@@joannalink6171 No, just no. TeX is pronounced like in technician. Not like in Expert. A quote from Donald Knuth himself (from the TeXbook): "Would you rather be a TeXnician or a TeXpert?" - The former being the right answer.
A friend of mine was a historian. When e-books first came out I showed one to him. He couldn’t get past the idea that you couldn’t give a book reference with page numbers. I explained that pagination was variable depending on the reader size and the font size, etc. He couldn’t accept a book that had no fixed page numbers!
Well, you've bought the right to store and read the book, not to distribute copies of it. This is stated in the terms of service and on the book itself at the time of purchase, so there's really nothing to argue about.
18:43 The book publishers themselves destroyed a lot of the promise of e-books, by trying to impose restrictions on them above and beyond those on physical paper books. And also trying to charge more for them. I can remember all those years of rising paper book prices in the latter 20th century, which the publishers blamed on the rising cost of paper, ink etc. So you don’t think that moving to a purely electronic format, getting rid of those consumables costs, would see a drop in the price. Not a chance.
Well technically you can remove DRM from most (legally bought) ebooks. It's kinda shitty, but it's not that hard and allows to read on any device and make backups. It's also interesting that books from some publishers (Tor books) are sold without DRM on Amazon because they requested not to put DRM on them, so the problem lies much deeper than B&N or Amazon.
I use DRM remover apps and then convert Amazon to PDF that I can use on my cellphone read or computer. PDF adobe you have chapters & page delineations and selection and per page read
9:08 As an editor, I've had to fix several epub files. The standard has evolved significantly, but the slightly older format is still used all the time. It's a little annoying, and some epub making programs sometimes even make malformed files by trying to conform to both epub 2 and 3, and maintaining that is difficult. I'm not sure what I wanted to say with this, but yeah. If you're making an ebook, please use the latest epub standard!
My uncle used to be a medical librarian. He said that when ebooks first came out, he saw the medical students reading the ebook on their iPad or whatever they had, but a lot had the physical book, too. So I asked him why? He didn't know but he thought the students were taking notes on their physical book but were watching animation and looking at graphics on their ebooks. At the time, he said, the animation was really crude, but it was there. And ebooks were locked down to prevent people from tampering with them, so it was impossible for the students to take notes and highlight passages in their ebook.
@dothemathright 1111 Well, if I want to write something next to a line, with an arrow pointing to something on that line it'd be rather hard for the ebook reader to know what exactly that drawing is meant to refer to. And it gets even harder when the text is on a different screen and the annotation needs to be repositioned. So you'd need to replace just writing on something with a system that allows people to take all the notes they want to while communicating the intent of their notes to the ebook. (drawing an arrow that points to a word isn't enough, the ebook needs to know that it is an arrow and what word it is pointing to. Same with marking text though that is a bit easier to do.)
Some issues I've had with ePub (not much experience with mobi) is that if you have a scientific reference with diagrams and math formulas there are often major problems displaying. -- I've seen one publisher get around this by creating specific CSS coding for each and every paragraph with a formula but it would be a whole lot easier if there were a way to incorporate mathML into an ePub which I'm not sure is possible (and if someone did it would most devices be able to read it)
@@black_platypus he thinks of a plan while the previous plan is falling apart. Pre-planning would be making a plan for the eventuality that you'd need it. MacGyver makes up plans as he goes along. (Quite often in situations that they should probably have predicted and pre-planned)
Mostly. It also defines acceptable file types and metadata representation. It doesn't allow everything HTML could do - it sets a lot of limits to ensure that even an e-reader with a very slow processor and limited RAM will still be able to process a book. Image formats, for example: JPG, GIF and PNG are allowed, but JP2 and WebP are not.
me: OK enough RUclips for tonight time to go to bed so I can get up early. Computerphile: "How do ebooks work" me: *opens ebooks on all devices at my reach *
(16:07) The 1984 book removal story was more than a Digital Rights Management issue. Kindle -lost the rights- [didn't have them in the first place] to sell the book in the [or never had them] -future- , so they decided to remove all the previously purchased copies from all of their e-readers! Which calls into question, when you purchase an E-book, what you are in fact doing is purchasing a license to READ that book. You do not own a copy of the book, unlike the hard and softback versioning model. That is to say, you own the paper and the ink of the book, but not the words, nor the story. But this is a major failing of purchasing today! You own a license to use the product, you do not own the product... This is a model that I tend not to agree with! DRM is a thing, and it is useful and important, however, the publisher or distributor should not be allowed to take that product away from you, once purchased. However, companies don't make any money selling paper, they do make money selling licenses to read said paper! Amazon was not thought of, and took quite a publicity thumping in the news, by deciding to remove the books as well as no longer selling it anymore!
It's not that Kindle "lost the rights to sell the book in the future". What happened is the person who put the book on the Kindle store *did not own the rights to the book at all* - it was *never* legal for them to sell the book.
Not the case if you have the ePubs locally on your system. Just like physical books, you own them forever, except for damage to yor hardware of course.
@@adityapathak5761 Can you cite your source for this information? It is a well-known fact that Amazon has removed books from people's kindle devices on several occasions. That would lend me to believe that you, in fact, do not own the files, only a license to read the files, until such time, as they see fit to remove them.
@@tekvax01 you seem to have insufficient knowledge. I only specified ePub format, there is no mention of Amazon in my comment. Amazon uses the proprietary azw3 format, but kindle also reads mobi format. It cannot read ePub (though you can convert ePubs to mobi via a software like Calibre). ePubs can be read on any desktop or smartphone, and cannot be controlled in any way whatsoever by Amazon, who doesn't use that format to sell books at all. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
I might add that I have sufficient knowledge to realise that Amazon likely can not affect your personal local files. But once again, that was not my point. My POINT was that Amazon *should not* be allowed to remove *ANY* files from your device. *(...and yes, I took offence to the "insufficient knowledge" quip.)
So when asked about the incident of copies of 1984 being wiped from people’s Kindles (and similar cases of disappearing ebooks), you went into an explanation of how DRM is used to tie a book’s encryption to a specific purchaser; but unless I missed something you didn’t actually cover what can make these ebooks disappear after having been downloaded. Or is it the case that ebooks are never permanently stored on the reader to begin with?
I would say that the books were stored there but Amazon made the kindles delete them. Which was kinda DRM so I guess he used that to explain that DRM in ebooks is a thing and explained how it is usually done.
In that case I would contend that the ability for a vendor to remotely send unsolicited commands to your device is not an issue with DRM specifically, but with proprietary software in general. You can’t completely trust software whose instructions you are not privy to.
@@RickBoat That's my default too, same goes for Video DVD & BlueRay. There's been more than one proprietary format which was rendered useless by the company going bust.
It depends. There are multiple DRM schemes, and they work in different ways. The only one I am personally familiar with is used for PDF rather than Kindle books, but I can tell you how that works, and I imagine whatever Amazon uses works in a similar way. Firstly, the books are encrypted. The key is unique to that download - every time someone downloads the book, they get a different file. The book doesn't contain the decryption key. When the device opens that book, it determines that it is encrypted and reads the unique ID for that download. It then contacts the publisher or store servers and provides two things: The unique ID, and the credentials of the person logged in on that device. The server than checks that the credentials are valid and belong to an account which has purchased that book and downloaded that particular file and, if all checks pass, sends back the decryption key. This key is then stored in memory - never written to removable media - and used to read the book. It'll be retained in the device memory to allow for reading the book offline in future, until either a set period of time is passed or the device next has to reboot. In this particular scheme, if the store wished to revoke a book, they would simply clear the 'has purchased this book' entry for every customer. People would retain the files, but eventually their key would expire and they would be unable to re-obtain it, so the file would be useless. This is not describing Amazon's DRM though - it's how a completely different DRM scheme works, one which is a third-party extension for the PDF format. I forget the name of it, and I can't look it up while I am supposed to be working.
Talking of books: Zen of Optimisation, Code Complete, Mike Abrash's Black Book, Petzold's Programming Windows, plus Agatha Christie and Colin Dexter... Doc Bagley has my bookshelf! Sadly no Bagpuss on mine though.
19:49 Correct layout of mathematical equations is a solved problem, surely. Consider that even HTML-based Jupyter notebooks can include correctly-rendered maths formulas, thanks to MathJax.
So how does it control where the page breaks are within a chapter to keep them suitable at different sizes? All of that sounds like it's only done the equivalent of adding a hard page break before each chapter.
The web has had a reader format for a while, I don't think it would take much to re-purpose it as an ebook format, it's not like you can't add special attributes using the data-* format specified and then let non-supporting browsers just treat it as they currently do, doing it that way ensures support everywhere and graceful fallback in the event it is viewed somewhere that doesn't directly support the format, IE6 for example would just see a bunch of blocks and flow it like so, a little awkward to read in that circumstance but not by much
"you can reflow PDFs" - yeah, AIUI there can be information about text in there, sort of metadata to say "this bit here is this character", given we can select and copypaste text from them nowadays. I don't know if it's the format or the readers, but it's not always been the case (or these enriched documents weren't always common).
HEY LITTLE DAVID! My cousin recommended me these videos so I'm trying to communicate with him through only these RUclips comments Please comment or like if you can so he'll see it
If I recall the original encryption for the first Kindles was standard ZIP encryption but using the serial# of the device. No idea if they still use that method.
As a programmer involved in the print industry for nearly 30 years, I find this needlessly complicated. XML has its place but I don't think this is appropriate to the (very simple) use-case.
Maybe it's because you've been involved for so long, your thoughts and understanding of everything surrounding such a concept are advanced enough for you not to need an explanation of that to fully grasp the entire situation. I haven't watched the video yet, by the by, I haven't the context of what XML is,
XML was the standard choice about 10-20 years ago. If they made it now it would be JSON. The idea was that these common vocabularies like DC would be useful for interoperability, and XML was designed to easily layer these vocabularies into each other with its namespaces, but in practice it largely turned out that it just made things more confusing to implement, because it's hard to reuse code for abstract ideas rather than specific behavior and you just ended up with incompatible interpretations everyone would need to handle differently anyway. Nowadays the focus is on heavily specifying specific behavior for a specific format, so reuse of formats is much more self contained, and doesn't need the kind of blending and layering of behavior XML is designed for.
In my experience any technical book is a mess as epub and I'd take a PDF any day. For fiction though (or I suppose any book without diagrams) epub is the better choice. We just need to work on getting rid of that encryption bug that got included by accident so we can actually own the books we paid for and manage our libraries the way we want to.
A technical book properly authored as an ePub would be perfect. The format isn't the problem, it's the production process - most technical books are written and edited primarily for printing. The PDF works because it is simply a direct copy of what the print edition would look like. The ePub version, if one is published at all, is usually just a sloppy conversion.
13:05 I think most (if not all) e-readers load all the chapters at once. After all, all readers I know are able to show the TOTAL amount of pages in the book. Can't do that when the reader only loads one chapter at a time.
I mean, each chapter is separated by a page break which means that it only needs to read each of them the first time it opens the ebook to calculate the "page numbers". It would only change if you update the reader settings (e.g. font size, line spacing), so when you are actually reading the book it can look at only the section you are on (perhaps preloading the next and / or previous section if you are close to either of them in the current section) and cache the page number calculations somewhere else.
@@Technizor That doesn't make sense. E-readers have more than enough memory to store the entire book. Reading chapters, then removing them again, and then read the compressed file again when the page numbers need to be recalculated or when you navigate through the book is completely unneccessary, it makes operation way too slow, and it drains the batteries. When an eBook is decompressed and in memory, it's way better to keep it there until the user selects a different book.
I know the Barnes & Noble Nook actually just approximates, based on *compressed* file sizes. I use a Windows/Android (/elsewhere?) reader called Freda, which you can set to do actual page count, but it takes an eternity any time you do something that causes a (re)flow in a large book. I've just set it to give accurate page count within a chapter, displayed next to chapter count (which might be the default setting-I don't remember).
Freda is an absolutely stupendous epub reader, especially (but not exclusively) for tablet PCs. It's also available on Android (I haven't checked iOS).
It's a nice format to hold various data on the same file to represent content on different devices including wide screen displays and TV. I like it. The only one question I have is how effective this format in holding a huge amount of pictures? I've hot a lot of documentation about Russian navy including large landing ships which contain pictures, schemes and other media content. The problem is that ebook reader that I have is unable to hold all this things and I have to store them somewhere in the cloud. I would like to keep them with me.
COM, ATL, Kruglinsky's Visual C++ book (which edition?), Petzold's Programming Windows on the bookshelf. Sacred ancient texts which I found useful in their day.
I always hate the "will this replace ...." questions. of course it won't, the key thing with software and formats is that having a large variety is good for everyone. CSS, HTML, and Javascript all still exist despite the fact that other standards have come along that do things differently but achieve the same goal
I am working on a new version of the digital book so wish me luck on that. There’s no need that the digital book is just a digital copy of a print book. There are better ways of representing information that takes advantage of the format this should be much easier to read technical books and allow you to better make sense of the content
Yeah i dont buy stuff if it comes with DRM. At least, not if its not at least 95% cheaper than what id currently pay. That goes for videogames just as much by now. Yes, i have an extensive steam library, but you know, people grow up eventualy and its only GOG now. Either you sell it to me and therby allow me to do what i could do with the physical copy such as making a backup or making a copy for a friend (that right to a private copy for a friend is legaly enshrined here in germany, de facto its gotten holllowed out by DRM and you arent allowed to break through protections to make a copy but you still have that right. You want me to pay for it protected by DRM? Give me 95% off and i *might* consider. And i dont mean 95% off of launch price, either. Even when i was still buying my games on steam, yes, some indie devs i knew i could trust, i bought it in early access if i allready liked what i saw, with AAA i waited at least a year or two becouse they have forced updates on people against their will more than once. In which case i can get at least 70% off of launch price anyways and have included in that all the addons or DLC as they call it now)
I signed up for amazons daily ebook deals email... sometimes you get great books on sale for 99p or £1.99 - i dont mind never owning the book at that price
What I think he's is saying is that newer epub3 capable readers can still display epub2 books just fine, and that fact is unlikely to change anytime soon, so there's nothing wrong with releasing new works in epub2 format.
that DRM bit was not really related to the kindle "scandal" though, that wasn't about encryption or antipiracy, it was literally amazon selling the book when they didn't have the rights, and then remotely wiping it from people's accounts again.
The HTML only contains the raw text. The fonts are outside of the HTML. Most text-only books only have body text and a few heading styles. You can actually have richer content if you want. And the font used by the reader can be very nice.
@@boyiscola whats the problem.? Using Css you can position ans size images fluidly with the ability to zoom and pan. Epub3 basically is html with css 2 plus limited javascript zipped into a single file.
I want more cellphones with e-Ink displays. I want to live in a world where when you buy a phone they ask what kind of screen you want with it. For people who only use their phone to text, talk, listen to music, or Google a quick question, you don't need more than a 16 grayscale display. Having a useful device with a 1 month battery life is completely possibly. You can just have another phone to watch videos and play games, or get a double sided phone with a 7 hour battery life screen on one side and a 1 month battery life screen on the other.
it's an interesting time when computer viruses can be isolated and characterized, but so-called human viruses have never been (let alone been proven to _cause_ diseases in humans). the metaphor, in other words, has more basis in reality than its referent!
please dont get me wrong ... I absolutly love most of the videos from this channel but................. man you guys like (LOVE) to talk talk talk ... 15 min in and I don't feel this title is "delivering whats on the tin" sorry but not sorry ... I'm an IT guy and NOW I know what its like for a person to listen to me to explain something technical ... thanks for that (discovered something new today about myself)
Smaller files are easier for ebook devices. Remember they are battery operated. Smaller html files can speed up the reading as well because not everything has to be loaded in memory.
@@erikvolger5631 You don't have to keep it all in memory just because it's one file. HTML is basically an XML, you can put tags in it that others don't care about, for example maps, or for ex. book specific tags, like new page (although that already exists for printers). With a little inspiration everything can be done but it's more profitable not to do it so you force people to buy your ebook reader.
Oh my god I loved it. please do a series on the LateX format
Don't you mean LaTeX?
Kinkay joking
@@Azraleee and pronounced "Lay-tech" or "Lay-teck"
@@joannalink6171 No, just no. TeX is pronounced like in technician. Not like in Expert. A quote from Donald Knuth himself (from the TeXbook):
"Would you rather be a TeXnician or a TeXpert?" - The former being the right answer.
@@Azraleee Which is what I said.
A friend of mine was a historian. When e-books first came out I showed one to him. He couldn’t get past the idea that you couldn’t give a book reference with page numbers. I explained that pagination was variable depending on the reader size and the font size, etc. He couldn’t accept a book that had no fixed page numbers!
Reference the position in the book... 72.6%. Etc.
Could also possibly reference chapter and paragraph.
Don't hardback vs. paperback vs. trade paperback have different paginations already?
@@TheGreatAtario yes, but not dynamically as you mmovr from device to device
@@RickBoat I mean, it still stops you from reliably giving a page number for reference…
Customers: "I've bought this [e]book so I now have complete control over how I use it, right?"
ebook publishers: "well yes, but actually no."
Well, you've bought the right to store and read the book, not to distribute copies of it. This is stated in the terms of service and on the book itself at the time of purchase, so there's really nothing to argue about.
@@knobtwista Apparently you can't edit them either, which is the most questionable part of those ToS.
@@VoilaTadaOfficial In reality, who will check and punish this kind of offense? :)
@@knobtwista control and copy is not the same.
Customer: Calibre!
18:43 The book publishers themselves destroyed a lot of the promise of e-books, by trying to impose restrictions on them above and beyond those on physical paper books. And also trying to charge more for them.
I can remember all those years of rising paper book prices in the latter 20th century, which the publishers blamed on the rising cost of paper, ink etc. So you don’t think that moving to a purely electronic format, getting rid of those consumables costs, would see a drop in the price. Not a chance.
The only thing I hate about ebooks is DRM. Not that I don’t support creators, but I want to have the freedom to read it on any device or app I want.
Well technically you can remove DRM from most (legally bought) ebooks. It's kinda shitty, but it's not that hard and allows to read on any device and make backups.
It's also interesting that books from some publishers (Tor books) are sold without DRM on Amazon because they requested not to put DRM on them, so the problem lies much deeper than B&N or Amazon.
I use DRM remover apps and then convert Amazon to PDF that I can use on my cellphone read or computer. PDF adobe you have chapters & page delineations and selection and per page read
Utterly agreed. I supporr publishers like Baen and Tor that refuse any DRM on their ebooks
Or something as simple as e-readers without an internet connection
@@klyanadkmorr But why not just get an ebook app instead of converting to PDF?
9:08 As an editor, I've had to fix several epub files. The standard has evolved significantly, but the slightly older format is still used all the time. It's a little annoying, and some epub making programs sometimes even make malformed files by trying to conform to both epub 2 and 3, and maintaining that is difficult.
I'm not sure what I wanted to say with this, but yeah. If you're making an ebook, please use the latest epub standard!
All of Steve's shirts look like if you stared at them really hard for long enough you'd see a sailboat.
It's a schooner!
I see a dolphin.
My uncle used to be a medical librarian. He said that when ebooks first came out, he saw the medical students reading the ebook on their iPad or whatever they had, but a lot had the physical book, too. So I asked him why? He didn't know but he thought the students were taking notes on their physical book but were watching animation and looking at graphics on their ebooks. At the time, he said, the animation was really crude, but it was there. And ebooks were locked down to prevent people from tampering with them, so it was impossible for the students to take notes and highlight passages in their ebook.
@dothemathright 1111 Well, if I want to write something next to a line, with an arrow pointing to something on that line it'd be rather hard for the ebook reader to know what exactly that drawing is meant to refer to. And it gets even harder when the text is on a different screen and the annotation needs to be repositioned. So you'd need to replace just writing on something with a system that allows people to take all the notes they want to while communicating the intent of their notes to the ebook. (drawing an arrow that points to a word isn't enough, the ebook needs to know that it is an arrow and what word it is pointing to. Same with marking text though that is a bit easier to do.)
Some issues I've had with ePub (not much experience with mobi) is that if you have a scientific reference with diagrams and math formulas there are often major problems displaying. -- I've seen one publisher get around this by creating specific CSS coding for each and every paragraph with a formula but it would be a whole lot easier if there were a way to incorporate mathML into an ePub which I'm not sure is possible (and if someone did it would most devices be able to read it)
0:21 I can hear George Carlin: "Pre-planned? Every plan is pre-planned! That's what a plan IS. Who would think of a plan AFTER the fact?!?" ^^
MacGyver
@@davidgustavsson4000 Huh? I don't follow...
Does MacGyver tend to think of plans after something's already over?
@@black_platypus he thinks of a plan while the previous plan is falling apart. Pre-planning would be making a plan for the eventuality that you'd need it. MacGyver makes up plans as he goes along. (Quite often in situations that they should probably have predicted and pre-planned)
@@davidgustavsson4000 aah, I see. Thanks for the explanation :)
The american military
So in a nutshell ePub is a file type which paginates the responsive html pages into an eBook standard? Nice!
Not really. It starts with the entire contents and navigation so not really pagination.
GifCo Ok, thank you for the clarification! I thought that it resembles pagination, but you are right.
a lot of file formats are actually zip files in disguise
It's looks to be more an XML format that's viewable in a browser because unrecognized tags are generally ignored by browsers.
Mostly. It also defines acceptable file types and metadata representation. It doesn't allow everything HTML could do - it sets a lot of limits to ensure that even an e-reader with a very slow processor and limited RAM will still be able to process a book. Image formats, for example: JPG, GIF and PNG are allowed, but JP2 and WebP are not.
me: OK enough RUclips for tonight time to go to bed so I can get up early.
Computerphile: "How do ebooks work"
me: *opens ebooks on all devices at my reach *
Didn't know what to do on a boring friday evening... so he read through the ePub 2.0 & 3.0 specifications manifest, the nerd is strong in this man
(16:07) The 1984 book removal story was more than a Digital Rights Management issue. Kindle -lost the rights- [didn't have them in the first place] to sell the book in the [or never had them] -future- , so they decided to remove all the previously purchased copies from all of their e-readers! Which calls into question, when you purchase an E-book, what you are in fact doing is purchasing a license to READ that book. You do not own a copy of the book, unlike the hard and softback versioning model.
That is to say, you own the paper and the ink of the book, but not the words, nor the story. But this is a major failing of purchasing today! You own a license to use the product, you do not own the product... This is a model that I tend not to agree with! DRM is a thing, and it is useful and important, however, the publisher or distributor should not be allowed to take that product away from you, once purchased. However, companies don't make any money selling paper, they do make money selling licenses to read said paper! Amazon was not thought of, and took quite a publicity thumping in the news, by deciding to remove the books as well as no longer selling it anymore!
It's not that Kindle "lost the rights to sell the book in the future". What happened is the person who put the book on the Kindle store *did not own the rights to the book at all* - it was *never* legal for them to sell the book.
Not the case if you have the ePubs locally on your system. Just like physical books, you own them forever, except for damage to yor hardware of course.
@@adityapathak5761 Can you cite your source for this information? It is a well-known fact that Amazon has removed books from people's kindle devices on several occasions. That would lend me to believe that you, in fact, do not own the files, only a license to read the files, until such time, as they see fit to remove them.
@@tekvax01 you seem to have insufficient knowledge. I only specified ePub format, there is no mention of Amazon in my comment. Amazon uses the proprietary azw3 format, but kindle also reads mobi format. It cannot read ePub (though you can convert ePubs to mobi via a software like Calibre). ePubs can be read on any desktop or smartphone, and cannot be controlled in any way whatsoever by Amazon, who doesn't use that format to sell books at all. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
I might add that I have sufficient knowledge to realise that Amazon likely can not affect your personal local files.
But once again, that was not my point. My POINT was that Amazon *should not* be allowed to remove *ANY* files from your device.
*(...and yes, I took offence to the "insufficient knowledge" quip.)
I may be paying too much attention to that line between lips
caught my attention as well
I read your comment before it appeared and I was wondering what you meant. When suddenly... 😅
No you aren't 😂🤣
I saw it and then I couldn't unsee
You mean the compression artefact?
So when asked about the incident of copies of 1984 being wiped from people’s Kindles (and similar cases of disappearing ebooks), you went into an explanation of how DRM is used to tie a book’s encryption to a specific purchaser; but unless I missed something you didn’t actually cover what can make these ebooks disappear after having been downloaded. Or is it the case that ebooks are never permanently stored on the reader to begin with?
I would say that the books were stored there but Amazon made the kindles delete them. Which was kinda DRM so I guess he used that to explain that DRM in ebooks is a thing and explained how it is usually done.
Amazon sends update instructions that say "delete this thing" which is why i remove drm from all ebooks i buy
In that case I would contend that the ability for a vendor to remotely send unsolicited commands to your device is not an issue with DRM specifically, but with proprietary software in general. You can’t completely trust software whose instructions you are not privy to.
@@RickBoat That's my default too, same goes for Video DVD & BlueRay. There's been more than one proprietary format which was rendered useless by the company going bust.
It depends. There are multiple DRM schemes, and they work in different ways. The only one I am personally familiar with is used for PDF rather than Kindle books, but I can tell you how that works, and I imagine whatever Amazon uses works in a similar way.
Firstly, the books are encrypted. The key is unique to that download - every time someone downloads the book, they get a different file. The book doesn't contain the decryption key. When the device opens that book, it determines that it is encrypted and reads the unique ID for that download. It then contacts the publisher or store servers and provides two things: The unique ID, and the credentials of the person logged in on that device. The server than checks that the credentials are valid and belong to an account which has purchased that book and downloaded that particular file and, if all checks pass, sends back the decryption key. This key is then stored in memory - never written to removable media - and used to read the book. It'll be retained in the device memory to allow for reading the book offline in future, until either a set period of time is passed or the device next has to reboot.
In this particular scheme, if the store wished to revoke a book, they would simply clear the 'has purchased this book' entry for every customer. People would retain the files, but eventually their key would expire and they would be unable to re-obtain it, so the file would be useless.
This is not describing Amazon's DRM though - it's how a completely different DRM scheme works, one which is a third-party extension for the PDF format. I forget the name of it, and I can't look it up while I am supposed to be working.
Talking of books: Zen of Optimisation, Code Complete, Mike Abrash's Black Book, Petzold's Programming Windows, plus Agatha Christie and Colin Dexter... Doc Bagley has my bookshelf! Sadly no Bagpuss on mine though.
19:49 Correct layout of mathematical equations is a solved problem, surely. Consider that even HTML-based Jupyter notebooks can include correctly-rendered maths formulas, thanks to MathJax.
Not to mention just exporting LaTeX equations to svg or something.
very interesting - I was never keen on opening the epub - now I don't have to - done on this video ;-)
thank you
Would love to see something like this for Troff
So how does it control where the page breaks are within a chapter to keep them suitable at different sizes?
All of that sounds like it's only done the equivalent of adding a hard page break before each chapter.
@@linux666, What happens when you double the font size?
The web has had a reader format for a while, I don't think it would take much to re-purpose it as an ebook format, it's not like you can't add special attributes using the data-* format specified and then let non-supporting browsers just treat it as they currently do, doing it that way ensures support everywhere and graceful fallback in the event it is viewed somewhere that doesn't directly support the format, IE6 for example would just see a bunch of blocks and flow it like so, a little awkward to read in that circumstance but not by much
"you can reflow PDFs" - yeah, AIUI there can be information about text in there, sort of metadata to say "this bit here is this character", given we can select and copypaste text from them nowadays. I don't know if it's the format or the readers, but it's not always been the case (or these enriched documents weren't always common).
HEY LITTLE DAVID!
My cousin recommended me these videos so I'm trying to communicate with him through only these RUclips comments
Please comment or like if you can so he'll see it
If I recall the original encryption for the first Kindles was standard ZIP encryption but using the serial# of the device. No idea if they still use that method.
How long before the Twitter hack is a Computerphile/Tom Scott video?
Keep making the great and informative videos!
This my favorite video so far. I wonder if you are making a more detailed video about kf8 amazon book format?
Check the book (EPUB 3 Best Practices) by O'Reilly.
Why is the spine's idref random? Is it because of DRM? I see that linear=no at 13:44. What's that about? Thanks!
As a programmer involved in the print industry for nearly 30 years, I find this needlessly complicated. XML has its place but I don't think this is appropriate to the (very simple) use-case.
Maybe it's because you've been involved for so long, your thoughts and understanding of everything surrounding such a concept are advanced enough for you not to need an explanation of that to fully grasp the entire situation. I haven't watched the video yet, by the by, I haven't the context of what XML is,
I think it's meant to be modular, easy to read for the reader and human readability is always plus. XML fits them all so why not use it.
What would your design be for this use case?
XML was the standard choice about 10-20 years ago. If they made it now it would be JSON.
The idea was that these common vocabularies like DC would be useful for interoperability, and XML was designed to easily layer these vocabularies into each other with its namespaces, but in practice it largely turned out that it just made things more confusing to implement, because it's hard to reuse code for abstract ideas rather than specific behavior and you just ended up with incompatible interpretations everyone would need to handle differently anyway.
Nowadays the focus is on heavily specifying specific behavior for a specific format, so reuse of formats is much more self contained, and doesn't need the kind of blending and layering of behavior XML is designed for.
In my experience any technical book is a mess as epub and I'd take a PDF any day. For fiction though (or I suppose any book without diagrams) epub is the better choice. We just need to work on getting rid of that encryption bug that got included by accident so we can actually own the books we paid for and manage our libraries the way we want to.
A technical book properly authored as an ePub would be perfect. The format isn't the problem, it's the production process - most technical books are written and edited primarily for printing. The PDF works because it is simply a direct copy of what the print edition would look like. The ePub version, if one is published at all, is usually just a sloppy conversion.
Sometimes you want to read a little bit on your phone...
pdf is unreadable on a phone. I still prefer pdf on pc tho
PDF is also used by engineers to share and archive drawings.
13:05 I think most (if not all) e-readers load all the chapters at once. After all, all readers I know are able to show the TOTAL amount of pages in the book. Can't do that when the reader only loads one chapter at a time.
I mean, each chapter is separated by a page break which means that it only needs to read each of them the first time it opens the ebook to calculate the "page numbers". It would only change if you update the reader settings (e.g. font size, line spacing), so when you are actually reading the book it can look at only the section you are on (perhaps preloading the next and / or previous section if you are close to either of them in the current section) and cache the page number calculations somewhere else.
@@Technizor That doesn't make sense. E-readers have more than enough memory to store the entire book. Reading chapters, then removing them again, and then read the compressed file again when the page numbers need to be recalculated or when you navigate through the book is completely unneccessary, it makes operation way too slow, and it drains the batteries. When an eBook is decompressed and in memory, it's way better to keep it there until the user selects a different book.
I know the Barnes & Noble Nook actually just approximates, based on *compressed* file sizes. I use a Windows/Android (/elsewhere?) reader called Freda, which you can set to do actual page count, but it takes an eternity any time you do something that causes a (re)flow in a large book. I've just set it to give accurate page count within a chapter, displayed next to chapter count (which might be the default setting-I don't remember).
Any recommendations for epub file readers on windows 10?
(Currently I have Adobe Digital Editions, but this program doesn't work properly.)
Have you checked out Calibre? It's free software. I've been using it for years.
Freda is an absolutely stupendous epub reader, especially (but not exclusively) for tablet PCs. It's also available on Android (I haven't checked iOS).
It's a nice format to hold various data on the same file to represent content on different devices including wide screen displays and TV. I like it. The only one question I have is how effective this format in holding a huge amount of pictures? I've hot a lot of documentation about Russian navy including large landing ships which contain pictures, schemes and other media content. The problem is that ebook reader that I have is unable to hold all this things and I have to store them somewhere in the cloud. I would like to keep them with me.
Just need a reader with more memory. Any tablet with a few hundred gig of storage will deal with it. Also you CAN use compressed images in an epub.
Use lower res images, and also compress the images?
very well explained !!!
COM, ATL, Kruglinsky's Visual C++ book (which edition?), Petzold's Programming Windows on the bookshelf. Sacred ancient texts which I found useful in their day.
I always hate the "will this replace ...." questions. of course it won't, the key thing with software and formats is that having a large variety is good for everyone. CSS, HTML, and Javascript all still exist despite the fact that other standards have come along that do things differently but achieve the same goal
*roff is so underrated nowadays. Fantastic language.
I'm using a Tolino, which uses the EPUB format.
I am working on a new version of the digital book so wish me luck on that. There’s no need that the digital book is just a digital copy of a print book. There are better ways of representing information that takes advantage of the format this should be much easier to read technical books and allow you to better make sense of the content
LibGenesis is the greatest thing that happened to sharing knowledge after Wikipedia
And the many other ebook sites of even more dubious legality.
I love reading comments on YT.
Better than any ebook.
😊
That Michael Abrash book on the shelf :-)
Would be a shame if someone used a script and screen capture for every page and ran it through an image to pdf text convertor.
Really miss captions.
Awesome video
Thank you for sharing this.👍
15:36 I suppose CSS animation features are right out.
I was expecting Professor Brailsford when I saw the title!
Guess this is going in a different direction ^^
Thanks for the content!
1:18
Johannes Gutenberg: "Am I a joke to you?"
Yeah i dont buy stuff if it comes with DRM. At least, not if its not at least 95% cheaper than what id currently pay. That goes for videogames just as much by now. Yes, i have an extensive steam library, but you know, people grow up eventualy and its only GOG now. Either you sell it to me and therby allow me to do what i could do with the physical copy such as making a backup or making a copy for a friend (that right to a private copy for a friend is legaly enshrined here in germany, de facto its gotten holllowed out by DRM and you arent allowed to break through protections to make a copy but you still have that right. You want me to pay for it protected by DRM? Give me 95% off and i *might* consider. And i dont mean 95% off of launch price, either. Even when i was still buying my games on steam, yes, some indie devs i knew i could trust, i bought it in early access if i allready liked what i saw, with AAA i waited at least a year or two becouse they have forced updates on people against their will more than once. In which case i can get at least 70% off of launch price anyways and have included in that all the addons or DLC as they call it now)
What ever happened to the .lit format... Very small file size... Yet readable . Is that no longer the point ?
.lit doesn't support animated gifs - New world with people wanting new things, so we got a new file format.
.lit isnt smallee than .epub and its a seamless conversion if you use calibre
16:00 I can’t imagine videos would work on readers with e-ink screens, though.
Boox onyx note air, u can “play” android games, albeit with a bad framerate
Wow, there are other ebook formats than .fb2 we all used to???
fb2 распростронён лишь в рунете. Хотелось бы совместить его и DocBook
I signed up for amazons daily ebook deals email... sometimes you get great books on sale for 99p or £1.99 - i dont mind never owning the book at that price
in russia it's very common to see .fb2 ebook files
First talks about why HTML is unsuitable because it doesn't support pages, then opens up an .epub and every chapter is an HTML file ^^
7:37
the problem is shiping 100 files along the html plus it is convenient that they can encrypt it
"I've dusted off my kindle" Yeah I know that feeling. It's not a useful as I thought it was.
Where's caption!
I thought this video would tell how eBook code gets distributed and edited.
"a few minutes"== 20 minutes
20 mins is nothing, unless you have the attention span of a gnat.
It was all worth it for his digression about "viruses."
I just saw how the host looks like for the first time
I wandered lonely as a tomato
Philip Seymour Hoffman...
I’m still waiting for your great IPv4 rant
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
nice
Nice
5:03 That's... html?
"If you don't want the extra capabilities of epub3, you'll probably be fine with epub2." This sentence tells me nothing new.
What I think he's is saying is that newer epub3 capable readers can still display epub2 books just fine, and that fact is unlikely to change anytime soon, so there's nothing wrong with releasing new works in epub2 format.
yay
DayZ you say
What about Arabic books?
that DRM bit was not really related to the kindle "scandal" though, that wasn't about encryption or antipiracy, it was literally amazon selling the book when they didn't have the rights, and then remotely wiping it from people's accounts again.
Great
Why do ebooks still look like internet from 1995?
xmlns=2007 - Close :p
They dont. They can be very beautiful
The HTML only contains the raw text. The fonts are outside of the HTML. Most text-only books only have body text and a few heading styles. You can actually have richer content if you want. And the font used by the reader can be very nice.
It’s excellent that fonts can be chosen, my issue is with pictures/figures/tables.
@@boyiscola whats the problem.? Using Css you can position ans size images fluidly with the ability to zoom and pan. Epub3 basically is html with css 2 plus limited javascript zipped into a single file.
For a moment I thought I read "How Ewoks bork"
Lol
B0rk! B0rk b0rk b0rk aaroooaragh b0rk b000000rk.... B0rk b0rk ararragah.
Moore Eric Miller Steven Hall Jose
Davis Angela White Joseph Gonzalez Sandra
I want a program that allows creation and editing EPUB on Android
try Calibre
@@erikvolger5631 Thanks. It's a great program that doesn't run on Android (unless it's changed recently)
*hopefully in a word processor*
I just want uni to start back up again so I can see Steve :(
I want more cellphones with e-Ink displays. I want to live in a world where when you buy a phone they ask what kind of screen you want with it. For people who only use their phone to text, talk, listen to music, or Google a quick question, you don't need more than a 16 grayscale display. Having a useful device with a 1 month battery life is completely possibly. You can just have another phone to watch videos and play games, or get a double sided phone with a 7 hour battery life screen on one side and a 1 month battery life screen on the other.
dont wait to buy that phone. invent it
Davis George Brown Anthony Young Lisa
it's an interesting time when computer viruses can be isolated and characterized, but so-called human viruses have never been (let alone been proven to _cause_ diseases in humans). the metaphor, in other words, has more basis in reality than its referent!
Am I the only one who thinks XML style formats look ugly? Was binary so bad?
Binary is unreadable. At least you can make XML "by hand"
@@ukyoize json has entered the chat
please do a video on reflowing pdfs into epub
fck ebook drm
Jackson Dorothy Williams Brenda Robinson Paul
Jones Betty Gonzalez Frank Walker Deborah
please dont get me wrong ... I absolutly love most of the videos from this channel but................. man you guys like (LOVE) to talk talk talk ... 15 min in and I don't feel this title is
"delivering whats on the tin"
sorry but not sorry ... I'm an IT guy and NOW I know what its like for a person to listen to me to explain something technical ... thanks for that (discovered something new today about myself)
he looks young tho ngl
Yada yada, this all could be done with one big HTML file, there are so much redundant stuff in IT it's ridiculous!
Smaller files are easier for ebook devices. Remember they are battery operated. Smaller html files can speed up the reading as well because not everything has to be loaded in memory.
@@erikvolger5631 You don't have to keep it all in memory just because it's one file. HTML is basically an XML, you can put tags in it that others don't care about, for example maps, or for ex. book specific tags, like new page (although that already exists for printers). With a little inspiration everything can be done but it's more profitable not to do it so you force people to buy your ebook reader.
11
3rd
Lawyers use pdf because reasons. Hm.
*laughs in free pdf*
By Azura, by Azura, by Azura!