MemeMachineGo!

An aeon ago, I bought The Bundled Doonesbury, which includes a CD-ROM of all of the strip's first 25 years. I'm pretty sure I tried it on a Windows 95 or 98 machine at the time, found the interface annoying, and gave up on it. It's been a very long time since I've run an instance of either of those OSes, and, for your convenience, the DRM-ed app on the CD doesn't support anything else.

I'm planning to get an e-ink reader some time this summer -- I'm waiting for some of the dust to settle in the price wars. It seems potentially nifty to read the strips there. So I looked into converting the strips into an actually useful format.

Some websearching turned up that a kindly hacker had come to my rescue with a script that converts the image format on the CD to directories of jpegs, which I ought to be able to convert to something readable on any reader out there.

The extra effort is a pain, though; it would have been much moreso without someone having done the hard work already. This, essentially, is why I'm planning to get an e-reader but not any DRM-ed e-books. I don't want to pay extra for the privilege of needing circumlocutions to read my books on different platforms going forward. (Techniques to crack most, maybe all, of currently popular DRM-ed e-book formats can be readily found, but I don't need the bother.)

Night Shade Books and the other publishers of DRM-free science fiction available on WebScription are liable to get a lot more business from me in the near future. (And ManyBooks, but without the payment part.)