Feminism, librarianship and deconstructing the media

I have an e-book reader, but I don’t normally buy ebooks. I love Gutenberg and Google Books for finding free stuff, and I have converted text documents to read on it, but before this morning I had yet to discover the HELLFIRE that is the e-book DRM.

I am totally addicted to the Pretty Little Liars series, and realized that I just couldn’t wait for the library to process it — I wanted to read it TODAY. So I decided to shell out the $10 to buy the e-book. I really like reading books on my eReader, but generally I buy books because I like to have collections. But since I figured I probably wouldn’t be buying the rest of the series, it would be silly for me to just have one book — the final book in the series, at that. The e-book was a tad more expensive than the hardcover (which I think is astounding, since you don’t even get to put anything on your bookcase), but I decided to just go for it. I think copyright is generally used for fucked up reasons, but it is still important to support artists. As I entered my debit card info into Barnes & Noble’s site I thought, “This one is for you, Sara Shepard!”.

I chose B&N because they were $0.50 cheaper than Sony’s e-book site. Big freakin’ mistake.

Apparently, B&N not only uses DRM, but the format is incompatible with all devices EXCEPT their own Nook and the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch. I have an iPod Touch, but the whole reason for having an e-reader is that sweet e-ink that is supposed to be like reading a real book and not a computer screen. So why won’t it work with my fancy-pants expensive e-reader? I like the Sony Reader because it is supposed to be compatible with basically every format, but I guess not if the vendor locks it and makes it incompatible. Boo.

I can’t get a refund, so I’m stuck with an electronic format I can’t use, and legally I’m not supposed to tamper with it to make it usable. I found a program that turned it into a PDF, but it left a watermark on each page so its not really usable. I could purchase the program to make the watermark go away, but it costs $30. For that, I could have bought three more books and would now own half of the series.

So what are my options? Do I illegally download the book? Yes, its illegal, but I already paid for the rights to view it. So is that really morally wrong? Or do I just wait for my library copy, cut my losses and say it was a huge FAIL? I really am trying to obey copyright law, but it is really hard to NOT be a pirate these days…