> >Most of what publishers are calling "ebooks" these days are in
> >stupid encrypted files with special readers that aren't very "e"
> >at all--they can't even be read in speech browsers or with
> >your visual settings, and they can't be searched, indexed, or
> >linked. Out-of-copyright books are generally available as plain
> >text (and therefore usable), as are a few selected books like
> >Engines of Creation and The Ultimate Resource. King's new book
> >is somewhere in between--no encryption, but it's in pseudo-
> >usable PDF format.
>
> Napster.
That's one way to get around the limited-distribution problem,
and moving up to something like Freenet can help a bit with the
legal attacks, but you still have to pull the text out of the
file to start with. That's relatively simple for PDF, but some
of the encrypted formats make it very tricky--and some of them
might even store page images as graphics, making it an OCR job.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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