dkeats.com

Vusi discovers disabled books: an ebook metaphor Tweet
252 days ago

This is the world of ebooks translated to the paper book world.

Vusi walked into the BooksForReaders shop in the Centralgate Mall in Johannesburg. The shop is the largest bookstore that Vusi has ever seen. It must have over half a million books.

Browsing the aisles, Vusi found a thriller by Tokahara Joshi that he would like to read. The cover is very attractive and the description of the story already has him gripped. He flipped open the book to check the writing style of the author, but much to his surprise, every page just had what appeared to be random alphabet characters, and a large message that he has not paid for the book yet.

"Interesting," thinks Vusi. "The book is smart!"

A little more flipping reveals a few segments of text that are not garbled, but they are not in the part of the book that Vusi would normally scan. Still, he liked the idea of the story, so he took the book to the till to check it out.

At the till, Vusi encountered a number of obstacles.

"Have you purchased one of our book readers?" asked the clerk.

"No," said Vusi laughing. "I read my own books."

"All books in our shop are printed on special paper, and the words only become visible on the paper if you hold the book in one of our readers," said the clerk.

"That's crazy," said Vusi. "Why on earth would you do that?"

"It is to prevent unauthorised reading of our books," said the clerk. "There are some people who actually pass on the book to someone else when they are finished reading. We want to prevent this piracy."

"But I always give my books to my sister to read when I am finished with them. You mean I won't be able to do that with your books?" he asked.

"No, said the clerk. We want to prevent that kind of piracy or our books. We believe we will sell more books that way, because now your sister will also want to buy the book when you tell her about it," said the clerk.

"When we are finished with the book, we always give it to a poor school so the kids have something to read,' said Vusi.

"You can't do that kind of piracy with our books," said the clerk.

"Piracy!" muttered Vusi.

Vusi decided to go for it, so he picked up a reader since they were almost free. The clerk scanned Vusi's thumbprint and entered it into the reader so that Vusi could unlock the words on the paper of his new book.

"Would you like to purchase one of our carry bags, or do you already have one?" asked the clerk.

"I don't need a bag," said Vusi. "I already have a backpack. I will just put the book inside it."

"I am sorry," said the clerk. "Our books are only licensed to be taken out of the shop in one of our carry bags. If you try to carry it in anything else, the words will disappear from the paper."

"That's weird," said Vusi.

"Not weird. We just want to make sure that our content remains under our control."

"Its still weird, but give me one of your carry bags then," said Vusi.

At that moment, Vusi's girlfriend Penelope appeared in the shop. Vusi paid for the bag and then handed it to Penelope, whereupon the bag suddenly turned into dust and fell to the floor.

"What the..," cried Penelope and Vusi at the same time.

"I am sorry sir," said the clerk. "Our bags are not transferable. You cannot give it to anyone else. If you buy one of our books, you must carry it yourself and you cannot give someone else the bag. The bag only works with you, and only if you hold it in your hands."

"Oh!" said Vusi, suddenly realising what ridiculous ideas are contained in these new books. He hands the book back to the clerk.

"Keep it," he says. "And keep my money. Your books are not worth owning. I wouldn't own it anyway."

Vusi and Penelope walk to Inclusive Books, just a little further down the mall. They buy ordinary paper books. The kind you can read, give to someome else to read, and donate to a school when you are done. The cost is more-or-less the same, the value considerably higher.

Have a watch of these videos:
Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, talks about copyright, creativity and the essential nature of books. From an Ottawa International Writers Festival (www.writersfestival.org) fall preview event at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities on September 28, 2009.

Part 1:


Part 2:


If you tweet about this topic, use #ebook_ripoff as a hash tag.

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New #Chisimba filter for Twitter: TWEETS Tweet
255 days ago

I have added a new filter for Chisimba to work with Tweets from Twitter. The filter is called TWEETS, and it works with two sets of parameters, the type of listing and the value of the query. Currently, there are two types of listings 'user' and 'query'. The filter takes the format:

[‍TWEETS:user=username]
or
[‍TWEETS:query=query_code]
where query_code is any Twitter Json API query. Examples of legitimate queries
[‍TWEETS:query=chisimba]
[‍TWEETS:query=to:dkeats]
[‍TWEETS:query=from:dkeats&phrase=chisimba]
[‍TWEETS:query=from:dkeats+OR+from:charlvn]
[‍TWEETS:query=chisimba&to:dkeats]

For example,
[‍TWEETS:query=from:dkeats]
will show my latest Tweets as shown below.

As another example, to show Tweets related to Chisimba, we can use
[‍TWEETS:query=chisimba]
which produces the results below.


To use this filter you need the latest versions of the moduless: twitter, htmlelements, and filters. The latter two are in core, while twitter is in the modules repository. Unfortunately, the Tweet! jQuery plugin doesn't behave exactly as expected for the more complex queries. I will get in touch with the Tweet! developers to see if we can fix that. Best to stick with simple queries for the time being.

There is still some work to do on this one.
1. add the ability to specify the number of tweets and the size of the avitar.
2. add the ability to provide for live queries using juitter (can also be used to make Twitter context aware)
3. fix it so that hashtags can be used

The Tweet! plugin can be found at http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ .

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Getting Ubuntu ready for a Postgres install of Chisimba 3 - symlinks Tweet
259 days ago

How to prepare your developer system for a Chisimba install using Postgres as the database. This clip covers setting your Postgres permissions and symlinking your developer checkout of Chisimba into /var/www. This is my personal preference, not necessarily the only way to set up a developer machine.

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Imagine if the colour red were patented: Freedom to Innovate South Africa Tweet
259 days ago

Tell your friends and colleagues about Freedom to Innovate South Africa! Download and share this campaign poster on your website or blog, or use it as your profile picture on your social networking sites, and link it to http://ftisa.org.za.

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A personal journey into the murky and screwed-up world of eBooks Tweet
260 days ago

Earlier this year I bought a Sony Touch eBook reader. I bought it for reasons other than reading eBooks for leisure, but since I am on holiday and feel like reading a few books, I thought I will buy a couple of eBooks for the Touch. It was thus that I entered the murky and confusing world of eBooks. As an activist for digital freedom, I knew about some of the issues regarding eBooks, but I never experienced them first hand before.

Naive and ill informed, I thought foolishly that the publishing industry might have learned a little from the music industry. Apparently, they have not. My experience at trying to buy an eBook illustrate the problems. I was particularly interested in Philippa Gregory's book 'the Other Queen' since I was just finishing reading 'The Virgin's Lover'.

Since I have a Sony reader, it seemed logical to go to the Sony eBook store at http://ebookstore.sony.com. After all, I assumed there would be fewer problems with eBooks bought from Sony for a Sony reader. Boy, was I ever wrong in a big way! I discovered that I can only buy books there if I am running the Windows or Mac operating systems and download special software for those operating systems. Funny, the Sony Touch runs Linux, but I cannot buy books for it if I myself choose to run Linux, even though I can connect to the reader and copy things to it from Linux without problems. Sony #fail, #epicfail!

I searched for other sites, but none of them specified the Sony Touch as something with which they worked. I went to the Waterstones website (I bought my last five paper books from their Kensington High Street store in London). It couldn't determine whether any books I bought there would work with the Touch, but the site directed me to the Adobe site, which said the software that I needed was only available in North America.

OK, I thought, let me try the Calibre website, the Free Software programme that I have used to manage content on the Reader to date. I discovered that most purchased eBooks have DRM (a form of digital disability that deliberately removes all of your rights normally arising out of Copyright), which means that they are disabled by design, and cannot work without some ridiculous fiddling. This deliberate disability prevents Calibre from opening eBooks.

Then I learned that you can still use calibre to store and transfer purchased eBooks to the Reader.

"OK, that's good news," I thought.

However, I then found out that I must first authorize my reader on a Windows machine with Adobe Digital Editions. Once this is done, EPUB books transferred with Calibre will work on the reader. But why on earth would I want to do that? I just seems utterly and totally absurd. What is the point? Besides, I don't currently have a machine with Windows, I don't want to run badly damaged, virus infested, expensive, time-wasting operating systems and software. Besides, I threw away the Windoze CDs that came with the device anyway.

This disabled by design is seriously flawed. Imagine it in cars! Imagine buying a car that will only work on roads built by certain companies. Imagine that the car will only start if you park it in certain driveways. Imagine that you could only drive the car if you were wearing blue pants and a yellow shirt. Imagine that the car switched off if you took passengers in the back seat and refused to allow you to move. Would you buy it?

Well that is exactly what you are buying if you buy most eBooks that are disabled by design. I don't like it. It is cruel, manipulative and unnecessary. 

I am thinking seriously of taking the Reader out and smashing it with a hammer, recording the video and putting it up on YouTube. What else is such a disabled piece of junk good for in a world gone mad with greed and stupidity?

All I can think of is demonstrating what MIGHT be possible in a different world from the one we live in, and of course reading really old books - which is not a bad idea. It's just not what I wanted. I wanted to read a relatively recent book, just read it. It would have been nice to have the same rights as I have with a paper book. I can't, and I wouldn't.

If you want to learn more about digital restrictions management visit http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

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Getting Ubuntu ready for a Postgres install of Chisimba, Part 2 Tweet
260 days ago

How to prepare your developer system for a Chisimba install using Postgres as the database. This video covers checking Chisimba out into your home folder in a folder that you create called 'chisimba'. This is different from the normal Chisimba install, and has nothing to do with Postgres, rather with my preferences for setting up multiple instances for developing from a common code base.

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Getting #Ubuntu ready for a #Postgres install of #Chisimba Tweet
261 days ago

How to prepare your developer system for a Chisimba install using Postgres as the database. This does not cover the Chisimba install itself. Just installing all the bits you need. The rest is the same whether you use Postgres of MySQL.

 

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Short guide to installing modules for #Chisimba using a svn checkout Tweet
262 days ago

This is a short guide to installing modules for Chisimba using a svn checkout  made by David Janks at Wits.

 

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Installing #Chisimba on Ununtu 9.10 Tweet
263 days ago

 This is a guide for beginners to Ubuntu and Chisimba on how to install Chisimba as a developer. It was made by David Janks at Wits.

 

 

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