How not to lose money on the first purchase of a book in the EPUB format and what is wrong with the book trade

Just buying the first e-book in the format EPUB
I understood why many still prefer the paper version.

First, the main warning for which the post was written.
Do not upload a book to your computer / gadget,
DRM protected in EPUB format before
how not to get Adobe ID and not tie it to your device!
Communicating with another potential client instead of a profitable order ended with a sweet conversation and a question from his side: “Why, having such achievements and such experience, have you not yet started a full-fledged own business of introducing not your own ideas, but your own ideas into life?”. To finally find the strength to start, he suggested that I “blow up my brain” with the help of an absolutely incredible book about startups and even threw a link to this miracle. The seed fell on the fertilized soil and I decided, if not to read this work, then at least look through. I’m not too sure of the possibility of transferring the western experience to the sovereign Russian reality, but in today's circumstances I’ve been thinking more and more of the way of a considerable part of my acquaintances and starting my business behind the hill, taking advantage of the benefits of Globalization.

So, I clicked on the link with the firm intention to make a purchase and then ran into freedom of choice. The book was already available in two versions: printed and electronic. From the desire to save money and to commit violence against my own brain as quickly as possible, I chose the second one and decided, for the first time in my life, TO PURCHASE FOR MONEY what can be downloaded for free in the torrent. It turned out that there are pitfalls on this path and not quite where you expect to see them. As a result, the first purchase may take a lot more time than going to a nearby bookstore, and at the exit for your considerable money you will receive a limited-use product. About how to minimize the harm from the purchase process and will be discussed under the cut. Those who decide to read the article to the end will also get acquainted with my thoughts on the current state of affairs in the field of selling electronic books, and if the topic affects someone other than me, then discuss it in the comments.

The first acquaintance with the EPUB and the seller.

')
Of course, the smell of fresh typographical paint, the soft rustle of pages in a comfortable warm chair is great, but metaphysics is metaphysical, and the Christmas tree is a pity! Plus, the e-book can, in theory, be purchased much faster than the paper version, and if you are not dealing with fiction, there may be a number of additional undeniable advantages associated with the interactivity of the product.
So decided, get the electronic version. You get it, because you want to be a law-abiding citizen, thank the authors for their titanic work and you are too lazy, risking to get a worm as a reward, to waste time searching and downloading the pirated version. But it turns out, reality presents us with its surprises.
One of the most common formats now is perhaps EPUB, well, at least I ran into just such an option. An attempt to buy this book on Ozone brought me to the site http://www.litres.ru/ . Well, so be it. There I learned about two possible options - a paper version and an electronic one. The second was slightly cheaper - thirty percent. Reluctantly, I chose it, but first I decided to read the trial chapter, the presence of which is the rule of good taste when selling books. In my case, despite the very serious price, the seller did not bother to lay out half a page. Well, okay, then I buy a book on the recommendation, for me it is not so important. But here there is a fad "table of contents", at least I will understand the structure of the book. With joy I click on the link and get only the title of the book as a reward. Hm I reject the idea that the seller completely scored on the buyer, because I was promised that the book would blow up the brain. Perhaps one of the ways she is going to achieve this is the lack of a table of contents. The truth is very embarrassing that if you believe the annotations on the site, the book takes exactly one page. No more no less. Well, maybe it's written on papyrus?
And finally, I notice the little inscription “This book is protected by DRM technologies”. Then I finally understand what I “got”, but I still have no idea how. Subconsciously I feel that one should stop and surrender to the pirates, but the national Russian peculiarity, the craving for walking the rake, does not allow me to do this, and instead climb to Wikipedia, from where I recognize:
Technical means of copyright protection (TSZAP; English DRM - Digital rights management) - software or hardware and software tools that intentionally limit or impede various actions with data in electronic form (copying, modifying, viewing, etc.), or allow you to track such actions. DRM is a set of access control systems.
It must be admitted that the seller did everything to finally keep the buyer from the reckless act of buying. He honestly warns on the site that the purchased book will be unavailable for reading on most reader gadgets, so popular in Russia, and for reading on smartphones and tablets you will have to install additional software and register (as it later turned out to be long and tedious).
No matter what, I still pulled my credit card out of my wide legs and started a purchase. At first everything went well, except for the fact that when buying I had to enter some exotic data that I have never been asked for at other sites.
However, instead of my book in the basket, the funds transferred to my account in liters.ru and I had to re-search the book and after that make a purchase. But this is the right word of trivia, but finally you can read the purchase! Less than a few minutes. It was not there. The most fun has just begun.

Registration is above all!

On the site, instead of a link, there is an inscription stating that the download is blocked. What a sting. Well, at least one eye to look at your volume! I decide to start using the “Read online” button and get a statement instead of the text that the site is not going to support reading this format. The question is, why in this case and not to block this button!
So there is no other way, we must try to download the purchase somehow on the computer and read there, bypassing the blocking. As it turned out, the blocking is formal and is removed by ticking the box “To download the book, confirm that you have an Adobe ID account.” But it’s not without purpose. The seller simply wants to disclaim responsibility for the case if you download the file (as I foolishly did) ahead of time. Next, the most important.
Looking ahead, I repeat. In no case do not upload a book protected by DRM technology in the EPUB format to your computer / gadget before you get the Adobe ID and link it to your device, otherwise the book will be read only on this device in the future. Even if you later implement this binding, it will not save the situation.
Applicable to e-books technology DRM protection allows you to theoretically install and read the book you downloaded on six devices, but crackers want to make sure that you install it only on devices that belong to you personally. By default, they consider that you personally own only the computer (gadget) to which you downloaded, but still leave you the opportunity to “tag” other devices like yours. There is only one way offered for this kind of tag - you have to register with Adobe, get an Adobe ID account there, and then link this record to a computer. Binding to a computer is an obligatory step, because you can register at least a dozen records for yourself, but only one can be attached to one computer and nothing else. How to register and carry out the binding is described in sufficient detail here:
http://www.litres.ru/pomosch/kak-skachat-i-chitat-knigu-s-drm-na-komputere/
Moreover, the procedure for obtaining the ID can be combined with the installation of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) - the program in which you will be forced to read this book. Personally, I have no problems with registering IDs and installing ADE, which cannot be said about linking to a computer.

Revenge offended time.

For all my attempts to perform this operation, as described in the link above, the program gave this window:

Here, for the first time, I have to praise the sales site - they were not too lazy to create a chat room, in which even around midnight I, strangely enough, managed to find a bored employee. For a start, she suggested that I restart my computer, which naturally did not bring any result other than wasted time, then I was advised to deal with the system time.
Further dances with a tambourine really showed that the problem lies precisely in this. On the one hand, irresponsible attitude to the time of our beloved government, and on the other hand the incomparable greed of gentlemen promoting DRM technology, who apparently care very much for you to not read their book outside the country of purchase, and perhaps even your native time zone. At the same time, they, like the wind descriptors, do not want to track the tricks of our government, which switches to winter time in summer, sometimes to summer winter, then freezes it, then defrosts it ...
In general, I had to not just choose a time zone that corresponded to Moscow, but also implement exact synchronization with the time on the Internet.


Picture made for Win XP

As a result of this operation, the time began to differ for a whole hour from the current Moscow time, but the “probable enemy program” came from this into unprecedented delight and tied my computer to the ID on the first attempt!
Finally, I was able to open a purchased book, but I could no longer read it on any other device besides my computer. Moreover, in the near future I am going to make a long overdue serious upgrade of my computer - put an additional screw and expand the memory to at least 12 Gig, which will lead to parting with my good old XP, which I can't see for more than three and a half. It's not a fact that the capricious book will recognize this updated device and will want to read on it.
I can say that the book turned out to be really explosive, having blown up my brain before reading.

Or maybe something is wrong at the conservatory?

Maybe I do not understand anything in business, but in my opinion the excessive greed of gentlemen using DRM technology harms their own business.
Complicating the process of downloading books, tying the use of the purchased product to the region, they reduce their profits. Sellers are getting huge profits from sales are not seeking to improve service. Book publishers do not have an incentive to expand the capabilities of electronic books that could be a couple of orders of magnitude more convenient for a user than printed publications.
Buyers who have paid HUGE money for the book are not only very limited in the use of gadgets on which they can read it, but also have to use to read programs with a very poor interface and functionality at the level of programs of the long-forgotten Windows 3.1
Instead of worrying about user friendliness and reducing the cost of the product, excess profits from sales are spent on endless lawsuits against copyright infringers. Gentlemen do not want to face the truth - they themselves stimulate piracy by putting numerous shots to their customers.
Monopoly record companies have become proverbs in tongues, but even they are children compared to eagles as booksellers. The difference between the cost of buying a QUALITY licensed disc and going to a concert is 10 or more times, and the difference between well-designed paper and tuff electronic copies of books is 30-40, well, a maximum of 50 percent !!! And this is despite the fact that the cost of production and distribution of electronic copies can be thousands, if not tens of thousands of times lower than when printing a paper version.

Here are a few measures that I would apply in the place of fat, lazy book-selling cats to increase the volume of legal sales and ultimately increase their own profits.

• Radically would reduce the price of e-books without a multimedia context - ten times compared to the printed volume.
• I would introduce voluntary certification of books by class, depending on the facilities provided to the user. At the same time, the book should be marked with icons indicating what kind of functionality it has and the buyer will decide which version to buy - pure text, text with illustrations, or he is willing to pay extra for a multimedia and interactive component. For business, technical, children's literature, this can greatly enhance the convenience of working with a book. Certification is voluntary - you do not want to not certify, but then you have to sell the book cheaper, because buying the reader is at risk.
• Part of the superprofits would be allocated for holding open contests to develop convenient and functional official reader programs for various operating systems.

Here are some additional features:

• The presence of a table of contents containing links.
• The availability of a trial free chapter so that you can understand the style of presentation and the quality of the translation, at a minimum.
• Hyperlinks.
• High quality images.
• Multimedia features - sound and animation.
• The presence of sections (for example, program code) that could easily be copied from the book.
• Tasks with hidden solutions and tests on the material passed.

The above measures in my opinion could stimulate the creation of a completely new level of books for which users would agree to pay more. Reference books, children's and educational literature, technical works would not be just a book, but our friend and teacher. Acceptable prices would increase circulation and make pirated copying irrelevant. It's easier to pay fifty rubles than to risk catching a virus, or getting problems with the law.
And what do we have now? Licensed books are the same pirated ones, just read them less conveniently and you have to buy a cat in a bag, since in most cases it is impossible to read the content before buying.
The result - the sellers lose profits, the authors of fees, buyers for huge money get a cat in a bag, which is very inconvenient to use for its intended purpose. Only pirates and a huge staff of lawyers, earning their bread with caviar in the fight against pirates, are jubilant. Is this the right approach?
Unfortunately, this is only a dream. In the meantime, the first desire that arose from my acquaintance with a paid book was to scan and translate at least to DjVu. At least so that you can read without restrictions yourself, and yet someone will not stop at this and put it into the torrent.

PS I referred this article to the educational material somewhat arbitrarily. It is rather from the category of teapots from teapots and is intended to alleviate the shock of the first experience of exploring a new product. Beginners very often make the same mistakes and only they can describe them in all colors. For the pros who write an article on the same topic from the height of their experience, the “little things” that beginners face are simply not visible.