[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Good to know. So there was in effect no issue for those involved in the 2006 Amazon DRM shift. You simply de-register your old device, re-register your new device, and viola you have access to your library on your new device.

No, the shift was from PDF to Mobi; the same devices wouldn't work. From 2005-2007, Amazon sold heavily-DRM'd PDFs (limited downloads, limited printings); they stopped and switched to Mobi when they released the Kindle. People who bought the original Amazon PDFs lost access to them when Amazon stopped carrying them, and lost the ability to update them to a new device when Adobe changed servers. Those ebooks are now only readable on the device (computer & laptop, mostly) that originally was authorized for them.

There wasn't much outcry because ebooks were a much smaller niche, and mostly only ebook-geek-fanatics were interested in them at all. And they knew that ebooks wouldn't get bigger as long as the DRM was that troublesome. (And they were right. Newer DRM is more accessible--and therefore easier to crack.)

I find that the anti DRM folks consistently overstate their case that DRM unduly burdens the consumer.

Depends on what you think is a reasonable burden. I consider that, when I buy something, I have the right to decide how to use it. Paying extra for limitations is ridiculous.

They bang on about not being able to " lend or share" their ebooks, leaving unmentioned the fact that by "lending" or "sharing" they mean violating federal copyright law.

Amazon has, in the past, told people it's against the TOS to physically loan out Kindles to people other than the account holders--that it's illegal to allow other people to read those books, even if no copy is made.

Fictionwise has much the same statement on their site--a claim that only the buyer is allowed to read the book at all, regardless of copying.

If you truly believe that DRM, like copyright, is some kind of affront to your "ownership" rights, then argue that. Just don't try to argue that you are doing it in defense of the "average consumer" or because DRM raises insurmountable obstacles to legitimate uses of your ebooks.

It raises no obstacles to me, other than slightly limiting my book choices. I won't buy or used DRM'd ebooks... woe is me; my reading selection is limited to just a bit more than 40k options at Smashwords, 160k+ works at ArchiveofourOwn, 100k+ from Gutenberg, and something like 2 million books from Google. Oh no. How will I ever cope.

It does, however, raise obstacles for ebooks as long-term replacements for paper books. Literary culture *cannot* shift to ebooks if they can't be shared; children don't learn to love books by being limited to what their parents buy them. They borrow from uncles, from neighbors; they buy fifty-cent books at yard sales; they mark their favorite passages and hand the marked-up versions around to their friends. DRM makes it obvious that a collection-of-data is not a "book" as normal people understand books.

DRM is a minor nuisance today. If books are a form of short-term entertainment, DRM is perfectly reasonable. If, however, books are a repository of culture, a container for potentially generation-spanning truths, DRM is an abomination.

None of the DRM-inflicting companies will discuss how they expect their books to be accessed in another 10 years, much less another 50. They want customers to think of ebooks as the quick & easy entertainment, and paper books as the long-term storage device. Those of us who think of ebooks as just another container for textual content, the newest in a long line of innovations, are unwilling to believe that the purpose of copyright law is to keep paper-focused publishers from bankruptcy.