The following is an e-mail I sent to InformIt a site for technical books that I would have happily recommended in the past. Unfortunately, I did not read the small print or I would have realized the book I was purchasing was DRM protected and I could have spared myself the resulting frustration.
Quote:
Last night I ordered a book from your web-site, sadly it ended in several hours of frustration and my firm resolve to not repeat the experience.
I had bought several books from you in the past with no problems and was quite happy with both the books and the buying experience. Last night looking forward to the same experience I bought a book not realizing it was DRM protected.
I bought the book "A practical Guide to Linux Commands" which is ironic because there is no way you can read it in a Linux environment, at least that I could find after messing with it for several hours. I had to settle for downloading Adobe Digital Editions on a MAC. Now I only have the ability to read it on ADE which is a very low-end reader in my estimation. It has a poor font, bad contrast, no ability to annotate and no ability to customize the font, background etc., not to mention no portability to Linux.
In simple terms a good product was turned into a heap of trash by adding DRM. Because of my experience, this is the last book that I intend to buy willingly from Prentice Hall, electronic or paper. I hope you will kindly take the time to pass my comments on to them so they can appreciate how their policies affect their customers or former customers in my case.
As for InformIt, unfortunately for you but fortunate for me, there are too many good sites that make all of their content available DRM free to tempt me to repeat my experience of last night again.
Thanks for listening
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Afterwards I e-mailed the author and politely explained my frustrations with his publisher.
It amazes me that publishers feel it's good policy to look at each and every one of their customers as a potential crook. I am through with DRMed (rhymes with damned) publishers.
