[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

And I'm back. Guess you missed me
I've been busy splitting time between meetings with Apple and the Big Six publishers, of course. That takes up a lot of time. And oh yeah , also posting at "my" blog.....You guys should adjust your tin foil hats, they're getting a bit tight

I figure any thread that's gone past 5 pages can have severe topic drift without penalty, and that anyone who leaves the discussion at that point isn't conceding anything; they just have a life outside of ebook arguing. There's a limit to how much wrong on the internet one is morally obligated to attempt to fix.

OK, what we have learned ?
We've learned that publishers believe they need DRM not because piracy-a popular meme round these parts-

That'd be because they often publicly claim that's why they need DRM.

but because they fear large scale "casual sharing." Elf[strike]mark[strike]wreck- one of the few beacons of rationality around here- admits that this is a danger, although he believes it will not happen. His admission is telling as he is an anti DRM absolutist, refusing to buy any DRMED work.

I not only don't buy, I don't deal with freebies. I move between three computers and two reading devices and am not interested in the hassle of keeping registrations between them all coordinated. Besides, my literary tastes run to extremely niche genres; if I never read a Big 6 book again, I won't feel I'm missing anything.

Elfwreck does not really say why he thinks large scale casual sharing will not happen.

Didn't say it won't happen, just that it won't kill the ability to sell books. (If the publishers have the sense to make buying easy, that is. If they insist on pricing ebooks at 10% less than the trade paperback, and require phone number & address to register to buy it, they'll be facing some problems.)

Sharing of a non DRMED book would be almost as easily done, and if the book was popular, I can't see why it WOULDN'T done.

For the same reason it's not done now with Baen books, Konrath's books, Hocking's books... because "you can give a copy to a friend" (specifically allowed in Baen's purchase) is not the same as "post this so anyone can download it." Some casual sharing exists, but the non-DRM publishers, both corporate and individual, haven't been put out of business by it.

Because MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT THIEVES. Most readers want authors to write more, so they want them to get paid. Saying "how can we prevent casual sharing without DRM" is like saying "how can we prevent shoplifting without searching people at the door?"

THe scenario I have in mind would be if the next installment of the Twilight Saga was sold non DRM . What is the likelihood that Twilight besotted teenage girls would buy the book and share it with their Facebook friends, who would share it with their Facebook friends, etc. IMO, the likelihood of that would approach 100 percent.

Public posts would be subject to DMCA takedowns. Sharing among friends by email wouldn't.

Um. How many teenagers do you think bought Twilight, rather than reading a friend's copy? Stross pointed out that only 25% of readers ever paid into an author's revenue stream--and therefore, a 75% "piracy" rate might be considered "business as usual."

The refusal of the anti DRM folk to admit that possibility shows that they have idealogical blinders on.

What we're saying, for the most part, is that DRM is an ineffective business model. It's not sustainable. It's especially not sustainable in the face of non-DRM'd competition; if *all* ebooks had DRM, people would cope with them; since many small publishers & self-pub authors aren't bothering, consumers have a choice.

And each consumer who gets burned by DRM--who buys a book, reads it, and goes back to read it again 3 years later and finds she can no longer register her new computer with that DRM, or who botches the registration because the instructions weren't clear, or who can't share an ebook with a spouse because (shock!) they have separate purchasing accounts--is one less future customer, one less recommender-to-friends.

Books can't survive on a "1 purchase = 1 reader" model. Not even a "1 purchase = 1 family" model, which works for games. Books have always been "share this with someone else who'll love it" entertainment; trying to change that for ebooks flies in the face of hundreds of years of literary culture.

The Mobile Read idealogy is that publishers are evil, greedy, capitalist dinosaurs who eat puppies for breakfast, so they can't possibly be right about this issue,

I mostly think they're terrified about the tech changes and can't figure out how to change their business model to deal with it, so they're trying to shove the toothpaste back in the tube and loudly screaming that there's no mess to see here. I think some of them are ridiculously greedy; they've been working with the Trust-Me Model for so long that they think it's natural law, instead of an economic method supported by a quickly-eroding monopoly.

I was kind of hoping that we could move beyond the Manichean dichotomy between DRM as it exists now and no DRM. I would say that could be a third way-toward a "better DRM" -a DRM scheme, that while taking the publisher's concerns into consideration, would allow a migration path for those who want to switch devices, for example. Unfortunately, the discussion here hasn't reached that stage yet. Oh well...

The concept of "better DRM" has come up before, many times. There's no such thing, without massive invasion of privacy and lack of end-user control of their digital lives.

"The cloud" won't work for anyone who lives out of range of wifi. Biodata DRM has been suggested... no, I'm not putting up with fingerprint or retina scanning to read my books. (Even if I trusted the tech to do so accurately, which I don't. ID-based tech has always been willing to err on the side of exclusion.)

Okay, imagine for a moment that someone develops PERFECT DRM. A method that guarantees that only the purchaser can read a book, on any device, and nobody else can open it. Telepathic DRM. Whatever. And it can't be cracked, and you can't copy & paste from the ebook (not even for reviews, which rather sucks) and you can't print it.

... what prevents that person from opening up MS Word and typing the contents into a new document?

That's how ebooks got shared online in 1998. Quite a lot of them, actually, mostly in the science fiction genre.

The problem with DRM isn't that it's too restrictive (although it is) or that it's not accurate enough (although it's not), but that it's working directly against the purpose of computers, which is to copy & modify data. Computers get consistently better at both these things; no restriction technology can keep up.

DRM may have its uses as part of the transition to a more digital age, but it's not sustainable without Orwellian restrictions on human activity.