily works imposes a lot of overhead on the responsiveness of the Nook.

In and of itself, E Ink technology has two advantages over the LCD screen on the iPhone. One, E Ink draws very little power after a page has been formed and is still being displayed on the screen. So an E Ink device like a Kindle or a Nook has a far longer battery life: days, not hours. It doesn't have to be charged nearly as often.

Two, E Ink is very easy on the eyes. The background "paper" is a non-backlit light gray, against which the dark "print" stands out distinctly, but not too starkly. The iPhone uses a backlit LCD screen that can provide similar contrast only at the expense of inviting eyestrain.

Also, of course, the Nook's screen is a lot larger than the iPhone's. It's not big enough to hold an entire printed page when using a medium-sized font, but it does hold roughly a third to half as much text as a typical hardcover edition's page. The iPhone screen holds much less when it's displaying text of the same size.

The Nook lets you switch among either two or three fonts, depending on the book, and five type sizes. I use Amasis Medium — except for certain books where I have to choose Amasis Large in order to get print as big as Amasis Medium is in other books. If you choose Small or Very Small type, you get type that is, to my eyes, too hard to read.

I chose the Nook over the Kindle for the wow factor of its color touchscreen, I admit, but mainly because the Nook reads a lot of eBook formats the Kindle can't. First of all, everything in copy-protected EPUB, PDB, and PDF formats from Barnes & Noble, Fictionwise, eReader, and other sources will work. Only books from the first source qualify as natively belonging in the Nook's own "library," though, while books from all other sources need to be "side-loaded" onto the Nook: copied to it from a computer.

Side-loadable eBooks also include "open" EPUBs and PDFs that entirely lack DRM-encryption, as techies call copy protection; one source of open eBooks is Project Gutenberg. Moreover, you can side-load onto the Nook any and all EPUB and PDF eBooks that use the Adobe copy-protection scheme. These include eBooks from Adobe itself, the Sony Reader eBook Store, and many public libraries.

Edit: Adobe-DRM'ed PDF eBooks do seem to be readable on the Nook ... but when I tried borrowing an Adobe PDF version of Tess Gerritsen's The Keepsake from Maryland's Digital eLibrary Consortium, I found that I could not read it on my Nook. But when I bought the same eBook as an Adobe PDF from BooksOnBoard, it worked! I plan to investigate the problem further, but for now it looks as if Adobe-DRM'ed PDF eBooks that are borrowed from an online library may not be compatible with the Nook!

The Kindle, for its part, turns up its nose at B&N's proprietary eBooks and those from its Fictionwise and eReader subsidiaries. Nor can it read Adobe-DRM'ed eBooks, or even open EPUBs. However, the Nook does strike out when it comes to eBooks in Amazon's proprietary AMZ and Mobipocket formats, so the favor is returned.

Side-loading Nook content, by the way, is done by hooking the Nook to a computer, using the micro-USB to USB cable that comes with it.

That same cable is used to charge the Nook's battery. Battery charging can be done while the Nook is computer-connected, but charging goes faster if you plug the USB cable into a regular outlet via the included power adapter. Irritatingly, the Quick Start Guide and User Guide that come with the Nook insist that you fully charge your new Nook right away, prior to beginning to use it. It takes several hours and while, technically, you can begin Nooking as that is going on, the fact that your Nook is tethered to a power source sort of defeats the purpose.

Unfortunately, using the Nook's user interface can be like trying to do the cha-cha on stilts ... while wading in molasses!

Nowhere is this more evident than when you use the Nook to shop for books at the B&N online store. You bring up the Nook's "home" screen, seen in color in the above photo, by tapping the inverted "u" atop the touchscreen ... actually, a lowercase "n" for "nook." "Shop" is the middle button, which you tap to go to the Nook store. So far so good. But now you see a list of choices on the main screen — not the touchscreen — and your temptation is to want to tap whichever one you intend to select. No! You navigate among various options on the main screen by tapping up and down arrows on the touchscreen — each choice in turn becomes highlighted on the main screen — and you select any item you want by tapping a circle symbol next to the virtual arrows on the touchscreen.

However, if you want to page forward or back to the next or previous set of main-screen options, you use the physical < and > arrows on the Nook proper. Got that? Up and down are virtual buttons, left and right are physical buttons.

It gets worse. Each time you tap/press a virtual/physical button, you wait a second or two (actually, about 1.5 seconds) until a revised image forms on the main screen. Your cha-cha'ing stilts feel mired in molasses.

Add to that complaint the beef that the Nook's touchscreen does not respond smoothly to a swipe gesture. You need to swipe side to side to bring more book covers into view in Gallery View. You need to swipe vertically when there is a menu on the touchscreen that has more items than can fit on the screen. The latter sort of swipe is especially prone not to work smoothly.

You get used to these various beefs after a day or so, but the Nook's user interface is nowhere near as fast, smooth, or intuitive as the iPhone's. This is going to be one area in which the forthcoming Apple Tablet, which will be an iPhone on steroids, will eat Nooks (and presumably Kindles) for breakfast.

Full details of how to navigate the Nook user interface, by the way, are in the 159-page (!) Nook User Guide. You can glean the basic points from the 12-pp. Nook Tour.

Once you manage to zero in on a book you want to buy in the Shop, the rest of the buying process is easy enough to carry out, owing to the fact that you duly registered your out-of-the-box Nook the first time you fired it up, right?

Registering amounts to telling the Nook what e-mail address/password combo you've established your B&N online account under, so that when you buy a book via the Nook, your credit card can be charged automatically. (If you've never set up an account, the Nook will not lead you through doing so, step by step. To do that, you have to visit the B&N website online, using a computer.)

But you can obtain B&N content for the Nook — books, magazines, newspapers, etc. — without running to your computer. It all happens thanks to the Nook's built-in "radios": its wireless circuits.

One of the wireless "radios" accesses B&N Fast & Free Wireless, a cellphone data network. An iPhone does the same kind of thing using AT&T's 3G and EDGE networks, but you have to purchase a cellular data plan from AT&T separately. With the Nook the data plan is, in effect, free — but it works inside the United States only, not abroad.

The Nook's other wireless "radio" makes for 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity. In bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble stores, your Nook will automatically latch onto a B&N hotspot as you walk in, without further ado. You can set the Nook up to connect to the B&N site via your home wireless setup as well.

The latest Kindle from Amazon has wireless cellular connectivity that works abroad, unlike the Nook's. But it lacks the Nook's ability to connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks. (However, it looks as if the Nook's Wi-Fi connectivity does not allow books to be bought and downloaded by those in foreign lands. Go figure!)

Sadly, the Nook's internal software is not quite ready for prime time, as of release 1.1.1. It's a heavily customized version of Google's Android operating system, which means it has a lot of as yet untapped potential, such as harnessing the Nook to browse the Web. As of right now, though, the software flunks a lot of usability tests.

It nominally lets you annotate book pages, but identifying specific passages you want to "highlight" is a balky process at best.

Dictionary lookups are available, but only for words actually on the page being viewed, which you (again) have to highlight using a slow, clunky procedure. I find that the word lookup can't locate inflected forms of words, such as "conferring" for "confer," and there's no way to type in the latter when only the former is present on the page you're reading.

The Gallery View shown in the photo above, though sexy, exists only for books in the B&N library, not for books you side-load onto the Nook. B&N really needs to support Gallery View for side-loaded books.

If you want to exit a particular book and go back to the full list of books in My B&N Library (or in the My Documents folder, if that's where you came from) you have to first go back to the home screen and then return to the library or folder in question. A waste of time ...

Sometimes the Nook loses track of the last page read and/or the furthest page read in a book.

If you navigate, via a text-embedded superscript, to an end note, in a book that has end notes — the ability to do that is itself a cool, but not unique, Nook feature — the Nook mistakenly counts the end note as on the "furthest page read."

There is no "Go To Page Number ___ " function. It's badly needed.

And, as I mentioned earlier, some books insist on a different type size than, say, Amasis Medium normally would be expected to produce.

Other ballyhooed Nook advantages are, as of the moment, overblown.

Early reports of the Nook being able to "lend" eBooks turn out to be much ado about nothing, for now. Only some eBooks in your B&N Library can be loaned out, by no means all. You can load eBooks only to another B&N customer, not to the eBook world at large. You can lend a book that can be lent just one time, for just 14 days. Big whoop!

According to the Nook User Guide, though, the borrower need not have a Nook:

You can lend to and from any device with the Barnes & Noble eReader application, including iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry smartphones, and most Windows and Mac laptops and desktop computers. All you need to know is your friend’s email address.

But the borrower does have to be B&N-registered. Also, lending is a complex operation in which you have to generate an e-mail "offer" to the borrower, who must then accept the offer, before being allowed to download the book. During the 14-day lend-out period, you cannot use the book yourself, unless the borrower goes to the extra trouble of "returning" it to you early.

The initial buzz for the Nook set great store (pun intended!) by its "in-store experience," described this way by the User Guide:

When you bring your nook into a Barnes & Noble Bookstore, you can access in-store content and merchandising. This includes the ability to sample any eBook while in the store! (This feature is coming soon.) Merchandising content includes in-store, exclusive editorial content, promotion coupons, and information about in-store events.

There's supposed to be, added to the Shop's so-called "merchandising area," a More in Store option that you can bring up on the Nook's main screen when you're in a bricks-and-mortar B&N store. Yet when I visited my local B&N establishment and fired up my Nook, I saw no such thing. Nor did I see any ability to thoroughly browse "any eBook" while in the store! Plus, I've heard that this in-store browsing feature, where implemented at all, is time-limited to one hour per book, per 24-hour period.

My Nook did automatically connect to the store's Wi-Fi hotspot, but that was the extent of the vaunted "in-store experience." And, true, I was able to download truncated "sample" eBooks and read them while sipping my latte in the store, but those prepackaged free samples are available from my home as well. (Also, whatever happened to all those comfy chairs B&N throughout the store? As of a couple of months ago, they had dwindled to two. Two weeks ago, those two were gone!)

The Nook's battery life is a major sticking point. Touted by B&N as letting you "read for up to ten days without recharging with wireless off," I'm finding a more realistic figure to be two to three days without recharging. The Kindle gets much greater battery life, supposedly: up to two weeks between charges.

Note the "with wireless off" caveat. The two "radios" in the Nook are thought to drain the battery fast. You can disable the Wi-Fi radio via its own settings, but to turn off cellular connectivity you need to turn on Airplane Mode, which is nominally there to let air travelers disable wireless communications during takeoff and landing. (Airplane Mode also disables Wi-Fi.)

I keep Airplane Mode on just about all the time, yet I get nowhere near ten charge-free days. The culprit may be my (very occasional) use of the color touchscreen, which (as with an iPhone) supposedly draws a lot of juice ... but I find it next to impossible to avoid some touchscreen activation as I'm using my Nook. The touchscreen goes dark after a user-configurable number of seconds — I've lowered it from 30 to 10. I've also reduced the touchscreen brightness to a near-minimum value and turned off the "Auto-Adjust Brightness" feature. Still, what little use my touchscreen does get may be responsible for draining my battery.

Or, it may be just plain old page turning that drains the battery so swiftly. (If that's true, is it possible that a software update might cure this?) My reasoning: The Nook may be incurring a lot of processing overhead, due to the fact that its dedicated book-reading application is hosted by a full-fledged operating system (Android). The Kindle, on the other hand, doesn't have its software set up as a applications running under a general-purpose OS. Presumably, the processing overhead of something as simple as a page turn is less on the Kindle. So the Kindle's battery needs recharging much less often.

One thing I've proven to my own satisfaction: when my Nook is put into "sleep" mode, the battery charge doesn't drop much at all, over several hours of non-use. "Sleep" is, as the name suggests, different from powering the Nook down entirely. In sleep mode, a screen saver image remains on the reading screen; hence, E Ink remains in use. Powered off, the Nook has a blank reading screen.

The Nook will automatically enter sleep mode after 2, 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes of inactivity, depending on a user setting. You can manually enter sleep mode by pressing the Power button on the top of the device: once if the color touchscreen is lit up, otherwise twice.

B&N says recharging the Nook from a power outlet takes 3.5 hours, a time estimate I find accurate, and that charging via the USB cable takes 6 hours.

Unlike with the iPhone or the Kindle, you can pop the back off the Nook and replace its lithium polymer battery, which is expected to last two to three years. Some pundits have suggested the disappointing time between Nook battery charges is a necessary trade-off for having a replaceable battery.

While the back is off you can pop in a microSD or microSDHC memory card of up to 16-GB capacity, to go with the Nook's 2 GB of on-board storage. The former, I find, is reduced to about 1.28 usable GB by (I assume) the storage taken up by the Nook system software. The Nook, at a nominal 2 GB of storage, is said to hold up to 1,500 eBooks, so adding a memory card is not an urgent priority. Amazon's Kindle likewise sports a 2-GB internal memory, said to hold a like figure of 1,500 eBooks. (Also, if you're wondering whether the Nook has a SIM card to enable cellular connectivity, it does; it's hidden by the battery.)

One of the biggest questions in the Kindle-vs.-Nook debate concerns the availability and pricing of eBooks from the two eBook-selling behemoths, Amazon and B&N respectively, standing behind the two readers.

The reviews of the Kindle and of the Nook from CNET cite a "large library of tens of thousands of e-books" as selling points for each of these devices.

Virtually all of the eBooks that work on the Kindle have to be obtained through the Kindle Store at Amazon. The eBooks eligible to become part of "My Library" on the Nook — as opposed to capable of being side-loaded into "My Documents" — all come from the B&N eBook Store.

I happen to have a list of books that I want to read soon. Most are fairly well-known titles. None of them did I select because of their availability (or lack of it) as eBooks. Some are in fact available as eBooks, some not. Here's an availability comparison:

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. $5.50 at the Kindle Store. $5.50 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland. $5.50 at the Kindle Store. $5.50 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. $3.95 at the Kindle Store. $3.95 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. $9.99 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. $9.99 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. $9.99 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. $9.59 at the Kindle Store. $9.59 at the B&N eBook Store. (Note: I downloaded the free sample of this eBook to my Nook and found that its cover does not show up in Gallery View. Nor does the cover show up in the B&N eBook Store listing for the eBook. However, when the Nook is actually reading the sample eBook, the cover thumbnail does appear! The listing at the Kindle Store likewise shows a cover.)
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, by Jim Defede. Not available at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
Disgrace: A Novel, by J.M. Coetzee. Not available at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre. Not available at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
Skyfall, by Catherine Asaro. $6.39 at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.
Dawn Star, by Catherine Asaro. $9.99 at the Kindle Store. $9.99 at the B&N eBook Store.
The Apprentice: A Novel, by Tess Gerritsen. $6.39 at the Kindle Store. $6.39 at the B&N eBook Store.
Whistleblower and Never Say Die, by Tess Gerritsen. $7.88 at the Kindle Store. $7.88 at the B&N eBook Store.
A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond Between Two Friends and a Lion, by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall. $13.17 at the Kindle Store. Not available at the B&N eBook Store.

What of the books that are shown above as not available at the B&N eBook Store, or unavailable at either store?

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, is available here as an Adobe PDF eBook, side-loadable and readable by the Nook, for a price in British pounds equivalent to $7.43. It's also available for the same price in the Mobipocket format. If not DRM-encrypted, Mobipocket would be usable by the Kindle. But this seems to be in the encrypted Mobipocket format, which the Kindle can't use. But never mind: a Kindle edition is available at Amazon's Kindle Store for a reasonable $9.99.
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, by Jim Defede, is apparently not available anywhere as an eBook. (You can check any book's availability as an eBook, or lack thereof, at AddAll eBooks.)
Disgrace: A Novel, by J.M. Coetzee, is apparently not available anywhere as an eBook.
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, is available here as an Adobe PDF eBook, side-loadable and readable by the Nook, for $8.10.
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre, is apparently not available anywhere as an eBook.
Skyfall, by Catherine Asaro, is available in EPUB format here, for $12.60. This kind of DRM-encrypted EPUB is meant for a Sony Reader (a rival to the Kindle and the Nook). However, it reportedly will work when side-loaded to a Nook.
A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond Between Two Friends and a Lion, by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, is available as a DRM-encrypted EPUB for a Sony Reader here, for $9.99.

More on the subject of eBook pricing for the Nook: here, in an early discussion of the Nook that appeared just after the product was announced in mid-October 2009, its author complains (referring to Barnes & Noble), "The bookseller's digital titles are way overpriced — at least compared to Amazon ... ."

Is that still true? Interestingly enough, I find that all of the book-by-book price gaps the author so rues seem to have disappeared! Check for yourself: it's easy to click on each cited eBook link to the Amazon and B&N sites, respectively. Try it.

The list of books I myself compiled above likewise shows that, in every case where both vendors have the eBook, the price is the same. It looks to me as if, in the wake of the Nook announcement, B&N dropped its prices to match Amazon's!

In cases where a Nook-usable version must be side-loaded from another source, however, where the Kindle Store has its own eBook edition the prices sometimes vary. In some cases, the Nook-usable eBook costs more that the Kindle edition; in other cases, less.

On the whole, the results I am seeing indicate that you would typically find the same books available for the Nook as for the Kindle, usually at identical prices, occasionally at different prices. Where there is price variation, sometimes one device is favored, sometimes the other. On average, you would probably spend the same amounts of money feeding the Nook as the Kindle.

True, the Nook would sometimes force you to computer-download and then side-load "non-B&N Library" eBooks to the Nook, where those same eBooks would be effortlessly available from Amazon's Kindle Store and would download direct to the Kindle. With respect to the availability of eBooks in the devices' "native" formats, the Kindle presently has an edge over the Nook.

You can read other comprehensive reviews of the Nook here and here.

iPhone: Reading Adobe/EPUB eBooks

2009-10-21T17:41:00.000-07:00

Note: This post has been heavily edited several times, the last time being Feb. 22, 2010. Readers who find errors, inconsistencies, or points of confusion are encouraged to post a comment below so that I can revise the instructions to make them as correct and usable as possible. Thanks!

* * *

Introduction

eBooks come in many forms; see this article in Wikipedia for a list. Most of the common formats can be read on an iPhone, by one app or another — see iPhone as eReader for more.

An eBook format that the iPhone can't deal with, however, is the supposedly "open" EPUB format if, paradoxically, it is copy-protected using the Digital Rights Management methodology created by Adobe Systems. This Adobe/EPUB format, a DRM-protected variety of the open EPUB format, is used by the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) eBook reader. ADE is intended for personal computers, but not for most mobile devices like an iPhone. The full name of Adobe's DRM methodology is Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology, or ADEPT. The Adobe/EPUB format can accordingly be called ADEPT/EPUB.

To repeat: Adobe Digital Editions, a.k.a. ADE, is software that runs on Windows and Mac platforms, but there is no ADE for the iPhone. Why not? Maybe because ADE incorporates Adobe Flash as a way of presenting complex graphics, and Flash is not supported on the iPhone. The iPhone, lacking Flash support, cannot read ADEPT/EPUB eBooks. This is so even though there is no Flash content in ADEPT/EPUB eBooks!

If it were possible to bypass or strip off the ADEPT DRM encryption, however, these ADEPT/EPUB eBooks would become plain old EPUB eBooks — downloadable to, and working just fine in, Stanza for the iPhone.

Bypassing ADEPT encryption so that you can read ADEPT/EPUB books on an iPhone is in fact possible. Here is a step-by-step explanation of how.

Step 1:

Before you get started, you'll probably need to download and install the free Adobe Digital Editions software itself.

I know of only one exception to that rule. If you have a Sony Reader, you probably have installed its companion Reader Library (formerly eBook Library) software for the Sony Reader on your Windows PC or Mac. As of version 3.0, this software (current version is 3.1) can stand in lieu of Adobe Digital Editions software, in that it lets you authorize your Sony Reader device (and your computer as well) for Adobe DRM-protected content. If you have already done that, you don't need to install and authorize ADE, and you can skip ahead to Step 2 in these instructions.

What if you are not sure whether your computer is Adobe-authorized?

If you are using Windows XP — I don't know enough about Windows Vista or Windows 7 to say how to do this on those operating systems — you can check to see whether your computer is already Adobe-authorized by clicking on the start button, selecting Run..., typing regedit.exe in the Open... box and clicking OK, and in the Registry Editor window that appears, selecting Edit:Find.... Then type privateLicenseKey in the Find what: box and click the Find Next button. If your computer is Adobe-authorized, then (after a few seconds of searching) the Registry Editor will show a two-item list in the right side of its window that contains privateLicenseKey as the first data item. (The second item is the actual — albeit encrypted — value of the key.) Voila! You can now close the Registry Editor window and skip ahead to Step 2 of these instructions.

If you are using a Mac, one way you can check to see whether your computer is Adobe-authorized is to look for an activation.dat file in your Home folder hierarchy on your Mac — specifically, in the ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Digital Editions/ folder. (~ is shorthand for your Home folder.) If activation.dat is there, you have already authorized your Mac for Adobe-DRM'ed eBooks. You can skip ahead to Step 2 of these instructions. (Note: the ~/Library/Application Support/ folder hierarchy will not show up in a Finder search unless you specifically tell the search to include system files.)

If you didn't skip ahead to Step 2, you need to authorize your computer to read Adobe-DRM'ed eBooks. Click here to install (or simply launch) ADE on either a Mac or a Windows computer. About halfway down the page which comes up you will see a large button saying one of two things:

If you see the word "Launch," then you already have the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions installed on your computer. You should click on the "Launch" button to open ADE. When you do — since you have just checked to see whether ADE is activated and found that it isn't — you should see an ADE Setup Assistant window superimposed over the main Adobe Digital Editions window.
If you instead see the word "Install," click on it to obtain the latest ADE version. A warning appears: "This application can read and write files to your system. Would you like to continue installing?" Click "Install" again. Another warning appears: "Press yes to download and continue the installation of Adobe Digital Editions." Click "yes." After the download has finished, the Adobe Digital Editions app immediately opens on your Windows or Mac computer, displaying an "Adobe Digital Editions Install" window. That window contains a license agreement to which you must click "I Agree." You'll now see the ADE Setup Assistant window superimposed over the main Adobe Digital Editions window.

Whether you just installed or simply launched ADE, you should now see the ADE Setup Assistant, since presumably your computer is not yet ADE-activated. You need to click the Setup Assistant's "Continue" button to see a panel asking you to "Authorize Computer" by filling in your Adobe ID (which is typically your e-mail address) and associated password.

If you do not already have an account with an Adobe ID, you should now click on "get an Adobe ID online," in order to be taken via your Web browser to an online page that will allow you to set up an Adobe account. Once you set up your Adobe account, return to the patiently waiting Adobe Digital Editions Setup Assistant and enter your new Adobe ID and password. Click the "Activate" button.

You have the option instead to choose "Don't Authorize Computer" at this point, instead of "get an Adobe ID online." This is what is referred to as an "anonymous" activation, in that your computer will be "activated" but not "authorized" to use any particular Adobe ID.

As long as the computer you are using is not available to the public, my strong suggestion is that you not choose this option. If you choose it, you will not have the ability to download Adobe-DRM'ed eBooks to, and read them on, any computer but the one you are presently activating. If you authorize your computer using an Adobe ID, you can use the same Adobe ID to authorize up to six computers, total — plus, you will be able to transfer Adobe eBooks to a device such as a Sony Reader or a Barnes & Noble Nook that has been activated with the same Adobe ID.

I have been assured that the following steps in these instructions will work with an anonymous activation that does not specify an Adobe ID. However, if you activate Adobe Digital Editions anonymously and then later do it again with an Adobe ID, at that time all of your earlier ADE e-book purchases will become unusable. So I strongly recommend that you activate Adobe Digital Editions with an Adobe ID right from the outset.

Once you click "Activate," you will see (briefly) a panel saying "Connecting to authorization server," and then, once the authorization is complete, you will see the Setup Assistant's final panel, from which you can, if you like, point your browser at the Adobe Digital Editions Online Library. This, as the title says, is the repository on the Internet where many, but not necessarily all, of the Adobe Digital Editions eBooks you buy will be kept. From the web page which appears in your browser, you can now obtain your first ADE eBooks.

I'll leave it to you to visit this library later on in this set of instructions and explore how this is done. At this point, you need to click "Finished" to dismiss the Setup Assistant.

Now, if you are on Windows you will have on your C:\ drive a folder, C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Digital Editions, that contains digitaleditions.exe, the ADE application. On a Mac, the Mac version of the Adobe Digital Editions software resides in your Applications folder.

Step 2:

Next, if you are using Windows, you need to obtain Python, a programming/scripting language originally developed for Unix-based computers, and also available for Windows.

If you use Windows you can currently get Python version 2.6, which you can download and install in Windows by going to the Python download page and then clicking on (as of this writing) the hotlink to Python 2.6.4 Windows installer. (There is also a version 3.1, but I can't guarantee it will work with this procedure.) You'll download a file called python-2.6.4.msi which you'll proceed to double-click, and then you'll follow the installer's on-screen prompts that allow you to install the Python 2.6 package in a directory the installer creates, C:\Python26. The actual app within that folder is called python.

For the Mac platform, you do not need to download and install Python at all, as Python 2.5 (which works fine for purposes of these instructions) is automatically installed as part of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." (I believe this is also true of OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard.") Even though Python 2.5 is part of the Mac OS X software package, you do need to make sure the optionally installed Apple Developer package is installed on your Mac.

If you already, at the outermost root level of your Mac's folder hierarchy, have a folder called Developer, you're fine. If not, you must create it by inserting your OS X 10.5 Install DVD and navigating to and then double-clicking Mac OS X Install DVD:Optional Installs:Xcode Tools:Xcode Tools.mpkg. You will be led by the installer program which opens through the necessary steps to install the Developer Tools package. These tools are necessary in the next stage of this procedure, that of installing and setting up the PyCrypto extensions to Python.

Step 3:

PyCrypto, the Python Cryptography Toolkit, is a package containing various cryptographic tools for the Python programming language. Its modules are going to be required later on in this set of instructions.

Windows users can obtain PyCrypto here (on that page, click on the link to pycrypto-2.0.1.win32-py2.6.exe). After downloading the .exe file, double-click on it to run the Setup Wizard. As long as you have already downloaded and installed Python as detailed above, the Wizard (after you click "Next >" on the introductory panel) will indicate Python 2.6 has been duly found in the Windows Registry, in C:\Python26\. The Wizard will accordingly use the subfolder C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\ as its installation directory. After you click on "Next >" once more, you will see a "Ready to install" panel. Click "Next >" yet again to actually perform the installation. Then click "Finish" to exit the Wizard. You should now be able to locate a Crypto folder and also a pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.6.egg-info file in C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\.

Mac users should go here and click on the "Download" button for PyCrypto 2.0.1. The pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz file you'll receive will most likely land right on your Desktop (depending on how you have your browser configured for downloads; if it doesn't download right to the Desktop, you can just move it there). Upon being double-clicked, the pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz file expands into a pycrypto-2.0.1 folder, also on the Desktop. You may move this folder wherever you like, or leave it right on the Desktop.

Next, Mac users need to click here to download PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer.app.zip, which, when unzipped, expands into an AppleScript app called PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer. Double click PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer to run the installer itself. It will ask you to navigate to and choose your pycrypto-2.0.1 folder, the one you created in the preceding paragraph of these instructions. Once you have clicked "Choose," PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer will open a window in the Mac's Terminal application and execute some Unix commands in it. The first time you use the PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer, the Unix commands will produce a large amount of output in the Terminal window, due to the fact that the PyCrypto software is, for the first time on your computer, undergoing a "build." Any subsequent times you use PyCrypto_2.0.1_Installer, an "install" without a preliminary "build" will be done, and you will see less output in the Terminal window. In either case, the final line of the Terminal-window output should say "Writing /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info".

At this point you can quit Terminal. If you look in Finder — starting at the root-level directory, not at the Home folder for your user account — and navigate to /Library/Python/2.5, you should find a site-packages folder. In it there should now be a Crypto folder and a pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.5.egg-info file.

Step 4:

At this point, you have obtained the Adobe Digital Editions application (or else the Sony Reader Library app) and authorized your computer by activating your Adobe ID and password (or you have activated ADE anonymously); installed Python (on a Windows platform only); made sure you have the Developer Tools installed (on a Mac only); and installed the PyCrypto cryptography tools within Python (on either a Windows PC or a Mac).

You are going to run two Python scripts in order to decrypt Adobe Digital Editions eBooks. I'll discuss the second of these two scripts in Step 6 below. The first Python script is designed to extract cryptographic key information from the Adobe Digital Editions desktop software that you now have installed and authorized on your computer.

For Windows, the script comes in a file called ineptkey_v43.pyw.zip, downloadable here.

For the Mac, the file ineptkeymac_v1.py.zip is downloadable here.

Whichever ZIP file you download, you need to expand it (unless your browser does that automatically for you). The Windows script expands as ineptkey_v43.pyw when you double-click it; the Mac's as ineptkeymac_v1.py. (On a Mac, if you can't get the ZIP file to expand by double-clicking it, then you can expand it manually using either Archive Utility or Stuffit Expander.)

To run the ineptkey_v43.pyw script on a Windows platform, you will open and run the script in the python app created in Step 2. To do that, right-click on ineptkey_v43.pyw and select Open With: python to designate the python.exe app. Or, if you instead select Open With: Choose Program ... , you can check "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file," and then select python and click "OK." From then on, you will be able to double-click any Python script file whose filename extension is .pyw, and it will automatically open in python.exe.

On a Mac, you will initially open ineptkeymac_v1.py in Build Applet. To do that, right-click on ineptkeymac_v1.py and select Open With: Build Applet. An application called ineptkeymac_v1 will appear in the same folder as ineptkeymac_v1.py. Double-click the ineptkeymac_v1 app to actually run the script.

I'll refer to these scripts generically as ineptkey. Having to be run only once, ineptkey derives a decryption key (sometimes called a "security certificate") which can then be used by the second script (see Step 6 below) to decrypt any Adobe Digital Reader eBook that you obtain and download. The decryption key/security certificate is saved by ineptkey in a new file called adeptkey.der. On Windows, adeptkey.der is placed in the folder that contains the ineptkey script itself; after the file has been generated, you can manually rename it if you like and/or move it wherever you like.

On a Mac, a File Save dialog allows you to specify in what folder (and by what name) to save adeptkey.der. You can move the adeptkey.der file (by whatever name) which contains the decryption key/security certificate into any folder you like.

Once you have used ineptkey once to obtain adeptkey.der, you never have to use it again (unless you someday re-authorize ADE on your computer with a different Adobe ID and password).

Notes: The AppleScript-based app ADEPTKey_Generator was formerly used on Macs to do what ineptkeymac_v1.py does, but it no longer works with the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions.

If you have any adeptkey.der files from either ADEPTKey_Generator on a Mac or versions of ineptkey prior to version 4.3 on Windows, you should trash them. They will no longer work in Step 6 below.

Step 5:

At this point, you are done with all the admittedly complex preliminary steps. You are ready to actually obtain and download some eBooks that are protected with Adobe ADEPT DRM-encryption. You can start to do so by visiting the Adobe Digital Editions Online Library. Obtain and download at least one Adobe-DRM'ed eBook that is in the "EPUB eBook" format specifically. (There is a Python script called ineptpdf that can decrypt Adobe-DRM'ed "PDF eBook" editions, but it is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

Note that when you buy an EPUB eBook from the Adobe Digital Editions Online Library, the Adobe Digital Editions software on your computer will open, if it's not already active, and the eBook will be downloaded automatically. The eBook will appear in "Reading View" in the ADE window, ready to read. (This is true if you are using the ADE software. If you are using Sony Reader software, I don't know exactly how all this works.)

With the newly downloaded eBook visible in Reading View, you can click on the READING menu and then on Item Info... . A window will open that shows, among other things, the File path: to where the downloaded eBook is stored on your computer.

On Windows XP, the eBook will normally be in the user's My Documents\My Digital Editions folder, the full path to which is C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\My Digital Editions.

On a Mac, the eBook file will normally be in the /Users//Documents/Digital Editions, a.k.a. ~/Documents/Digital Editions, folder.

On both operating systems, the name of the file will typically be (roughly) the same as the book title, usually with each space replaced by an underscore ('_') character. Some eBooks download with more cryptic file names. The filename extension will be .epub.

You should leave the downloaded file exactly where Adobe Digital Editions puts it, under its original name and filename extension. However, there's no law against making a copy of that file, putting it where you wish, and naming it what you wish. (However, it's definitely a good idea to retain the .epub extension.)

Once you have downloaded, located, and optionally duplicated one or more EPUB eBooks that use Adobe DRM encryption, you can move on to the next step.

Step 6:

The adeptkey.der file containing the ADEPT decryption key/security certificate — you generated it earlier in Step 4 in this set of instructions, remember? — can now be used, on either a Windows machine or a Mac, by the ineptepub Python script to decrypt downloaded ADE books.

For either a Windows platform or a Mac — the same script works on both — you can download the ineptepub_v2.pyw.zip file here. After you download it, just unzip the ZIP file to get the file ineptepub_v2.pyw.

Your browser may unzip the ZIP file automatically, so you won't have to. If it doesn't unzip the file automatically, then:

On Windows XP (I'm not sure about other Windows versions), you can unzip the .zip file manually by double-clicking it and then clicking "Extract all files" under "Folder Tasks" in the window that opens. Otherwise, you can use the WinZip utility.
On a Mac, you can unzip the .zip file manually using either Archive Utility or Stuffit Expander.

On Windows, you will next open and run the ineptepub_v2.pyw script in the python app created in Step 2. To do that, right-click on the ineptepub_v2.pyw script file and select Open With: python to use the python.exe app. If you instead select Open With: Choose Program ... , you can check "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file," and then select python and click "OK." From then on, you will be able to double-click any Python script file whose filename extension is .pyw, and it will automatically open in python.exe.

On a Mac, you should next change the .pyw filename extension to .py in a Get Info window in Finder. Finder will ask you to confirm your intention to change the extension; just click "Use .py." You should then double-click the ineptepub_v2.py script file to (try to) make the ineptepub_v2 app in the same folder. If the double-click method doesn't produce the ineptepub_v2 app file, then probably what has happened is that the script has (briefly) opened in Python Launcher instead. Python Launcher cannot deal with this particular script, so it quits right away. This time, just right-click the ineptepub_v2.py script file and choose Open With: Build Applet.

On Windows, when you open the ineptepub_v2.py script in python, in front of an empty python.exe window you'll see:

As you can see, you'll need to specify three files. The easiest way: click on the "..." button to the right of each file-entry field, then navigate to and select the requisite file for each:

For Key file, you'll select the decryption key/security certificate file created earlier, the one that by default has the name adeptkey.der.
For Input file, you'll select a file containing any previously downloaded Adobe Digital Editions eBook you want to decrypt. In Windows, the downloaded eBook will typically be stored in My Documents\My Digital Editions. It will have the filename extension .epub. (On a Mac, it will be in ~/Documents/Digital Editions, where '~' signifies the Home Directory for your user account. Again, the file will have the filename extension .epub.)
For Output file, you'll select a folder for and give a name to the file that is to contain the decrypted version of the eBook; you can put the decrypted output file anywhere you like in your folder hierarchy. You should make sure to specify the .epub extension for the output filename.

Then click on Decrypt. Within a second or so, the INEPT EPUB Decrypter window should say "File successfully decrypted." The decrypted output file should be right where you said to put it, using the file name and .epub extension you specified. If you double-click its icon, it will open in Adobe Digital Editions (even though it is no longer encrypted!). You can alternatively open it in any other eBook reading application, such as Stanza, that handles EPUBs.

You can now either perform one or more additional INEPT EPUB Decrypter decryptions or click Quit.

On a Mac, using ineptepub is about the same, though visually the user interface looks different. When you double-click on the ineptepub_v2, app, you will see:

It's like the Windows version, but without color. This time, behind the INEPT EPUB Decrypter window there's an empty Console window that you can just ignore, whereas in the Windows version, the window behind the INEPT EPUB Decrypter window is an empty python.exe window. You will (as for the Windows version above) use the "..." buttons to select Key file, Input file, and (the folder location and name of) Output file (don't forget to specify the .epub extension for the output file) then click Decrypt.

Remember, on a Mac, the Input file will normally be in ~/Documents/Digital Editions, where '~' signifies the Home Directory for your user account. This is the folder into which Adobe Digital Editions downloads eBooks. Again, the downloaded file will have the filename extension .epub.

Within seconds after you click Decrypt in the INEPT EPUB Decrypter window, you should see the message File successfully decrypted at the top of the window. You can now do further eBook decryptions, if you like.

After you finish doing eBook decryptions, just click Quit.

Step 7:

Once you have decrypted an eBook, you can open the decrypted eBook file in the free Stanza desktop application. The Mac version of Stanza can be obtained here, the Windows version here, and the iPhone/iPod Touch version here.

Once you have installed one of the desktop versions of Stanza, just open a decrypted eBook file in it. You will be able to read it right on your desktop.

Or, if you want to read it in Stanza for the iPhone/iPod Touch, follow the instructions here to transfer the book to your mobile device. (I find the "Sharing using Stanza Desktop" method works just fine.)

... And You're Done!

If you aren't done, then perhaps you ran into a problem? If so, check out Breaking Adobe DRM — Tips, Tricks, Workarounds for possible help. If you can't find the solution you need there, please post any questions you have as comments, either to this post or to that one.

You can get more details about the ineptkey and ineptepub Python scripts at Circumventing Adobe ADEPT DRM for EPUB.

eReaders To Come: Nook by Barnes & Noble

2009-10-21T12:44:00.001-07:00

Nook is the name of the new eBook reader from Barnes & Noble:

Due to arrive on Nov. 30, 2009, its touch screen is the same size as that of Amazon's current Kindle 2: 6 inches, measured diagonally. One the Nook, that dimension pertains to the actual reading screen, exclusive of the color touchscreen control bar below the reading area.

Its price is also the same: $259.

The Kindle 2 looks like this:

It has a keyboard made of physical buttons, where Nook has a color touchscreen control bar. That control bar is positioned under a black & white reading screen that uses the same E Ink technology as the Kindle does. Aside from a pair of physical buttons at either side of the Nook reading screen that obviously are used to flip through electronic pages, the Nook lacks controls besides those on the color touch screen itself.

Nook and Kindle both download eBooks wirelessly, Nook using WiFi and Kindle using a cellphone network. They both have enough storage to hold roughly 1,500 books.

You can take PC World's "tour" of the Nook here.

eReaders To Come: Fujitsu's FLEPia

2009-10-08T06:26:00.001-07:00

Fujitsu's FLEPia is said here to be the first eBook reader with color. It looks like this:

It can come with a black frame instead of white. Its 8-inch (measured diagonally) screen uses a new technology called "color e-paper" to produce images. It displays 260,000 colors, not just black, white, and shades of gray ... and it's said to do so "in high-definition." Like its rival technology, colorless E Ink, color e-paper does not require power for continuous display of a static image, consuming power only when it draws a new screen image.

Though FLEPia is of course rigid, the e-paper inside its frame can actually be flexed. Here's a YouTube video about it:

This page about FLEPia indicates, disappointingly, that redrawing the FLEPia screen takes fully 1.8 seconds, and that's when only 64 colors are in use. With all 260,000 colors, you'll ... have ... to ... wait ... an ... interminable ... 8 ... seconds. Apparently there's no way to force it into monochrome mode for faster page turns.

FLEPia's screen responds to pressure from its accompanying stylus. But it's not clear whether it also responds to fingers — assorted physical function buttons suggest that it doesn't. (The capacitive touchscreen on an iPhone is designed for finger manipulation; the FLEPia's touchscreen seems to be resistive instead.)

FLEPia incorporates wireless connectivity via WiFi (802.11b or g, but not the faster 802.11n) or Bluetooth (but what about cellphone networks). It wires to a computer via its mini-USB port. Its 4 GB of storage resides on a swappable SD card. That's enough space for 5,000 eBooks on a card you could (theoretically — don't try this at home) swallow!

Not just for reading eBooks, FLEPia comes with a Japanese version of the Windows CE 5.0 operating system on board. Here, a U.S. version will probably need to be supplied.

The battery life is nominally 40 hours, giving about 2,400 page turns between charges.

The weight of the FLEPia is only 385 grams, or under 14 ounces.

Embedded stereo speakers and a headphone jack allow audio playback of eBooks, suggesting a text-to-speech capability in FLEPia.

This press release about FLEPia's introduction for sale outside Japan says it supports two eBook formats that frankly won't fly in America: “BunkoViewer” (XMDF format; “bunko” refers to “library” in Japanese) and “T-Time” (.book format). So, clearly, FLEPia in the U.S.market will have to add at least one of the established eBook formats here.

FLEPia is already being sold in Japan for (gasp!) about $1,000.

Learn more about FLEPia in this preview, which includes a video showing the FLEPia (slowly) turning pages.

eReaders To Come: Plastic Logic

2009-10-07T08:19:00.001-07:00

Two photos of the upcoming eBook reader from Plastic Logic:

It has a "broadsheet" 8.5-inch x 11-inch screen, making it bigger than the current size champion, the Kindle DX, while being even slimmer than the more petite regular Kindle.

Coverage of the new Plastic Logic entrant in the eBook reader wars can be found at:

The Plastic Logic has a touchscreen interface to help you access and read more than 700,000 titles at the Barnes & Noble eBook Store and elsewhere. The keyboard is a virtual, onscreen one. The screen is made of E Ink, as is the Kindle's, meaning that any one monochrome image can stay put for any amount of time without drawing down the battery. (But there's no backlight, so reading in the dark is out, and E Ink causes a distinct lag at each page turn.)

The Plastic Logic's touchscreen apparently supports both fingertip gestures and the use of an included stylus tool for scribbling annotations and notes.

Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity will keep users from having to cable their Plastic Logics to their computers to complete their book downloads.

Unlike rival readers, the Plastic Logic's huge screen lets you view things besides eBooks with no eyestrain: PDF files, Word documents, spreadsheets and even PowerPoint presentations can typically be displayed full-size.

It looks as if the B&N/Plastic Logic reader is going to support, as its main eBook format, the one called EPUB. EPUB is widely known as an "open" format that lacks DRM (Digital Rights Management) to prevent the copying and redistributing of eBook content. Plastic Logic users will thus be able to read (and redistribute) the hundreds of thousands of public-domain eBooks available from Google Books. But they'll also have access to hundreds of thousands of non-public-domain EPUB titles at the B&N Store, and they will in fact have so-called "Adobe ADEPT DRM" added to their EPUB content. Current bestsellers in that encrypted format will sell for $9.99.

Up in the air is whether this reader will, right away or in the future, handle the alternative DRM format that B&N subsidiaries FictionWise and eReader.com support, and that works on the Sony Reader. That format is referred to as "eReader format" and also as the .pdb format.

Adobe's ADEPT — which stands for "Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology" — is used for DRM-protecting both EPUB and .pdb books. It's different from the DRM that Amazon uses on Kindle editions. My impression is that the B&N/Plastic Logic reader will eventually use both EPUB and .pdb eBooks and will turn into (or so its backers hope) a Kindle Killer par excellence.

eReaders To Come: IREX

2009-10-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Meet the IREX:

It's a soon-to-arrive device for reading eBooks — a rival to Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader — and according to the article Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray, you'll be able to buy the $399 touchscreen, Verizon 3G wireless (but not WiFi) IREX DR800SG at a kiosk inside your friendly local Best Buy store. (As one who has an AT&T 3G account for my iPhone, I'm wondering whether I'd need a separate plan for the IREX.)

"Starting this week," says the 9/22/09 article, "Best Buy is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and IREX, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices. Best Buy previously sold e-book devices only on its Web site and in limited tests in stores."

The-eBook-Reader.com website has more about the IREX and also its predecessor iLiad eReaders (which didn't do very well) from the same company. Among the selling points of the IREX: it's "the first [dedicated] eBook reader other than the Amazon Kindle to offer free wireless service for quick and easy eBook downloads." Its 8.1-inch touchscreen makes it one of the bigger eReaders available. However, "you can't use your fingers for navigation; you have to use the [included] stylus."

Using the stylus — after a promised firmware upgrade — you'll be able to write stuff on the screen by hand, such as book annotations, that can then be converted to text and stored. But, sadly, "It seems the touchscreen doesn't serve much of a purpose at this point."

Here is a whole website dedicated specifically to the IREX.

At the main IREX website there is further information about this reader. PDF documents available there say it is "a sleek, 8.1‐inch, touch‐screen eReader," it "offers multi-mode 3G wireless capabilities," and it "supports multiple formats including industry standard ePub format and multiple DRM solutions, rather than a single, 'closed' proprietary format that locks content to a specific device."

Admittedly, that last item is a bit obscure. What does it mean?

First of all, "industry standard ePub format" refers to a format for eBooks which is being widely used for free-of-charge downloads of classic books that are in the public domain and no longer copyright protected. These digital editions can be distributed and redistributed for free — by anyone, to anyone, for any reason whatever.

So they do not need to be copy-protected, which is what DRM (Digital Rights Management) is all about.

The IREX publicity seems to imply that it will give access to multiple kinds of DRM-encoded, copy-protected eBooks: "supports multiple formats including ... multiple DRM solutions." But this PDF-format fact sheet shows that's a bit overstated. For, among "DRM solutions" in today's eBook world, there are two main biggies, the Amazon Kindle format and the so-called eReader format ... and IREX does not support the former, only the latter.

The IREX fact sheet gives "Adobe PDF, EPUB, Newspaper Direct, Fictionwise, eReader, TXT" as the formats supported natively by IREX. EPUB and TXT are typically not DRM-protected. Newspaper Direct is limited to delivering newspapers electronically, not books. Fictionwise and eReader both use the eReader format — since they are basically the same company! Only the ability to read DRM-protected Adobe PDF eBooks adds any real value, and this is a format that is also supported by the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle DX (though not the less pricey Kindle proper — go figure).

Conspicuously absent on the IREX is the ability to download, unlock, and read Amazon Kindle eBooks. Also missing is support for Mobipocket, another DRM-protected format that is owned by ... you guessed it, Amazon.

This is not to say that the IREX is a bad deal. After all, it connects directly to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore — a big source for DRM-protected eBooks in the eReader format — just as the Kindle plugs you right into the Kindle Store at Amazon.com.

But the IREX is not going to be an eBook reader for all people. In fact, I'd say there is a proverbial eBook format war in progress: Amazon (cum Mobipocket) vs. everyone else (with Barnes & Noble as ringleader).

Until someone tells me different, I am under the impression that just about any eBook you can get for the Kindle, you can also get in eReader format for a Sony Reader or an IREX, albeit at not necessarily as low a price. But if you want to be able to tap into either eBook universe at will, your best bet still remains a multi-function mobile such as an iPhone. (See iPhone as eReader for more on that possibility.)

eReaders To Come: Apple Tablet

2009-10-02T08:21:00.002-07:00

Check out this image from Ten New Details on the Apple Tablet at iLounge.com, a website dedicated to all things iPod/Phone:

The image is meant to show how much bigger the screen on the forthcoming "tablet" device from Apple is than the current iPhone's.

Tablet device from Apple? Is it real? And is it an eBook reader?

Maybe, and maybe.

It looks like longstanding rumors — see Apple Tablet In October For $800, Says China Times — that Apple will introduce what I'll characterize as a "smart tablet" in the not-too-distant future are going to come true.

iLounge's article nicknames it an iPad. I wouldn't mind if Apple dubbed it an iSlate. It's already October 2009, so it looks like it will be introduced next year, not this.

Will it be an eBook reader? Yes and no.

Depending on whether or not it has the (perhaps mandatory, perhaps optional, perhaps unavailable) feature of phone connectivity via AT&T's 3G network, you could call it an iPhone or iPod Touch on steroids, with a screen that measures 10.7 inches diagonally to the iPhone's 3.5 inches. At over thrice the linear dimension, it may have over nine times the viewing area (seven times, iLounge says).

It so happens I have an old wooden slide rule (remember those?) hanging around on my desk that is exactly 10.7 inches long, and when I hold it up diagonally to my iPhone's screen I can see how much the iPhone will be dwarfed by the iSlate (as I'll keep calling it).

The iSlate will have a screen too small to display an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper full size ... but large enough to do so for, say, most of the so-called "trade" paperbacks I own. Almost all of my hardcover editions, though, would have to be scaled down just a tad.

So, used as an eBook reader, the iSlate would allow viewing of a full printed page from just about any popular book at no, or very little, reduction in size. (Bigger textbooks would need additional squeezing, zooming-sliding-scrolling, or text reflowing.)

But iSlate would be an all-purpose device, not just a book reader. It looks like it will run the same OS that the iPhone uses — not the Mac OS — and therefore the same iPhone/iTouch apps, including eBook readers (see iPhone as eReader).

iSlate, if it arrives, would have the same color touchscreen technology as the iPhone/iTouch; no physical keyboard, but a virtual one with bigger keys; and the ability to orient it for portrait or landscape viewing. In short, everything the iPhone has, except maybe the ability to use it as a phone. (What about as a camera? Who knows?)

So all current iPhone/iTouch eBook reader apps should work fine on it!

But, no, Apple apparently has no intention of making a big deal of its status as a potential "Kindle killer." It looks like the iTunes Store isn't going to sell eBooks for the iSlate. As Apple Not Building An 'iTunes For e-Books' says, "It's clearer now ... that Apple will help publishers and e-book vendors sell their wares on the new devices — and not that Apple is planning to enter the e-book sales industry itself."

iPhone as eReader

2009-10-02T08:21:00.001-07:00

Your iPhone is an eReader! It can read eBooks: ordinary books published in downloadable, digital form. All you need is the right iPhone eReader app for the books you want to read.

I have four eReader apps so far. Before talking about them individually, I'd like to mention that all these apps present eBooks with text that is formatted for easy reading on a handheld device. That means that you are not looking at tiny reproductions of the pages in the printed version of the book. Instead, the text is "re-flowed." You see artificial "pages" with however much text can fit on the iPhone screen, no more, no less.

Most of the apps give you the option to choose what font the text is in, how big the text is, how wide the margins are, how far apart the lines of text are, and so forth. (The Kindle for iPhone app is the sole exception; it gives you some formatting control, but it's locked into a single font.)

Now for the four apps:

Kindle for iPhone, free at the iTunes App Store, is the top name in the iPhone eReader app field. Kindle is the name of a handheld device that Amazon.com sells for $299. If you owned one, you could buy any of the over 350,000 books Amazon sells in eBook form, including virtually all of the current New York Times bestsellers, typically for a price of $9.99 or less.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch along with the Kindle for iPhone app, you don't need a standalone Kindle device. You can download and read the same eBooks the Kindle eReader can, right on your iPhone.

Kindle eBooks are in a format that won't work with any device other than a standalone Kindle or a handheld device such as an iPhone/iPod touch that has the Kindle for iPhone app. There are, in addition to the Kindle eBook format, other eBook formats that boast hundreds of thousands of books. For those, I have three other iPhone apps.

Stanza is another free eBook reader app. It reads mainly free books — you don't have to pay for them — from a variety of sources. You can find and download these books by going into the Online Catalog in the Stanza app itself.

Also in the Stanza Online Catalog are links to vendors of books that do cost actual money. Right now one of the most popular eBooks-with-a-price is Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which you can get for $9.95 by pointing the Stanza Online Catalog to BooksOnBoard. Using eReader (see below), I recently bought another version of the same book for $9.99. (I have seen the hardcover edition — list price $29.95 — on sale at a bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble for 40% off, at $17.97. You can buy the hardcover edition online at Amazon right this minute for $16.17. An eBook price of under $10 is a pretty good deal.)

The maker of the Stanza app is LexCycle. LexCycle is owned by ... guess who ... Amazon, makers of Kindle!

Stanza supports a wide range of eBook formats. If you click on this link, you can get a quick look at many of the main eBook formats that are in existence. Stanza supports most of them, but not all. The catch is — and this is a very important catch — Stanza does not support any format (other than the so-called eReader format; see below) when there is DRM protection involved. And it supports eReader DRM protection only on the iPhone/iPod touch, not in its desktop version.

What is DRM protection? DRM stands for "digital rights management," tech talk for copy protection. If you buy a Kindle eBook from Amazon, for instance, it will typically (but not always) be DRM-protected, which means you can't copy it to your spouse's iPhone. DRM-protected eBooks are usually encrypted, such that you have to enter a code such a a username/password combination to make them readable.

So there are two general types of eBooks. Most or all recently published eBooks have legal copyright protection, just as do the print editions. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is one of these. These copyrighted eBooks accordingly cost you money to buy and are DRM-protected and encrypted.

The other type of eBook is free of charge and not DRM-protected. Classic books that are old enough to no longer be copyright protected are the stars of this category. Their eBook versions typically have no DRM protection. Often they are in the ePub format, an open format that Stanza and some other iPhone e-Reader apps (but not Kindle for iPhone as far as I know) can use. (An "open" format is one that is not proprietary and can be used by anyone who wants to. The Kindle format is, on the other hand, proprietary and cannot be used by eBook sources not licensed by Amazon.)

eReader from FictionWise is a free app for iPhone that reads mainly eBooks that FictionWise itself and eReader.com sell.

This part of the discussion gets confusing, so bear with me: eReader.com is the name of a website that sells eBooks that are in the eReader format and are usable by the eReader iPhone app. FictionWise.com is the name of a website that likewise sells eBooks in eReader format usable by the eReader app.

Often, these two sources sell exactly the same eBooks. Both companies are owned by Barnes & Noble ... the bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain whose online store is in competition with Amazon.com, makers of Kindle. As endorsed in July 2009 by B&N, the eReader format is designed to allow DRM protection, putting it in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle format. The free B&N eReader app for iPhone (see below) uses the same DRM-protected format, but it makes you buy eBooks directly from the B&N website, not from FictionWise.com or eReader.com.

The eReader format is discussed in the Wikipedia article Comparison of e-book formats (scroll about halfway down, or else click here). It is also called the Palm Digital Media format, since it was originally for PalmOS, the operating system used on Palm handhelds.

Files in the Palm Digital Media (or eReader) format have the .pdb extension (though when you are using an iPhone app to access them, you can't see the files as such, much less their filenames and extensions). The .pdb extension derives from the initials of "Palm Data Base." These files, when in an open version of the format that is not DRM-protected, are often referred to also as "Palm Doc" files.

To add to the confusion, the term eReader is being used as a generic term for any handheld device that reads eBooks. By extension, any cellphone, smartphone, or other mobile device that can (with the proper app) read eBooks is an eReader.

Furthermore, there is yet another eReader app for iPhone ...

The free B&N eReader app is very much like the eReader app I just discussed, except that it is hot-wired directly to the Barnes & Noble website. When you shop for books in the B&N eReader app, the app automatically opens that website in the iPhone's Safari browser. You then use the browser to buy any eBook you want and add it to the eBook library that is maintained for you at the website. The eBook will automatically sync to your iPhone as soon as you return to the B&N eReader app on the iPhone.

The same B&N eReader app exists for the Blackberry as well as for Windows and Macintosh computers, so you can download and read any e-Book that you have in your Barnes & Noble e-Book library on any of these platforms.

More information on iPhone e-Reader apps can be found here:

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone comes from Walter S. Mossberg, author of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal.
Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle's iPhone app comes from Nicole Lee, an associate editor at CNET.
Kindle is not the best iPhone e-reader comes from tech columnist Don Reisinger and appears at CNET. It discusses Stanza and eReader,in addition to Kindle for iPhone.
CNET's review of Kindle for iPhone contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
CNET's review of Stanza also contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
CNET's description (not a review) of eReader for iPhone likewise contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
The LexCycle website has more information about Stanza.

Hanlin eReaders Galore!

2009-09-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

I've covered Kindle eReaders Galore! and Sony Readers Galore!, the eBook readers from industry leaders Amazon and Sony. Now it's time for the Hanlin eReaders from Jinke Electronics.

Jinke doesn't sell these readers under its own brand name. You'll find them under such names as BeBook and EZ Reader.

Here is the BeBook, based on the Hanlin V3:

(The queen of hearts is shown for size comparison. The hotlinks above the images, when present, link to online reviews of the devices.)

Here is the just-introduced BeBook Mini, a.k.a. the Hanlin V5:

As of the date I am posting this, I can as yet find no in-depth reviews of the BeBook Mini/Hanlin V5, which is also sold as the EZ Reader Pocket Pro. The link above is to techie coverage of the device at the MobileRead Wiki.

Here is the Hanlin V9, a large-format eBook reader:

The Hanlin V9 is hard to find on the Web. Here is a comparison between it and the original Amazon Kindle.

Sony Readers Galore!

2009-09-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

As a way to read eBooks, the Amazon Kindle (see Kindle eReaders Galore!) has stiff competition from Sony and its Sony Readers. Here is the Sony PRS-505, shown with the queen of hearts to give an idea of its size:

(The hotlinks above and below take you to reviews of the respective Sony Readers at CNET.)

The PRS-505 is no longer available new from Sony. Here is a link to eBay listings of the device.

Here is Sony's PRS-300 "Pocket Edition" Reader:

The PRS-300 comes in navy blue (shown), rose, and silver.

The PRS-600 "Touch Edition" Reader from Sony looks like this:

The PRS-600 comes in rose (shown), silver, or black. It has no buttons because it uses a touch screen.

Coming in December 2009, the touch-screen Sony PRS-900 "Daily Edition" Reader will look like this:

(The size comparison with the queen of hearts is just a guess on my part, based on knowing that the diagonal measurement of the screen is going to be 7 inches.)

Because it hasn't hit the market yet, CNET hasn't reviewed the PRS-900 as of the date of this post. The hotlink above is to a page at The-eBook-Reader.com that previews it, and also discusses other Sony Readers.

Kindle eReaders Galore!

2009-09-27T14:19:00.001-07:00

Kindle eBook readers come in various sizes. Here is the original Amazon Kindle, now discontinued, shown alongside the queen of hearts for size comparison:

(Click on the device names above and below to read a CNET review of each device.)

Here for visual comparison is the Apple iPhone, likewise placed next to the queen of hearts:

The queen of hearts is the same size. The iPhone, which can run the Kindle for iPhone app that reads most of the same content as the Kindle, is a lot smaller than the original Kindle.

Here is the current replacement for the original Kindle, the Kindle 2:

The Kindle 2 is bigger than the original Kindle, so the queen of hearts looks smaller. (The Kindle 2 is being sold by Amazon under the name of just "Kindle," without the number, even though the original Kindle had the very same name. Amazon now calls the original Kindle the "Kindle (1st generation)." "Kindle 2" is used here and elsewhere as a term of convenience to distinguish the new model from the original.)

Here is the fuller-featured Kindle DX:

The Kindle DX is much bigger than the Kindle 2, so the queen of hearts is shown even smaller by comparison.

A selling point for the new Kindle and Kindle DX is their ability to purchase and download books wirelessly, via the Sprint cellphone network. Kindle calls it Whispernet; it's really the Sprint network, but you don't have to know that. Nor do you need a Sprint account, since Amazon arranges for your Kindle to get access to the Sprint wireless network for free, for this one particular purpose.

Most dedicated eBook readers can't yet access content wirelessly — you have to use a computer to buy the eBooks online and download them, then hook up a USB cable to transfer them to the reader.

It gets even better. If you have sprung for more thane one Kindle — say, one at work and another at home — you can synchronize them via Whispernet, using Whispersync. Any Kindle content can be wirelessly copied to up to six Kindle devices (including iPhones using the Kindle for iPhone application). Whispersync makes sure that current information such as the last page read for each eBook in your library propagates across all devices.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Kindle content can only be read on Kindle devices (including iPhones). Kindle eBooks use Digital Rights Management software technology — DRM — to keep you from being able to read them on, say, Sony Readers. If someday Amazon pulls the plug on the Kindle readers, or your Kindle device breaks and you decide to switch to a non-Kindle eBook reader, your Kindle content becomes unusable. (True, Amazon has stated that it plans to do for other iPhone-like mobile devices what it has already done for the iPhone; as long as you have an Amazon-blessed multi-function mobile device like the iPhone, this should never become a big problem.)

The Kindle family is the first eBook reader to get a lot of attention. Though Amazon has declined to announce its sales figures, it has been dubbed by its ardent supporters the "iPod of eReaders" because it has caught on so nicely. The brand name Kindle even threatens to become synonymous with the whole dedicated eBook reader category, which is expected to take off between now and 2013. If you want an eReader that, when friends ask about it, you can say "It's a ______" and hope for their instant comprehension, you'll probably fill in the blank with "Kindle."

* * *

As of October 7, 2009, Amazon has cut the price of the Kindle 2 to $259, from $299. In the near future, for an additional $20, customers will be able to get a Kindle version with international wireless access; the $259 version has only U.S. access.

Welcome to Viva eBooks!

2009-09-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

This blog celebrates eBooks!

eBooks are like regular books ... but they're electronic books. You read them using a computer or a handheld device like an iPhone or a Kindle. That's because electronic books are digital. They're computer files. You buy eBooks online — or find them for free, or borrow them from a public library — then you download them to your digital reading device and ... read them!

Here's a picture of a Sony eBook Reader:

Here's another model:

Here's the Kindle 2 reader from Amazon.com:

Here's a side-by-side view of the Kindle 2 and an Apple iPhone using the Kindle for iPhone app:

Note that the Kindle 2 image has been much reduced in size to match the iPhone image's height. The Kindle 2 is actually much bigger than the iPhone — see Kindle eReaders Galore! for more.

But you get the idea. Whether you use a dedicated reader like the Sony Reader or the Kindle 2, or a multipurpose handheld that doubles as an eBook reader as the iPhone does, you can carry not just a single book but a whole library in your pocket or purse. You can read any of your eBooks wherever you are. When you're done reading an eBook, you can remove it from the reader to save storage space, but still have access to it on your desktop computer or online, in case you want to read it again.

And eBooks are widely available today. Virtually every recent New York Times bestseller, for example, is available as an eBook ... for a price way lower than the hardcover edition. Most of the great classics, and many other books as well, are available as free eBooks.

***

Before I go any further, I'd better admit some of my biases. One is that I simply think eBooks are neat! The whole idea of being able to buy a book — or obtain one for free — and read it on a digital handheld device or on a desktop or laptop computer impresses me as way cool!

Another bias is that I think its even cooler when the handheld device has many other functions, besides reading books. For my money, the iPhone is a better eBook reader, for that reason and for others as well, than the Kindle or the Sony. Other smartphones such as a BlackBerry or a Palm Pre can also serve as eBook readers, so they're part of the same multipurpose-device scene.

Yet I realize that not everyone will agree. Some will prefer a dedicated reader, if only because it has a larger screen. Others, because the dedicated readers use for their screen technology not an LCD but E ink, which is easier on the eyes and also on battery life. So I'll do my best to cover both types of reader, multipurpose and dedicated — as well as the possibility of using laptop and desktop computers as eBook readers — in the posts I'll make to this blog, even though the reader I use is an iPhone.

Also, I'd better fess up to being almost completely Apple-centric. I have, as I say, an iPhone (and also an older iPod Touch which has been pretty much retired). Plus, an iMac 20" desktop computer and a MacBook Pro laptop, all on a wireless (i.e., WiFi) home network using a couple of Apple's AirPort devices as access points (i.e., routers).

So my knowledge of Windows machines and non-Apple WiFi devices is limited. Now, just about anything I can do on my Macs that use the Mac OS, as far as reading and storing eBooks, can likewise be done in Windows. Computer applications for reading eBooks are typically available for both OS's, as well as (often) for other OS's as well. But my hands-on knowledge is in the Apple Macintosh world only.

So, having admitted some of my biases, I'll close by saying: Happy eReading!