Quote:
Originally Posted by ginolee
When you buy a physical book, only one person can be in possession of that book at any given point in time. This is why it's legal to loan it out, or even to give it away.
When you buy an electronic book, without DRM, it's all too easy for one purchase to turn into one purchase + multiple copies. If you "loan" an e-book to someone and you forget to delete your own copy permanently, you've now bought one copy from the ebook-seller and stolen one from publisher.
Gino.
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So we do not buy the drm book and everyone is happy. The book is not stolen after all; well the publisher loses a sale, but what the heck, he does not get 100 lost pirated sales. He does not get any sale in the end but of course that's much better than making a sale and having a potentially pirated book.
Just too bad that despite all drm and actually despite a book not being offered digitally at all, the popular books somehow make their way to the net while the obscure ones remain obscure. Think of how much income a popular author loses in piracy, would it not better for he or she not to be popular at all, and not lose that income. And the obscure authors should be so happy that they are not pirated at all, so they are so much better than JK Rowling and similar authors after all
Actually the same argument has been made very seriously about those bargain bin books you see at the bookstore, where the author gets no royalty. So what the heck, all those popular authors in the bargain bin at BN should be mad as hell as how does the bookstore dare sell their books without them being compensated...