supporting your favorite authors without supporting your local IKEA

[firecat]

(Also another test of dreamwidth crossposting feature)

From a comment posted in James Nicoll's LJ here.

What I want to know is whether authors are getting more royalties due to there being no way to pass DRM'd e-books on to additional readers the way you can pass on a paper book.

I have my doubts, but if it turned out to be true I would consider getting one of the e-book readers.

(I'm buying as few books as possible because I have absolutely no space left in my house for books. The ones that don't come off my to-read shelf, I get from the library.)

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

What's the value of "good" here? For some values of "good", that's been met for some time, but for some other values of "good", I expect it's an impossible goal until they become significantly larger.

[firecat]

I need the PDF to be very resizeable so I can look at pdf knitting charts on it.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'd have to see how the Cybook handles that, but I have a friend who has one who I could ask if you like. The Sony resizes PDFs nicely, but only text -- if you choose a zoom level other than the original, all the graphics disappear. (This is a reasonable sacrifice for the type of use they envision, but obviously doesn't help you for your application.)

[firecat]

Yeah, I have my eye on the Cybook but I don't know how it handles PDFs, and it would be nice to know!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Okay, I prodded him to ask if he'd mind answering some questions. If he's okay with it, I'll put you two in touch -- probably on FB, if that's okay.

[firecat]

Yes, thanks!