Friday Report

[adair]

I am moving forward in my effort to make space so Mike can sleep on our couch when he visits. The stacks of books are much to big to sort and make adequate decisions to keep or not, so I bought some banker's boxes and am filling them to stack in the garage. I am screening a little as I pack the boxes, and pulling out a few that I plan to read right away, but most will be brought in after Mike leaves, a box or two at a time for major work.

Making book decisions is hard. A friend does much better than I, and has collected ebooks of most of those she wants to keep. I suspect a lot that I want to keep will not be in ebook format, but some undoubtedly are. I may investigate some books, and see if I can DeDRM them so I can use them on any reader. I am happy to pay for ebooks, but I really do not want to be restricted to one brand of reader. I prefer epub as a format, but B&N epubs are restricted to B&N software. Apple books are epub; I have not tested their restrictions so I can put them on Calibre and move them to any epub reader I have.

Comments

[tanaqui]

I hope being able to bring the books back a box or two at a time makes it easier to work through them!

If you use Calibre, you should check out Apprentice Alf's tools/plugins for DRM removal: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

[sauscony]

That's great progress. A box or two at a time seems much easier to deal with than all the books at once.

I agree about DeDRMing ebooks. I have an Android phone and tablet, so I could get Kindle and Nook reader apps, but my eyes prefer to read an e-ink ebook reader. I have an old Sony Reader though and unless the books are on Project Gutenberg or the Baen Free Library, it's really hard to find books I can read on it. I too like epub the best of the ebook formats. Several of my favorite authors have published either ebook only novellas or the books might come out a year or so later in expensive hardcovers. I'd love to buy the ebooks and support the authors, but if I can't read the book, what's the point?

[fred_mouse]

I must admit to a deep suspicion of epub, in that while I have something to read them now, I don't trust I will in a decade, or two, or three. In part this is because I work with electronic data, and even this week have had a query from a work mate as to whether I know anything about a potentially defunct data format in files a bit over a decade old.