There's no question that DRM is a big nuisance. My wife has a Sony, I have a Kindle. She can read DRM'd ePubs but can't (legally?) share them with me. I can read DRM'd Mobipockets on my K3 but can't share them with her. We could, of course simply swap eReaders but that causes other issues timewise. But through Amazon (and perhaps other vendors), we share one account and could potentially (with vendor blessings) share those books IF we bought another Kindle, but that's another $129 or so.
DRM is supposed to prevent unauthorized pirating of eBooks which become "fair game" to potentially thousands of pirates on online sharing sites. I can understand why authors and publishers are trying to limit illegal distribution. But DRM goes way too far in the other direction. A pBook may be shared among a group of friends perhaps up to a dozen times. Nearly half of my reading is from borrowed pBooks. pBooks I purchase, I loan in exchange and my friends and I coordinate on titles we want to share. pBooks are re-bound and used by libraries for decades, loaned out to potentially hundreds of readers. DRM'd library books are now being considered for a 26-loan limit by some publishers, thus requiring additional expense by the library to renew their loan 'rights.'
So publishers whine about the 'costs' involved in creating eBook formats. I can't believe that it is any more difficult to create a generic eBook format than it is to use electronic typesetters to publish pBooks. I base that on the fact that I am a proofreader for Project Gutenberg and I know the formatting rules that they use to prepare OCR-scanned print into their software to create the various formats they offer (ePub, HTML, QiOO Mobile, Kindle (Mobipocket), Plain Text UTF-8). Calibre does those conversions on the fly. The text for pBooks is handled electronically and there is absolutely NO excuse for not being able to publish multiple eBook formats simultaneously as PJ does for free.
So it is a matter of political and/or economic control that publishers refuse to accommodate all formats. There is no excuse other than because it involves virtually no additional 'formatting.' There is no excuse for any of these platforms or publishers not to open up to a common format or provide simple software upgrades to allow more people to share files.
The solution is unclear. If all pirate sites fell under legal jurisdiction of one country, then prosecution of pirate sites would be a goal, and sharing would be limited to user-to-user peers, not potentially the rest of the world. What I see happening now is that publishers see a big cut in pBook sales and they are trying to make up for pBook pending obsolescence by gouging eBook readers with unjustified pricing (remember, no paper, no printing, no shipping and handling, no shelf space, no cost of returns and re-handling).
For the time being, Amazon meets my needs and I've found almost nothing that is available in eBook format that they do not have or that I can't find from multiple eFormat online sources. Absent an eBook version, they will usually have the pBook either paperback or used. So far my inability to check out eBooks from the library is a non-issue, but I have no qualms about stripping DRM from the library ePub on my wife's Sony so I can read it on my very own K3. That is an allowed transfer under both the Amazon and the library 'code of ethics' even if it does violate (perhaps) legal abuse of DRM intent.
I have never, nor will I ever send a DRM-stripped copy of a book over the internet in violation of that trust, but in exchange I would ask publishers to treat us as adults and make their products available to all formats. To do otherwise is to limit distribution, I would guess, far in excess of illegal distribution.
Most book fanatics (who, me?
) are adults. The kids who would think little of pirating are too busy playing video games and texting friends to be much of a drain on profits, I would think. So lets quit playing games with eFormats and give us a functional equivalent of pBook sharing.
