\n — @adurdin is thinking aloud

Unfit for purpose

I had another run-in with the paranoid attitude of publishers today. I decided to buy the PDF version of Apress’s “iPhone Games Projects”, which—despite the clumsy title—looked like it might be handy. I’d flipped through a friend’s hardcopy edition a bit before: each chapter is by a different author, and on a different topic: networking, OpenGL, cross-platform game coding, and more.

I’m away for the weekend, and will have my iPhone, but not my laptop, so I was hoping to read some of the book on the phone over the weekend.

However, the PDF was password protected, so that you can’t read it without the password; which was not made clear during the purchase process until after I’d paid. This effectively renders it useless to me, since my iPhone won’t display password-protected PDFs. Since the book does not contain any state secrets that I’m aware of, the only reason to have the password is to make the PDF harder to share online, at the expense of (at best) inconveniencing the purchaser.

When I get back home, I’m sure I’ll be able to find an app to strip the password protection away; but until then, I’m left once again with a product that doesn’t work as advertised, due entirely to the publisher’s paranoid and vain attempts to stop the illicit spread of the PDF. And the irony is, as always, that I could have downloaded the PDF illicitly, and got a more usable product at no cost.

So I’m not going to buy another PDF from Apress unless they start selling unprotected PDFs. I might go look at the Pragmatic Programmer’s catalog now, since I’ve heard they sell real, usable PDFs.