{"id":1514,"date":"2009-06-28T11:12:56","date_gmt":"2009-06-28T16:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=1514"},"modified":"2025-07-31T14:10:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T19:10:28","slug":"a-cautionary-tale-for-authors-and-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/a-cautionary-tale-for-authors-and-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"A cautionary tale for authors and agents"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019m done.<\/p>\n

Well, Penguin Books has reminded me this morning that not only am I not done, I\u2019m now pissed off as a reader<\/em> and not as a writer\/publisher\/e-book mark-up-er, except \u2026 this is really not about Teh Pretteh. It\u2019s about DRM. I\u2019m fighting the wrong battle. The book designers can go figure out their own lives. I\u2019m a reader first, dammit.<\/p>\n

\"Cover
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME novella by Roxanne St. Claire, in this anthology<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Way back in the day (six months ago), Penguin offered the novella \u201cYou Can Count on Me\u201d by Roxanne St. Clair as a free PDF download you could snag from Ms. St. Clair\u2019s site. It was part of a Christmas anthology called I\u2019ll Be Home for Christmas<\/em><\/a> and features characters from her long-running series called The Bullet Catchers<\/a>. I believe there are currently three books in this series, with probably more to come.<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t like romantic suspense and I don\u2019t like anthologies and I don\u2019t like Christmas romance novellas, but this looked like a good way to ease me into a romantic suspense series that already had me intrigued.<\/p>\n

And it was free. No question.<\/p>\n

Yet I forgot the cardinal rule of life: There ain\u2019t no such thing as a free lunch.<\/p>\n

Dear Penguin:<\/p>\n

You suck. And not in the good, hot, naughty kind of way.<\/p>\n

The novella is 97 PDF pages long, but it\u2019s 5.25 MB. Why? BECAUSE IT\u2019S A SCAN WITH A BIG FAT KANGAROO WATERMARK ON EACH PAGE.<\/p>\n

To give you an idea of how big this is, my 736-page doorstopper\u2019s PDF is 7 MB. 736 pages >97 pages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I converted this novella before I realized it was a scan. Easy enough. PDF \u2192 RTF \u2192 IMP.<\/p>\n

Except it wouldn\u2019t load onto my eBookWise. WHY WHY WHY? Well, because it\u2019s just too big. The IMP file is 68 MB.<\/p>\n

\"An
eBookwise reader<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To sum up: Not only am I NOT<\/strong> going to read this free PDF (because I don\u2019t read books on my computer), I\u2019m also going to dump it from my computer (which I never do because even the bad books still belong to me) because it\u2019s a space hog and severely cramps my Vostro\u2019s innards when it tries to open the damned file, and I\u2019m going to remember Ms. St. Clair (poor dear, I know it\u2019s not her fault) for this and only this.<\/p>\n

You cost me a lot of time with your chastity-belted freebie, time I could\u2019ve used to make money to buy the anthology the novella came from and buy more of Ms. St. Clair\u2019s work if I liked the novella.<\/p>\n

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

Love,
\nMojo<\/p>\n

Update @8:38 p.m. It was just pointed out to me that the PDF file didn\u2019t 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\u2019s a scan, remember), it nearly crashes my computer.<\/p>\n

One could argue that this is where book design and fear of piracy converge to create a virtually (heh) unusable product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019m done. Well, Penguin Books has reminded me this morning that not only am I not done, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[558,222,87,532],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creating","category-ebooks","category-money","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16926,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/16926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}