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Comment by g947o | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related:

Amazon has a huge fake ebook problem as well.

I recently spent $2 buying an ebook that is still copyrighted. It is cheaper than the first item in search result that has more reviews. I thought, it's an ebook, what could go wrong.

Upon opening it, I found that the formatting is completely off. Words are concatenated. It was impossible to read.

A few days later, I noticed that the book is gone from Amazon store. I cannot open the link from my order page, and I cannot even ask for a refund. I had to ask customer service to do that. I guess this was a pirated book that was taken down.

It was a shame Amazon did not even notify me of this.

And I hope this doesn't happen on kobo or elsewhere.

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That has been a problem since the beginning of ebooks --- I happened to be browsing the Sony e-book store on a day when they offered a $10 credit, so I bought a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ --- it was so badly formatted and so riddled with errors I had to go to a library to consult a print copy so as to fully enumerate all of the typos in it. Since then I was issued a check for the price-fixing lawsuit, and that purchase was transferred over to a different e-book store where there was a better copy (though I haven't had occasion to re-read it since).

That said, I've found at least one typo in every ebook I've read, even _Dune_ which I didn't get around to buying until it had been available in the Kindle store for _years_ ("pogrom" was mis-rendered as "program" and there was a formatting error in the glossary). I've been reporting all them using the interface, but not sure if they ever get fixed...

That said, it's not limited to electronic texts --- my second printing of J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_ also had a typo in it, but at least for that I was able to reach an editor at the publishing house who assured me that it would be corrected in later printings.

I was happy a few years ago when I found a site selling DRM-free EPUBs on many topics I am interested in, but with no prior warning last week they sent out an email saying they no longer do that and instead you have to buy and read books through some special app.

They could at least have warned a few days in advance. I would have stocked up on several lifetimes of books to read. A bit skeptic about post-2022 books anyway.

Going back to kindle isn't very tempting unless there is some reliable way to export their books again. Looks like it will be going back to paper books and reading books from Gutenberg (as I do a lot anyway).

It's not very hard to remove the DRM from Kobo or Google Play Books.

For reference for Kobo in particular: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

I recently threw an LLM at it to turn the Obok plugin into a statically linked CLI in Rust, it works great.

What site?

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