Bb RealTech

I love books on history, and have read several on my Kindle. I hope to someday write book reviews, or perhaps use quotes from the books in my future writings. Kindle facilitated this capability by providing functionality to highlight passages, add book notes, and especially, save a Kindle "page" to a clipping file.

By saving passages from the book to a text file, I can copy and paste quotes, without worry about mistyping the text. In addition, if my Kindle died, though I may not have the books, I'd at least have my notes.

My routine would be to read a book, such as A Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s or Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, and once finished would copy the clipping file to my computer, delete the one on the Kindle, and start fresh. However, while reading Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, about a third of a way through, when I went to save a page with a passage of interest to my clipping file, I received an error:

Unable to save clipping. You have
reached the clipping limit for this item.

Clipping limit? This was the first I'd heard of clipping limits.

I deleted the clipping file, but it made no difference. Per suggestions on an Amazon thread, I also deleted a metadata file associated with the book, but again, had no luck.

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Not all books have a clipping limit, and the limit is not the same for all books. However, there is no way to find out if a book has a clipping limit, or how big it is, unless using software to 'crack' the DRM (Digital Rights Management) for the book.

That I'm peeved is to put it mildly, as that was one of the Kindle features I found most valuable. It was also one of the features I've used to sell the reading device to others. And now I'm afraid to make notes or save clippings without wondering if I won't hit the limit. Contrary to what Amazon or the Publishers must assume, I'm not going to use the "Save as Clipping" feature to copy the entire book—I'd rather get the book from the library and photocopy each page, because it would be easier. And I can't wait to find out what happens when several college students hit this limit with their fancy, and expensive, new large form Kindle DXes.

More importantly, Amazon does not mention this limitation with the sales material for the device, though the company does tout the "Save as clipping" capability.

Bookmarks and Annotations

By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. Using the new 5-way controller, you can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use.

Yet there's nothing about clipping limits: in the documentation, or the web site. This, to me, is a deceptive business practice. Making an assumption that people will somehow "know" about the limits because of copyright laws is especially weak, because the amount you can copy seems to be arbitrary, and we readers have no way of knowing what these limits are.

Even more disappointing, the clipping limit also applies to DRM free books from Amazon, according to a MobileRead forum entry.

update I counted the clippings from "Banana...", and discovered that the clipping limit for this book has been set to 40. That's Kindle clippings, not book pages. Following is a typical clipping:

busy, modern family would consist of bananas sliced into corn flakes with milk. It wasn’t just the recipe that broke new ground. It was also the coupons, pioneered by the company, packed inside cereal boxes (redeemable for free bananas that the cereal companies, not the fruit importer, paid for). The company made sure that children knew about bananas, too. It set up an official “education department,” devoted to publishing textbooks and curriculum materials that subtly provided information about the fruit. United Fruit also added a new element to its political strategy. If military action was impractical (U.S. troops might be unavailable or force precluded by situations on the ground), Central America’s geography became an ally. The region’s countries were small and easy to move between. There were plenty of natural ports on both the eastern and western coasts, and bananas could be grown just about anywhere land could be cleared and a railroad could be laid. If a government became particularly balky, the company would simply threaten to go next door. But one thing United Fruit couldn’t control was nature. Not long after bananas added themselves as a third party in cereal and milk, the troubles growers were beginning to have with an aggressive malady became public. One headline in The New York Times read: “Banana Disease Ruins Plantations—No Remedy is Available—Whole Regions Have Been Laid Waste and Improvements Abandoned by

update I've tried the Perl tool mobi2mobi on several of the books I have, including those with an expired copyright downloaded from Amazon, one that is copyrighted and with DRM, and one that is copyrighted, without DRM.

The values I'm getting would seem to be percentages, not absolute clipping instances. So a value of 0xa, which is hex for 10, would be 10 percent, not 10 instances. Non-DRM books return a clipping limit of 0x64, which is hex for 100, which would be, if my guess is accurate, 100%. This matches our expectation for a non-DRM enabled book: that we can highlight, or clip pages up to 100% of the content.

That the value is a percentage may have been obvious to some of you, but the idea of that Amazon would enforce such an arbitrary limit, and without notice to the customers, is still new to me.

Note, also, that Amazon is attaching what seems to be a default value of 10% to books that are no longer covered by copyright, but which you can download for free from Amazon. Looks like Amazon is also attaching DRM to these books, too. My suggestion would be to get these books elsewhere, like feedbooks.com, and hope they aren't so limited.

I don't know if I'm the only one seeing a white page on the site, but since the upgrade to 6.11 in Drupal, I've had problems accessing all my sites. The problem could also be my hosting, and I'm currently exploring the possibility of moving. However, the problem has become much, much worse with the 6.11 upgrade. If you've had problems accessing the site, let me know.

I now have seven Drupal installations, though two are "stealth". One I'm using to write my new book. I stripped away all styling and then designed a Drupal theme that supports ePub. I'll be adding a second theme that supports Mobi/Amazon, and possibly a third that supports a PDF book. One of the advantages of being comfortable with XHTML is that you can take your mad XHTML markup skillz to the eBook world with only a little effort. Once I've published the book, and know the themes are working 100% I'll upload them to the Drupal theme site, for people who want to use Drupal to write eBooks.

I will say that self-publishing is a different world now. There are so many resources. One wall I hit, though, was getting an ISBN. I could swear these were free at one time, but now, ISBNs in the US have been "contracted out" from the government to a privately owned monopoly.

You don't need an ISBN for an eBook, though some sellers prefer ones. But if you're going hard copy as well as eBook, which I am, you'll have to have one. You can also "borrow" an ISBN from some distribution companies, but they don't recommend this approach, because you're then stuck with them as publisher. You can also buy a single ISBN, but it's a lot cheaper just to buy a block of ten, and then if you need a new ISBN for another edition, or a new book, you have it.

It's just that having to buy an ISBN wasn't a cost I was expecting. Again, these are free throughout the world. Only in America do we contract what should be universally accessible to monopolies. How else to explain our cable systems?

Regardless of the unexpected expenses, there's something very rich, and satisfying, about having some control in all aspects of my book. O'Reilly is a good publisher, and the company has been generous with me, but I've always felt out of the loop with my books. For instance, I didn't know my books were going to be published to the Kindle until after the fact. I didn't know they were all being released as DRM free ebooks on the Kindle until after the fact. I'm happy about the books being offered DRM free, but I sure would have appreciated a quick note before hand.

(Not to mention having some say in the cover, formatting, and subtitles...)

No, the success or failure of a self-published book is really dependent on the author. This is both scary, and wonderful.

O'Reilly now has DRM free versions of some of its book available for the Kindle. Among the books are my own Painting the Web, Learning JavaScript, second edition, Practical RDF, and Adding Ajax.

O'Reilly has been offering DRM free versions of the books at the O'Reilly site, but it's only been lately that authors have been able to provide DRM free books at Amazon. Why is this important? Because all you have to do is change the book's extension to .mobi to read the book on your Sony or other MobiPocket capable eBook reader. In other words: Some Amazon store books can be read on other eBook readers other than the Kindle, iPhone, and iTouch.

Teleread and MobileRead have started a campaign to make these DRM free books more easy to find. If a book is DRM free, just tag it "drmfree" at the Amazon site. It tickled me to be the first to tag my own books.

My books being offered DRM free doesn't change how I feel about copyright. I still believe in the importance of copyrights. My books are still copyrighted, at least until the publishers and I decide the time is ripe to release them into the public domain. I am dependent on the royalties I make from my books, and I lose money through piracy of my books. But I have never believed in DRM, which only hurts the legitimate owners.

I'm currently working on my first self-publishing book, which I'll be releasing as a Kindle, as well as in other formats. Regardless of how I distribute the book, not one version of the book will have DRM.

Being a Kindle owner, I've been following, and involved in, many discussions related to the recent DMCA take down notice that Amazon served on the eBook friendly site MobileRead. I'm too tuckered from arguing in other forums to say much now. At this time, all I'm going to do is list out pertinent articles and forum threads, and write my first impressions of the events.

The take down notice was first detailed in MobileThread

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

A quick backgrounder: kindlepid.py is a small Python script allowing you to derive a Mobipocket-compatible personal identifier (PID) for your Kindle reader. This PID in itself has nothing at all to do with reading any copyrighted content. It is only used to make legitimate e-book purchases at stores other than Amazon's.

We believe in the freedom of speech and we encourage you to continue expressing your views and thoughts on tools like kindlepid.py. We only ask you not to provide any how-to instructions, source codes and/or links for obtaining kindlepid.py.

Several people and organizations have weighed in on the issue, including Slashdot, BoingBoing, CNet and so on. You can find links to the articles in TechMeme, but I also linked stories as I found them in a thread I started in the Kindle owner's forum at Amazon. Current entries to that thread: 127 and counting. Some interesting, and differing, opinions are shared.

What puzzled a lot of people is, why now? The application that Amazon is unhappy about, kindlepid.py, has been out and in use, and discussion item in Amazon forums since December of 2007. So, why now, and why serve a DMCA on MobileRead, rather than Google Apps, or other sites were the software is actually hosted?

A little hunting around found the most likely cause of this current foo-flah: another thread at MobileRead. The timing of the thread and the DMCA seem too close not to be related.

I'm not rigidly against DRM, though I would be happy to have my own books DRM free. (Painting the Web is available without DRM at O'Reilly.) As we all know, DRM typically harms legitimate owners, and does little to prevent piracy. Regardless, I can understand the use of DRM...but it should be based on a consistent standard the industry shares, so that if I buy a book at one eBook store, it will work with my Kindle; and an Amazon eBook will work on devices other than Kindle. Anything else is death to the industry. The industry is just too new, and too small, to be fragmented by such walls.

The Kindle is based on the MobiPocket Mobi digital format. Because of this shared format, Mobi books will work on a Kindle. However, Mobi books also have a PID-based DRM system that requires you provide your device's PID if you want to buy a book. What kindlepid.py does is provide Kindle owners that PID. It does not bypass the DRM; it doesn't circumvent copyright—it just gives us the ability to buy books in other stores.

More importantly, libraries are now incorporating digital book loans, but they're based on DRM-enabled PDF files, or DRM-based Mobi books. If we want to "check" a book out at our libraries for use on our Kindle, we have to use both kindlepid, to get the PID, and kindlefix, to set a flag so we can read the book on our Kindles.

The book loan still expires at the end of the loan program. We can still only read the book on the given device. We've not broken either law or copyright or DRM. And since Amazon refuses to work with libraries, about the only way Kindle owners will have access to library loans is the use of this software.

The DMCA move by Amazon was especially disappointing to me, personally, because one reason I felt comfortable with buying a Kindle is that I trusted Amazon, I trusted Jeff Bezos, not to keep the Kindle jailed forever. I assumed that over time, the company would open both the Kindle, and the book store. I believed that what Amazon did for MP3s, it would eventually do with eBooks. Well, I can see with the DMCA, my trust was misplaced. I guess one can never get too old to still be naive.

I still like my Kindle, but I'm no longer comfortable buying books for it from Amazon. Luckily there are free ones that Amazon "allows" me to load on to the Kindle. As for new books, I've returned to paper books, via library loans. Too bad, too, because my library just doesn't carry all the books I want.

I've also taken copious notes from the books I do have on the Kindle, for that day when the device breaks. I strongly doubt I'll ever buy another eBook reader, much less another Kindle. Not until the industry gets its act together.

Like I said, more some other time.

Writings from the TOC (Tools of Change) conference this last week have been made into a free eBook at O'Reilly. I've already downloaded it to my Kindle, and others have downloaded it to their Stanza application, but you can read it as a PDF on your computer. Heck, you can print it if you're feeling contrary. A description of the TOC and a link to the book, via TeleRead.

You don't have to provide a credit card, but you do have to provide your mailing address, as you are going through O'Reilly's check out system. I used St. Louis at first, which caused the system to cough, gasp, and fall fainting to the ground.

FYI systems people: it is St. Louis. It is not Saint Louis. We are across the Missouri river from St. Charles, not Saint Charles. We're north of St. Genevieve, not Saint Genevieve. Forget what Google Maps has, we're St. Louis.

Signed Shelley "there is a second 'e' in my name" Powers. Who lives in St. Louis.