Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Maybe DRM makes things "harder" for the consumer... on the other hand, if the consumers were honest about paying for things they took, DRM wouldn't be necessary. So it's pirates themselves who are responsible for DRM, which they fight against, causing the creation of stronger DRM... a vicious circle that the pirates themselves caused and that they cause to escalate.
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DRM is less caused by pirates themselves than by author/agent fear of pirating. To some extent it's a valid fear I guess, in that pirating would be less work for those that do it. Since most of the pirated books out there though aren't from electronic source files, but from scans of pbooks, there's really no point except to lend a false sense of security. Heck, many popular authors books hit the net within days of their release and have no official ebook version. DRM did nothing to stop them.
I don't really know the answer, but I know what I want personally. I want to be able to buy my books electronically (far to few are available now). I want to be able to have a universal format or an acceptable way to format shift any file I buy so it's usable no matter what path I take in reading devices. Give me this and I'd care very little about if the use DRM. They could use whatever they need to make them feel better. If they want to charge me paper prices (or often close to those prices) for an electronic version of the book I need more freedom in how I can use that file.
I'm a big user of Audible. They use DRM, but it doesn't feel so locked down, because I'm allowed to burn those DRM'd files into standard audio CD's any time I want to. So if all of the sudden the devices that play Audible files dry up I still have an 'out' to keep the files I paid for usable. This is what I'd like for ebooks too.