(2011-06-11) Buying Google Ebook

Wanted to buy EBook of Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages ISBN:9781843763314 after Fred Wilson recommended it. No Barnes And Noble Nook Book or Kindle version available (because it's oldish)! Then found it on Google Books, so I bought it.

Argh, it's a Books In Browsers reading experience, though at least it's flowing text and not pictures of scans.

Google has their own reader app for Android, but doesn't appear in unofficial Apps Lib, nor in Amazon AppStore. Really irritating. 2010-12-30-AndroidMarketForArchos

Hmm, maybe convert to a Nook book, then use CaLibre to convert to EPub? Blech, have to install AdobeDigitalEditions, which means can only be installed/read on 6 computers. (Which means I can probably read with Nook app, but maybe not FBReader.) Hope I don't run into problems down the road. I hate DRM.

Maybe I'll live with Books In Browsers on my Archos70. Argh, if I just go to http://books.google.com I get redirected to the search function. But if I go to http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader then I see my own Library. ZOMG the Title gets rendered in every page's header, and because it's in a narrow column it takes up half the vertical height of the window! See photo.

Next step: try AdobeDigitalEditions. Hrm, doesn't seem to offer me any sort of conversion process. It just gives me yet another reader app. And it's not available for my Archos, so it doesn't do me much good!

• find its folder, and the EPub is there inside. Made a copy in another folder, tried to open with FBReader - no dice.
• try running the decryption tools I use for Barnes And Noble EPub files, but that doesn't work either.
• try reading with the "Barnes And Noble eReader" app on the Mac - my credit card info won't unlock it.

Found a procedure for transferring files to an Android device using the txtr.com site.

• Found their app in Apps Lib and installed it on my Archos70!
• Created account on their site. Uploaded my EPub.
• Went into txtr app on Archos, enter my txtr and ADE account infos.
• Then the Perez book shows up in my Inbox, and it lets me download it.
• But when I click the Read button, it says "Unable to read document"!
• I Commented on the blog post, and contacted txtr.
• I Commented on Google support forum too.

See related post by Douglas Cootey on ADE nightmares. By March of this year, I began to contact Adobe to fix the situation, but each web case was “withdrawn”, which is to say “dismissed without solving”.

So for the moment, I have a couple ways to read the book on my Lap Top, but can't read it on my Tablet.

Duh, I already had ineptkey.py and ineptepub.py - so I decrypted, and now I have nice clean EPub!

Update: also realized that laptop Books In Browsers experience won't let you copy/paste!

Dec09'2014: Found this which led to these instructions which reference these plugins for CaLibre.

• that process worked
  • when asking Google Books to download a book I bought it gave me just the .acsm Adobe file. Double-clicking that launched AdobeDigitalEditions and downloaded the actual book, at which point I could go into the Adobe folder to find the encrypted epub.
  • also used Kindle app to download the books from there, and dragged all the .azw files into CaLibre, which generate .mobi files, which I then bulk-converted to .epub
    • though some generated a popup in CaLibre about DRM problems, so it's possible some of those epub files aren't readable...