Economy Size Geek

I was hoping to pick up a PDF version of The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez. I already have a print version - but I didn’t want to have to carry around a 912 page book for reference.

I’ve become hooked on PDF versions of my favorite tech books. It makes it seriously handy to having them when I need them - minus the hernia.

I won’t be getting this one because Addison Wesley only publishes PDFs that are controlled by Adobe’s DRM. Before you start to think this is something political (DRM vs Non-DRM is a discussion for another day) - the issue is actually a practical one. Adobe doesn’t support DRM on Linux.

According to their website:

http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/faq/

Will a Linux® version of Digital Editions be available?
Yes, a desktop Linux is under development and a public beta is expected later this year.

No idea if they wrote that in 2007 or 2008. On one hand I hope that they add support - on the other hand I can always hope that AW goes the way of the Prags and releases a PDF without DRM - though I won’t hold my breath.

One good thing (if you can call it that) is the online vendor actually warned me about the DRM before I purchased the pdf. About a year ago I bought a shortcut from AW about user acceptance testing that was DRM’d - it turned out to be a huge pain to work with -mainly be relegated to the once read through in Windows never to be seen again.

I briefly toyed with the idea of circumventing the DRM - but it turned out I didn’t like the short cut enough to bother. That is of course the down side to DRM - I’m a legitimate customer who wants to enjoy what I’ve payed for in the environment where I actually do the work (namely on an Ubuntu desktop). The restrictions that seem to violate my fair use (I’m not trying to distribute it - just access it without a lot of cartwheels) - encourages me to break the DRM and feel justified in doing so. For a perfect example see -DeCSS.

In this case, I’ll just carry the book for now…

Update

Looks like I can get the chapters I liked the best DRM free via my Safari account with Oreilly.com - so I won’t have to lug it around after all :)