[Alan]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Unprotected music files can be copied indefinitely and somehow the trend is for them to prevail over drm music..

Of course, why would somebody pay for something they could easily get for free. And so music is being copied without permission of the copyright holders and rips the music industry of a lot of revenue. So you prove exactly my point: There has to be some kind of protection against (widespread) copyright infringements.

The above kind of reasoning is one of the main reasons commercial e-books are such an insignificant part of the publishing industry and why I am pretty confident that until external pressures come upon it, e-books are going to stay insignificant.

You know the iPod? You know iTunes? They sell music legally and are making big bucks. DRM is not important as long as the price is reasonable and the handling is easy. Most DVDs are copy-protected these days. Yes, of course you can still make copies of them if you know how. The same with ebooks. I can buy secure .lit files and convert them after I have stripped them of DRM. I never tried it, but it should be fairly easy to do.

But the majority of people won't do it. People are lazy. Most won't try to break any protection on DVDs or ebooks because it involves doing some kind of work.

I live in Germany. When I go to the supermarket to buy groceries, I will find those big shopping carts in front of the supermarket. They remain there even after the market has closed. Anybody could take them easily and without problems. And those carts are expensive - a couple of hundred dollars each. But that does not happen, except for very rare occasions. Why? Those carts are being chained together. You have to put an Euro or some plastic chip into each cart to unchain them. And this is effective theft protection.

The same with DRM. Of course you can circumvent it in many ways. But most people does not even bother to try. And the majority counts. That's the point.

For myself and I guess many book lovers, I value the most the ability to read a book whenever and wherever I want and with e-books this includes on any device of my choosing, so I will stick to non-drm, convertible-drm and print books for now.

You do it, many of us here do it, too, but the majority won't. Ereaders are still some nerd gadgets. They are not widely advertised, not prominently featured in the media and are hard to find in any physical shop. They are niche products. DRM on the other hand is not an issue for most people. But it is in the music business, because there DRM protected files are much less easy to use. An exception is the iPod and iTunes. And guess what - both sell big time.

We might not like DRM (I do not). It might have some serious flaws in it (especially if the publisher is not available anymore and we got a new ereader). But I cannot see any alternative. Lower prices are fine and will attract more people to ebooks. Sure. But as long as you can get any book anywhere for free, not enough will bother to pay. Maybe digital watermarks might be an alternative. They do not prevent anybody from making illegal copies, but at least everybody will know, who was the original buyer and copyright holders can try to blame them for illegal activities. Time will tell.

Alan