# Ebooks finally come to Norway


I've been waiting for this moment for quite a long time. Living outside
of Norway for many years, I've always been interested in technologies
that enable me to access Norwegian culture from afar. I enjoy reading
Norwegian newspapers online, I listen to a few podcasts from the
national radio station, I follow some of the Norwegian intellectuals and
academics on Twitter and through blogs, and I still await the time when
the national broadcaster begins streaming in a format that works
internationally.

I also download Norwegian movies through bittorrent, and also listen to
Norwegian audiobooks. As I've begun reading more and more books on my
iPod Touch, I've been waiting eagerly for the time when I could access
Norwegian books. The Swedes have been much more progressive here, the
site [elib.se](http://elib.se) offers thousands of Swedish audiobooks
and ebooks for download, with most of them available as watermarked ePub
files. They usually sell for around 50 SEK (\$7), and work great with
Stanza. I really enjoy reading Swedish crime, and have bought quite a
few books through this website - even a few Norwegian books translated
to Swedish, since this was the only way I could get them in e-format.

In Norway, the publishers have been moving much more slowly. Partly,
they complain that they have to pay VAT on ebooks and not on pbooks
(paper books, a term I learnt from my Norwegian colleagues), and that
this is unfair. I agree with them, but in Sweden they also have to pay
VAT for ebooks, and they have a thriving market. A more likely
explanation is that the big publishers also own bookstore chains, and
are reluctant to take business away from the brick-and-mortar stores.

I was also worried, because I read that they had all chosen Adobe
Digital Editions as their DRM of choice. However, there was not a single
app for iOS that could read ADE files, and thus I would be out of luck
even in the future. However, two day, two great pieces of news came at
once. First of all, Cappelen Damm, one of the largest publishers in
Norway, with more than a 1000 new titles per year, have taken over the
domain [digitalbok.no](http://digitalbok.no), and [started their own
ebook
store](http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/11/24/kultur/litteratur/bok/14429410/),
without waiting for all the other publishers to get their act together.

They currently offer about 500 Norwegian titles, as well as a selection
of English titles. All the books are offered as ePubs protected by ADE.
The second piece of good news, is that we now have an ebook reader for
iOS that accepts ADE encrypted ePub files! I've been waiting for this,
and wondering what the problem was. This means that not only can I buy
and read books from the Norwegian store, but a bunch of other stores
using ADE, and even libraries that lend out books using ADE, are fair
game!

This app is called [Bluefire Reader](http://www.bluefirereader.com/),
and has gained a lot of [positive
press](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-gadgeteer/the-ipad-may-be-the-best-universal-ebook-reader-thanks-to-bluefire-reader/4163)
(all the more strange that I never heard about it until today). So I
installed the reader, purchased my first Norwegian book, and off I went.
The book cost 99 NOK (about \$16), which seems to be a fairly common
price. More expensive than the Swedish bookstore, and I would
definitively like to see cheaper books, but it's still within the
"pain-treshold" (anything more expensive, and I would not buy). When I
first tried out the website, I could not register, apparently they had
some problems with too many people accessing (anyone who said there was
no interest for ebooks in Norway?), but after a day, it worked fine. I
bought the book, and had to use Adobe Digital Editions to download. This
opened the file up, and I could read on my screen. But of course, I
wasn't excited about being able to read the book on my MacBook, I wanted
it on my iPod Touch.

So I transferred the file through iTunes, opened it in Bluefire Reader,
and it worked perfectly. Yay, after so many years, I am finally sitting
in Toronto, reading a Norwegian crime novel on my futuristic little
device. Amazing. I read about a third of the book this afternoon at a
restaurant, waiting for my food (the writing is actually quite poor, but
that is not the fault of the technology!)

However, there are some details that still need to be improved. If you
download a scanned pirate version of a book, you don't mind artifacts
and poor formatting, but if you are paying exactly the same price as
this book would cost as a paperback in Narvesen, you expect quality. The
two things I noticed were a lot of words that were split with a space,
and footnotes that appear in the middle of the text. Examples below:

problem with spaces in the middle of words:

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/photo.png "photo")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/photo.png)

and problem with footnotes in the middle of the text

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/photo2.png "photo(2)")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/photo2.png)

As you see, these are relatively minor issues, but I don't think anyone
would have accepted it if they appeared in a pbook, and I don't think we
should accept them in an ebook.

One interesting question becomes where the error appears - is it a
problem with the file, or with the ebook reader. However, right now
there is only one ebook reader that accepts ADE on iOS, and this reader
is recommended on digitalbok.no's pages, so one should expect the books
to work with it. Of course, normally I would have opened up the ePub,
done a few search+replace or regexps, and fixed the problem, but that's
impossible, since the files are encrypted. This also means that it's
impossible for me to see if the file is well formatted, and it's
Bluefire Reader's problem, or not.

The reader works fairly well, although it enforces a very wide margin,
which might work on the iPad, but takes far too much real estate on the
iPod Touch. This doesn't seem to be adaptable through settings, which is
peculiar, since it has settings for almost everything else (page
transitions, etc).

All in all, a great day, and I look forward to reading much more good
Norwegian fiction in the future. Of course, once my Kindle arrives in a
month or two (apparently there is a crazy backlog), I'll have to figure
out how to break the ADE encryption, so I can put these books on the
Kindle. Also, next time I am in Sweden, I have to make sure to get a
library card, so I can borrow ebooks, rather than having to buy them!

I hope the site is a success, and that other Norwegian publishers follow
suit.

Stian