Quote:
Originally Posted by CommonReader
How do you believe the books that are being uploaded here are being turned into ebooks? How many ebook versions of The Lord of the Rings are out there in the net - and that's a book that isn't being scanned in an afternoon? If a book doesn't get scanned it's because it sells badly and doesn't generate any interest, not because the people don't want to spend the time to scan and to proofread.
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That's kind of making my point. I fully expect many
popular books will get scanned. Clearly, it's in someone's interest to scan them. My point is that for the vast majority of books, that kind of interest won't exist, and it's not an outrageous assumption that the particular book that I'm releasing, as a publisher, will be one of those non-scanned books. How many
Lord of the Rings-caliber books do you think get released every year? Most books (especially in the current reading climate) simply don't generate that kind of attention. So in the vast majority of cases, if it's harder to copy, people won't bother, whereas if I didn't think much of the book, but hey, I've already got the file available, I'm much more likely to take the 5 seconds or so to strip the DRM and upload it via P2P, because hey, why not, right?
If you want to put the issue in perspective, look at it this way: How long has the written word been around? Even if you only go as far back as the printing press, that's around
500 years. Now, go look at Project Gutenberg. These are people
dedicated to making ebooks out of paper books, and they've just scratched the surface of what's been available up to the copyright expiration limit.
There's absolutely no contest. The far better way to ensure that a book doesn't get pirated is to make sure it remains in print only, and doesn't go electronic. As long as you don't release it electronically, the odds are very much against it ever getting digitized.