Quote:
Originally Posted by foghat
You talk about portability and obsolescence being a concern with ebooks. I disagree. Regarding obsolescence: fact is the drm is easy to remove - talk about whether it is legal or not, I don't care. I bought the book, I can remove the drm and easily sleep at night. remove the drm and use calibre and now you have a book that can be used on any device can be 'lent' to anyone for any length of time.
If you want to go to extremes and say, what if a drm scheme gets developed that cannot be cracked, what if calibre goes away and there is no replacement, what if amazon goes out of business and/or my kindle breaks and my kindle drm'd books are useless?
To that I say, what if your house burns down, what if you get robbed, what if you lend the book out and forget to who (has happened to me in the past), what if you spill coffee all over your pbook, what if, what if, what if.
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The pbacks have a 4-for-3 sale, or a few cents off, and shipped...for CHEAPER than the ebook. Ridiculous.
By buying DRM'd books at greater than or equal to paperback book is telling the publishers that:
They don't need to lower their prices under ebooks. You'll pay a premium for them.
DRM is OK.
I refuse to buy either for that reason. All you can do is speak with your $$. I've reluctantly given in on the DRM a couple of times for a couple of nonfiction history books for class, when the price differential was > 50% (i.e $12 + shipping for the used pback...$5 for the ebook). But I felt bad doing it. I try not to buy any DRM'd content for higher than the price of a rental or the same property used. That includes books, video games, etc. For books, that's like $2 or so for fiction most of the time, for XBLA games $8 tops, for DRM'd PC games (like via Steam) it's under $10.