Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Personally I see this as not really relevant since its simple and easy to remove DRM and do what ever I care to with the electronic books I buy I do not see that the US Government can and will stop Calibre from removing DRM.
For my part as a network administrator its a very different issue. I need to understand exactly how DRM goes about restricting your rights to the books that you buy.
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Your second question is more complicated. Calibre isn't the only tool that creates files eBook readers can render. Atlantis Word Processor and the soon to be released Scrivener for Windows can export your text in a format readable on bookreaders. When the powerhouses like Word catch up the problem of formats for documents you create in-house largely goes away.
The real problem with DRM is how it's being used. The publishers try to use it to keep people from stealing their books. I think that's a legitimate concern. The book sellers, however, are using it to restrict competition by using DRM specific to their product to prevent customers from buying books at any other book store. If you have a Kindle, you have to buy your books from Amazon, no other bookstore sells copyrighted books your Kindle can render. Barnes and Noble plays the same game but a little bit differently. Unless you have a nook it's unwise to buy books from Barnes and Noble since they have their own DRMed ePub and sell eReader DRMed books without telling customers ahead of time which format they're getting, and only the B&N nook can render both secure formats.
Consider this: B&N bought a little company called Fictionwise to get control of the DRM used by a format called eReader. eReader books were once ubiquitous but now B&N refuses to license any other eBook manufacturer to render eReader. From a customer's point of view, that means their library of eReader books will only last as long as their existing eBook reader unless they buy a nook especially to read them.
You are assuming that it's easy and legal to remove DRM but it isn't that simple. For technically minded people with the drive to do it, yes, once you have the tools it's relatively easy to remove it. But most book readers do not have the ability, or sometimes the drive, to do it. Moreover, it is not clear that it is legal to remove DRM. The language used in the law is technologically naive and results in being vague.
As a network admin it probably doesn't affect you yet, but if the people in the business you work for shift to using eBook readers, or want their documents and books delivered in a form they can read on an eBook, you will have to decide which format to enforce or keep track of who has which one and figure out how many copies of books in this or than DRM to provide. You'll need separate keys for every book reader and if you lose the keys you'll lose the ability to move that user to a new book reader, or lose that part of your library.
Maybe they won't go after private persons who buy all their books, but businesses have deeper pockets and a lot more trouble keeping track of who has which device and is using which book. If you take the DRM off how will you keep your users from sharing copyrighted material? And if you remove the DRM for them, imagine what will happen when you get audited and someone compares counts licenses and copies deployed?