A Dance With Dragons and E-book Piracy

On Tuesday, after 6 long years, the 5th book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series was finally released.

(revel in its awesomeness)

When I was a lad, I would enjoy purchasing a new book, holding it in my hands, hearing the crack of the spine as I opened it for the first time, and having the smell of the pages drift up to my nose. But most of all, I enjoyed adding a book to my collection where I could admire the display and pat myself on the back for having such excellent taste.

Moving to Japan changed me. Knowing my time in Ogimi was limited, I learned to live lightly. Having a book collection is an inconvenience for someone who has to move around a lot. When I moved here, I literally had two suitcases filled with books. After that endeavor, my book collection that I had been so proud of began to seem like an unnecessary luxury.

I decided to part with my books. As I finished a book, I would either give it to another JET or mail it to someone who had requested it on BookMooch. This was a fine system because I was able to get rid of the books I had brought with me one by one.

Then, two Christmases ago, I visited the US and bought Stephen King's Under the Dome. Coming in at over 1000 pages, it was a beast of a book. Not only did it take up all the space in my carry-on, but trying to snuggle up with it, on an airplane no less, proved to be impossible. After I finished, I listed it on BookMooch. That left a bad taste in my mouth because I had bought a $30 book, read it in a month, and then paid the shipping fee to give it away.

Fast forward to earlier this year, and the release date for A Dance With Dragons was announced. I knew I was in trouble. After waiting 6 years since the last book, there was no way I was going to wait another year for it to come out in paperback. Like Under the Dome, the book is a door-stopper at over 1000 pages.

I knew it was time to buy an e-book reader.

I went with the new Nook for a couple of reasons: it has touch screen, has no physical keyboard, and it fits in my pocket. Also, it is built on Android and supports the ePub format. The ePub format seems to be what the standard for e-books is heading towards. There are many arguments for a standardized format, which I won't get into here, but think of it this way: when I buy a music CD, it will play in any CD player I put it in. When I buy an e-book, I want it to do the same and work on any device, whether it is a Nook, iPad, or Kobo.

If I had gone with a Kindle, it would have been like buying a CD that will only play in, say, Sony CD players. I don't want to be forced to use a platform, and with the Nook, I thought that not only would my money be going to supporting the ePub format, but I would also be able to read my books on other devices should I ever choose to upgrade to something new.

Oh, how ignorant I was...

As the release date for ADwD approached, I pre-ordered it at Barnes & Noble...only to have my order cancelled. After e-mailing a customer service representative, I was informed that even though I was using a US debit card with a US billing address, I was not physically in the US, and therefore I could not buy the book. Purchased e-books can be downloaded anywhere in the world, but if one tries to buy a new one with a non-USA IP address, they will be denied.

Because I couldn't use the B&N store, I had to come up with some other ideas.

1. Download the book through the iBookstore.

The iBookstore on iTunes uses ePub, and all ePub books are the same, right?

No.

After some intense Google-ing, I discovered that Amazon was not the only company to lock its e-books to a specific device. I came to the following scientific conclusion:

If I could not put an e-book purchased from a different store onto my Nook, surely I could...

2. Convert with Calibre.

Calibre is a nice little program that organizes my books on the computer and transfers them to and from my Nook. It can also convert between many various formats. I figured I could download a Kindle or iPad version of a book and just convert it to ePub with this program.

It turns out I can't do that either. E-books purchased from Amazon, Apple, and B&N have a DRM lock on them, and Calibre can only convert non-DRM'd books.

I found methods for stripping the DRM from e-books, but the process seemed like way too much trouble for something as simple as buying a book. In the end, I decided that I would just...

3. Pirate it.

I didn't want to do this. I have been a fan of this series for a long time, and I wanted to give Mr. Martin my money. I tried searching several 3rd party e-book sites, but none of them were selling the book. At this point, I was fed up. I had done a lot of work to find a way to give the book publishers my money, but the system would not let me. It was like I had bought a CD player, only to be told I was not allowed to purchase the CD I wanted to play on it.

A friend suggested that if I pirate the book, I should send Mr. Martin a check. I thought that was a good idea...but I don't own any checks, and I don't know how he would feel about Japanese Yen.

Then I had one final idea...I found a friend online who lives in the US and asked her to log into my B&N account and purchase the book for me. She did and it worked. It took all of two minutes, and when it struck midnight on the east coast, I logged in and download the book.

Success!

I understand that e-book technology is new and the book companies might be a little confused as to what the best business model might be, but I'm sorry, the current one sucks. 

One would think that they would not be so obtuse as to copy the old music industry business model, but that appears to be exactly what they are doing. CD sales plummeted until iTunes made their music DRM-free. Now we are seeing 1,000,000+ digital album sales for the first time.

So, to the book companies, if you don't want my money, I'm not going to go through the trouble of giving it to you again. Until there are DRM-free books, or unless an author has a Paypal link on their home page, I will pirate at will.

Well, at least until The Winds of Winter comes out...