DRM sucks ... battery life

    I like reading, a lot of it is science fiction, and so does my wife. She actually reads more than I, and has the good fortune to work at a library, where she has access to a virtually limitless supply of books at almost no cost. I'm thrilled that both of my sons are following in our footsteps in this regard, as they are both enthusiastic readers and regularly take advantage of the library system.

    While my wife reads mostly 'physical' books, I read a lot on my RAZR V3xx and my Palm T3. And while there are multiple formats and readers for the Palm OS, our library's DRMed format is MobiBook. Some other ebook sources I use also use that format, and the Mobipocket Reader isn't bad. I think I prefer Plucker, which is a readily available format for a lot of Public Domain stuff via Project Gutenberg, and I use it for 'mostly text' web page reading.

    The problem with MobiPocket is that it really seems to drain my battery faster than most anything I do on my T3. I got several of David Weber's Honor Harrington book for my birthday, and reading them ends up generating multiple battery warning pop-ups, requiring several visits a day to the cradle for a boost. I attribute this power hungry nature to the encryption heavy nature of DRM, although maybe I'm enjoying the books so much I'm reading more. Or maybe the battery I installed in my T3 a while back doesn't have the lifetime the original had, and is fading already. Nah, more fun to blame DRM. Excuse me, I've got to get back to my reading. :-)

Posted at 10:21PM Jun 02, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[3]