A cautionary tale for authors and agents

You know, I shove a tanto in my gut and bleed all over the interwebz about my issues with embedded font evangelism in the name of book designer job security, then I get over it and I think I’m done.

Well, Penguin Books has reminded me this morning that not only am I not done, I’m now pissed off as a reader and not as a writer/publisher/e-book mark-up-er, except . . . this is really not about Teh Pretteh. It’s about DRM. I’m fighting the wrong battle. The book designers can go figure out their own lives. I’m a reader first, dammit.

You Can Count on Me novella by Roxanne St. Claire, in this anthology
You Can Count on Me novella by Roxanne St. Claire, in this anthology

Way back in the day (six months ago), Penguin offered the novella “You Can Count on Me” by Roxanne St. Clair as a free PDF download you could snag from Ms. St. Clair’s site. It was part of a Christmas anthology called I’ll Be Home For Christmas and features characters from her long-running series called The Bullet Catchers. I believe there are currently three books in this series, with probably more to come.

Now, I don’t like romantic suspense and I don’t like anthologies and I don’t like Christmas romance novellas, but this looked like a good way to ease me into a romantic suspense series that already had me intrigued.

And it was free. No question.

Yet I forgot the cardinal rule of life: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Dear Penguin:

You suck. And not in the good, hot, naughty kind of way.

The novella is 97 PDF pages long, but it’s 5.25 MB. Why? BECAUSE IT’S A SCAN WITH A BIG FAT KANGAROO WATERMARK ON EACH PAGE.

To give you an idea of how big this is, my 736-page doorstopper’s PDF is 7 MB. 736 pages >97 pages.

I converted this novella before I realized it was a scan. Easy enough. PDF → RTF → IMP.

Except it wouldn’t load onto my eBookWise. WHY WHY WHY? Well, because it’s just too big. The IMP file is 68 MB.

eBookWise reader
eBookWise reader

To sum up: Not only am I NOT going to read this free PDF (because I don’t read books on my computer), I’m also going to dump it from my computer (which I never do because even the bad books still belong to me) because it’s a space hog and severely cramps my Vostro’s innards when it tries to open the damned file, and I’m going to remember Ms. St. Clair (poor dear, I know it’s not her fault) for this and only this.

You cost me a lot of time with your chastity-belted freebie, time I could’ve used to make money to buy the anthology the novella came from and buy more of Ms. St. Clair’s work if I liked the novella.

Perhaps authors and agents negotiating contracts with you would do well to remember that your DRM process never gave me a chance to get hooked off your free hit.

Love,

Mojo

Update @8:38 p.m. It was just pointed out to me that the PDF file didn’t actually have any DRM on it. It was just a wildly bloated scanned-and-watermarked PDF. The effect, however, is the same: Make it as difficult as possible for the consumer to read the book. Every time I open the PDF, whatever else is in those graphics (it’s a scan, remember), it nearly crashes my computer.

One could argue that this is where book design and fear of piracy converge to create a virtually (heh) unusable product.

7 thoughts on “A cautionary tale for authors and agents

  • June 28, 2009 at 11:26 am
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    Whoa! Why dump it? Wouldn’t it be perfect to read on your future EeePC?

    Reply
  • June 28, 2009 at 11:27 am
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    It took 5 minutes to open on my laptop and froze everything else up in the process. I think not.

    Reply
  • June 28, 2009 at 11:49 am
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    Did you send a copy of this to Ms St Clair? She might be interested to know how off-putting it was, even if Penguin doesn’t care.

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  • June 28, 2009 at 11:51 am
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    Not yet. Hadn’t thought about it, really, because it’s not her fault.

    Reply
  • June 28, 2009 at 5:29 pm
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    Besides, if you sent it and it crashed *her* PC, she’d blame YOU.

    Reply
  • July 1, 2009 at 6:53 pm
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    Thank you, ma’am!

    Reply

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