(Of course, if you're not in the US, they've already made the choice for you. Thanks terrible international intellectual property laws!)
Until today, my experience buying #ebooks from Humble Bundle was they were always available unencumbered by #DRM. I have hundreds of #DRMFree#epubs built up over the past decade.
The #PratchettDiscworldHumbleBundle is through #Rakuten#Kobo's ebook shop, and all the books are encumbered by #Adobe and the #AdobeDigitalEdition DRM. There is zero indication that this DRM is included on the bundle page itself. and it explicitly says "Use on Any Device". On the #RakutenKobo page itself, the only indication the file has DRM is some small bottom-text that says "Download Options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)".
Also, DRM Digital Editions will also "helpfully" install Norton for you as well. It's like the dogshit you just stepped in offered to stab you in the kidney, too.
This is shameful and disgusting from Humble Bundle. I know Humble Bundle got acquired years ago by IGN/Ziff Davis, but they'd avoided the levels of #enshittification to make me stop using them.
@dannotdaniel I'm taking a moral stance that this should fail because Humble Bundle has failed to properly disclose the absurd DRM on the package. With the understanding that the DRM can be stripped out with the below process, I certainly won't blame folks for getting an absurdly good price on some truly excellent literature.
Kill the Adobe DRM so you have the useful files you expect:
Load the DeDRM and Obok plugins in Calibre, and restart.
Obok adds a button to the top menu bar. Push that, and it'll read your Kobo library (including the decryption keys necessary), and offer to remove the DRM and push the new ePubs to your Calibre library.
Enjoy a refreshing drink in honor of the hours I wasted on Adobe's broken shit.
@drsbaitso Until recently I recorded every digital book bundle I could find on Libreture's Bundles page.
But checking Humble bundles slowly grew into a regular quest to discover if the books were actually DRM-free or 'available to read on any device' (as long as the device is one that can run this particularly shitty app, and make it really difficult to actually enjoy what you just bought'.
I'll be recording bundles again soon, but I'll be keeping a close eye on Humble.
Even better: In Adobe's eBook Vendor list (sorted by "How many guys named Mark worked at the company 366 days after it was founded?" order), Rakuten Kobo isn't listed.
The process for downloading "your" books from Kobo is you actually get a little JSON file that you have to drop into Adobe Digital Hellscape. That brought up the dialog box above automatically.
The JSON file itself has lots of interesting information in it. Including an OperatorURL bit pointing straight to Kobo. dot com. But that's too complicated for Adobe Doggy Enshittier to handle automatically, so I have to guess if Kobo used to be eBookPass or Pocketbook or Kortext or BIDI or any of a half-dozen other viable options.
Of course the answer is "Fuck You: None of the Above".
This Help page isn't linked anywhere when you try to download your books and instead get a very small text file that is almost, but not entirely, useless.
Instead, I get the gift of sharing my email with yet another company. Because the accounts I have with Humble Bundle and Kobo are entirely decorative to this process.
Since I have my own domains, I get to set up fuckadobe@drsbaitso.com for just this purpose.
Remarkably, that error message didn't stop the registration process, and what it was actually concerned about was the fact that I wasn't using gmail or hotmail or aol.
But it's not all sunshine and hookers. I'm not sure if it actually didn't like the email (haven't gotten anything in my inbox) or if it barfed on the 100 character password. But trying to log in with my account gets this fun error message:
Huh, the account was created. I wonder if it's something in the very small text file that I got when I pushed the "download book" button on #Kobo's website instead of an actual epub.
Nope, it was the 100 character password. The website processed it just fine, but Adobe Dooglejum Eggerface can't. The very small text file that wasn't the epub I wanted when I pushed "Download Book" was just fine.
Of course, there's still DRM on the epub that Adobe Dangleballs Entermytoilet puts out, so I still don't have a copy of the book I "bought" in a format I trust to work twelve hours from now.
Yelling at companies for pulling dumb shit and warning others about the dumb shit that companies were pulling was exactly what Twitter was good for. Fuck you, Elon.
It should surprise exactly zero people that the accounts I created for Adobe Digital Enshittification are getting marketing spam unrelated to their garbage ebook drm.
@drsbaitso Gods damn it... I suggested this bundle to US friends (I'm in Canada), but because I'm in Canada couldn't even see the restrictions... But yeah, I assumed they were DRM-free (I got a bunch of Scalzi books via HB like that recently...
Granted, I already own most of the Discworld series as ebooks on Kobo, with a few on the Kindle app, and a whole heap of dead-tree, so the bundle wasn't for me per-se, but still...
@uninick Yea. Insomnia might be taking a high-lighter to my anger, but I'm real pissed. It's not just "Oh, it's a different process and it takes a few extra steps to get a file you can read without a third party's approval", it's that this explicitly broke the trust I had in Humble.
@drsbaitso Yeah, I would have considered buying it just so I had all my books on one device, but the ability to not have to load the Kobo app on my tablet to read would have been nice too... Obvs I don't mind the Kobo market per se (One of the reasons I went with Kobo was to support an alternative to Kindle, and also at the time it was a Canadian company in league with a book & mortar book store), but since historically they've all been DRM free from HB...
@uninick Supposedly the Adobe tool will allow a DRM-free output. I'm building a fresh VM for it now to do some testing.
I'm not happy that I have to install any Adobe shit anywhere on my personal devices. Especially not something that may install malware like Norton during an update.
@uninick There's no way, the "installer" is only 8.8 megabytes. I'm pretty sure the "oh shit norton broke everything again and we have to purge it with fire" tool is bigger than that at this point.
Seriously, this kind of shit should be illegal and result in you being escorted out of polite society and into the goddamned ocean.
@dannotdaniel@uninick What I actually did during this entire embarrassment of an odyssey was used a Windows 11 development environment VM which is a free download directly from Microsoft. It's an eval version of Windows good for 90-120 days, and it's perfect for exactly this scenario. Tuck everything into a disposable VM, grab what I actually care about (non-DRM'd epubs), shitcan the whole thing when I'm done.
As demonstrated by the amazing "helpfulness" of Adobe getting bribed by generously offering Norton during the install process, they shouldn't be trusted any farther than you can sue them.
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