Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
I do not like DRM and I do not like the idea that I do not own the book when I buy it although we should all be used to that through software licensing.
I do not see a viable alternative for publishers at the moment. Self publishing authors or authors in general could request donations, but not a hope in hell for publishers.
Publishers have been doing business for quite a while and generallly doing a reasonable job with no hue and cry up until recently. Perhaps they are doomed, but one can't fault them for trying to stay in business.
What would you do in their shoes? Just give up?
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Except that Digital Restrictions Management doesn't keep anyone from copying ebooks. The proof is left as an exercise for your favorite torrent site.
For that matter, go take a look at how easy it is to get any of the Harry Potter books as an illicit ebook -- books which have never been released in electronic format.
As a counter-example, take a look at Baen. Thanks in part to their DRM-free policy, they have become one of the top SF publishers. And they are not a small press.
Anybody who wants an illicit copy of an ebook can get it, and often with less effort than getting a DRM-encumbered version. DRM removal is also minimally difficult for anyone who really cares. The book has to be displayed, so one way or another -- even if it requires screenshots and OCR software -- that is unlikely to change.
What DRM really does is enforce device lock-in. People with Kindles (people who don't jailbreak their books, anyway) have to buy new Kindles, etc. That's what the publishers want. That, and the destruction of the secondary market (used book stores).
They see their customer as someone who buys a half-dozen hardcovers a year. Precisely why they don't think someone who buys dozens of paperbacks a year is also their customer remains a mystery. That's where companies like Baen and O'Reilly and their kin are smart: they realize that if we can get books cheaper, we'll buy more books -- and specifically, more of
their books. So they sell us cheap books (a new release from Baen is usually $6.00, for instance, and no weaseling with ".99" either) and we buy them by the bucketload.
It's anything but true that publishers "need" to impose DRM to keep people from copying their books. The torrents are full of copies of their books; that horse is not just out of the barn but cantering down the highway. The publishers can't stop them. It's all about device lock-in, and always has been.