Goodbye Barnes & Noble
I've read books on electronic devices for many years now; the
convenience of having a huge library with me while traveling makes up
for the lower quality of the presentation. I've read books on a
selection of Palm devices, an old
OpenInkpot
compatible ereader, my phone and, most recently, on my
Kobo Aura.
To get reading material, I've used a variety of sources, including the
venerable
Project Gutenberg, the
Internet Archive, directly from authors like
Cory Doctorow and even our local
Multnomah
County Public Library.
I like to have books in
epub
format; it's a published standard, based on HTML and CSS. My recent
devices have all happily supported that, and it allows for editing
when I feel the need to correct typos or formatting problems.
Purchasing Books
When I wanted to actually purchase a book, I bought from Barnes &
Noble; they have a good selection, and reasonable automatic
recommendations. According to their web site, since I started shopping
there, I've purchased 51 books. I can't tell how much I've spent, but
probably in excess of $500.
Not knowing which device I'd be reading on at any one time, and liking
to have the assurance of ongoing access to my library, I would always
download the epub files to my laptop and then transfer them to
whichever device I wanted to read on. This ensured that my books
would be available even when I didn't have a network connection (as
happened yesterday during a wind storm which cut the power to the
DSLAM which connects me to the internet).
I'd created a simple shell script which captured the file after it was
downloaded on my laptop and prepared it for my reader. A bit of
browser configuration and it really was as simple as clicking the
'download' button to get a book onto both my laptop and my reading
device.
Barnes & Noble Disables Downloading
I was traveling in Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago and wanted to get the
latest volume in a series I was reading. My library didn't have it
available, and so I decided that it was worth a few dollars to
purchase it for the flight home.
After clicking through the Barnes & Noble store, I was ready to
download the book so that I could transfer it to my reader. Going to
'My Library', I found my new purchases but the usual 'Download' button
was missing. I was a bit surprised as I'd purchased and downloaded the
previous volume just before leaving without any troubles.
At first, I assumed there was some kind of region restriction on the
distribution of this book. I'm familiar with that from DVD region
locking of movies, and supposed that the same could be done with books
for some reason. However, after setting up a VPN back to home and
browsing through that (to ensure that my browser would appear with an
Oregon address), the download button was still not present.
The unhelpful Barnes & Noble representative that I accessed through
the 'help' button disclosed that the 'download' "feature" had been
disabled for "security" reasons.
Not really having any alternative, I requested a refund for the new
book.
Barnes & Noble Loses a Customer
With no way to actually use ebooks purchased through the Barnes &
Noble store, I won't be spending any more money with them.
I'm not sure how that helps their "security" issues, although if they
lose enough customers and they close their doors, I guess that would
make them about as secure as imaginable.
Kobo Makes a Sale
Having purchased a Kobo Aura, it had built-in access to their book
store, which made it easy to download the book that I wanted. Then, I
simply connected my reader to my laptop and copied the file over for
safe keeping.
Buying Books under Linux
After I got home, I had to figure out how to get Adobe Digital Editions
installed on my laptop. Fortunately, I discovered that
version 2.0.1
runs fine under wine.
Now, purchasing books can be done with my laptop (a vastly superior
browsing experience). The .acsm file can be dragged straight from the
iceweasel download menu to Adobe Digital Editions, which happily
downloads the actual .epub file and makes it available for transferring
to my reader.
Of course, now that I've got Adobe Digital Editions working, I can
also get digitally restricted books from all over the net, greatly
expanding my options for purchasing (or borrowing) books. It's a bit
less convenient, and requires that I run an icky Windows binary under
wine, but at least I have choices, which is some consolation.
LXQt is a Qt lightweight desktop the Qt port of LXDE. Packages exist in Debian albeit without a top level metapackage or task package to make installing it easier. So I wrote up a simple-ish vmdebootstrap call:
With iceweasel installed and various other tweaks:
Finally, note #809339 I have local changes which are being tested to use 
Attention: If these 
So I decided to pay the self proclaimed leader of the snakeoil industrie (Comodo) via
What happened about the 
I just had my hands on some mobile devices (a Samsung's 
If you re a Unix person instead of e.g. a Microsoft Windows person, you ve probably been annoyed by Iceweasel (or Mozilla Firefox ) creating a ~/Desktop directory, among others (things like ~/Downloads).
Here s a quick fix I found somewhere in the net:
TLDR: Using the 
= Driving your firefox like vim
Recently a friend of mine pointed out
