Marvin — the paranoid android

Ebooks and DRM vexes me. I originally thought that DRM or Digital Rights Management was all about copy protection. Wrong. It seems to be about locking your purchases into the one eco system. Most of us move around over the years; in my case from IBM to Acorn BBC B to Acorn Risc, then to Vaio PC then to Mac and now iThingy with IOS. I cannot read the first ebooks I bought on the PC. They are lost to me. Some sort of garbling of the words occurred in the files and then the proprietary software would ungarble it. Sadly, Microsoft dropped Reader and as my PC is long trashed, my books that I paid good money for are just garbage.

A better system used by another company was to use my credit card number as the password. I have been able to retrieve these files and now have removed the DRM. So I can now read my old books.

DRM is also present on Kindle books. Amazon uses a proprietary format that is not used by any other firm. They say that there is an app for all machines but you are still beholden to this company for access in the future. I thought that I owned the books I bought — is that the case?

You cannot sell, lend etc etc an ebook; you can with paper books

Amazon also deleted a copy of a book that people had bought from their Kindles. Did they ask for permission — no.

There are programs to get rid of DRM from .azw files (the Kindle format)

You then have control over your books. Catalogue them with Calibre, add metadata, change the cover, select short passages to allow quotes. You now own them, can make backups, add them to collections and if you like to collect authors' signatures, you can use Skitch to obtain them and replace the cover with the personalised variant.

Sadly, the way around DRM on iBooks no longer works.

This means that I cannot read my iBooks on the fantastic Marvin.

I like to organise my books the way that pleases me. I wish to have all my books on the one app. Why should I have books scattered around my ipad?

I have also gone off iBooks as my go to standard eBook reader. Why?

I made an error in setting the wrong synch parameter between my ipad and itunes while away from home. iTunes then promptly deleted all the books from my iPad; 1000+ .

I still had the files on my portable hard drive, but then had to resynch them back to the iPad. Guess what? Some covers and metadata did not transfer; my preferred order of books in the bookcase was lost and I lost (yet again) my highlights and annotations in my books.

Enough was enough. My frustrations were similar (but of a lower level) to those that prompted my move from PC to Mac. So I jumped to Marvin (the name must come from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) — it has a brain the size of a planet! ¹

My workflow:

• add the book to my wishlist on the Kindle store in Amazon
• wait until the price has fallen to below the cost of the paperback version
• buy the kindle edition on Amazon
• add to Calibre
• add metadata, fix cover and add to collection
• send to iPad Marvin app
• lie back and read book on the sofa

The days of running out of books on holiday are long gone. If you read all the books on your ipad then the Kindle store is just a few clicks away.

Come on Apple, get rid of DRM as you did for songs.