Too many books

[julesjones]

I am at that stage of "Oh god I need to clean up this office" where I have to face the fact that I have Too Many Books. No, really, I have completely run out of room in the downstairs bookcases again, so if I want to put away the teetering piles of "have read it but not yet logged it", something's got to leave. Which means I have to decide what's going to Oxfam.

And once again I am wishing that the Big 6/5... publishers would quit with the DRM nonsense. I have here a box full of books I bought on remainder where I would be only too happy to give the publisher the full cover price in order to buy an electronic copy the next time I want to read it. But I want to *buy* it, not rent it. If it's locked to a specific device, or specific credit card, or a specific cloud account, it ain't mine.

One of the reasons this matters to me is that I've hit the age where I do not have endless vistas of reading time ahead of me. I went out for dinner last night, and found that my current pair of handbag reading glasses can no longer cope with restaurant menus in restaurant lighting. And at current reading rates, I have around ten years worth of books in this house, and that's just the fiction. I have a lot of books where I liked them enough that I might want to read them again, but may not get to them for a re-read in the next few years. I'm accumulating more of them. The reality is that "a few years" may take it past my personal reading event horizon. And many of these books are ones where I don't have much attachment to the physical object. I'd be perfectly happy to shift the physical object out of the door as long as I'm reasonably sure I can get hold of the text again if I *do* feel the urge to re-read. I have a lot more where I know I will want to re-read them but ditto on the physical object.

I think it's time to give in, install Calibre and learn how to use naughty plug-ins. It will make it a lot easier to put that treeware book in the Oxfam box.

Comments

[zeborah]

New Zealand's "Copyright (New Technologies As Long As They're Not Too New) Amendment Act" got a lot wrong, but one thing it got right was allowing people to remove DRM in order to allow usage which is otherwise legal. I consider it legal to read a book I legitimately possess on a platform of my choosing, so routinely remove DRM from any ebook I own. (Or borrow, I just make sure to remember to delete all copies when I'm done.) Strictly I also have to avoid borrowing/buying from sources which have terms and conditions which explicitly forbid removing DRM/TPM, because licenses are in addition to copyright, sigh.

Anyway - I use the Applescript port of DeDRM, which has a Calibre plugin version too.

[julesjones]

Thanks for that -- and I like that his tool does *not* support breaking DRM on library books, because IMO library stock control is one of the few legitimate uses for DRM.

[zeborah]

Doesn't support morally; it still works technically (at least on the Applescript version). I do it so I can read on my ereader that doesn't support DRM technically, and then I delete the files before the loan period expires.

[julesjones]

I'd do that as well if it was the only way to get a library ebook to work at all on my ereader, but I think I did persuade it to work without naughtiness the one time I tried. That was a couple of firmware updates back, though. IIRC.

[neyronrose.livejournal.com]

You may have already downloaded some, but there are many free classics that are available as e-books. Project Gutenberg has quite a number, and Google Play has free books in addition to the books they sell. I think it's books that are pre-1923 that are out of copyright and free. I got several that were boys' adventure stories, and books of teens fighting in World War I -- the Big War series by Ross Kay was one of those series.

I use Calibre to change books that don't have DRM from PDFs to e-pub format or vice versa. It takes more power than my computer has to watch the instructional Calibre videos, but the basics are pretty easy. This is from someone who isn't particularly techno-literate.

Good luck. I need to weed books out of my collection, too, but some are difficult to part with.

[julesjones]

I've been using Project Gutenberg since the days when I was downloading them onto my Palm IIIxe. :-) (And downloaded a stack of stuff for Predatrix to read when she was offline a couple of years ago.) But I'm surprised at how many people who read ebooks don't know about PG, so it's always worth pointing people there.

I eventually switched to FeedBooks as my first port of call for out of copyright material, partly because they had a very good formatting system that amongst other things would format pdfs to your specification re font size and screen size -- and one of the standard customisations they offered was for my Cybook Gen3. At the time Gutenberg's formatting was a bit clunky.

I haven't tried Google Books, but should really have a poke around. I know they have some scanned books that aren't available at Gutenberg yet.