Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
Conceded. Realize, though, (read Peter's posts in this thread), that publishers simply will not produce e-books without some system in place, even though any system "fails", technically, to prevent privacy.
It's a classic dilemma:
Publisher Lemma 1: consumers must be able to read a copy of the book.
Publisher Lemma 2: consumers must not be able to produce a readable copy of the copy of the book.
DRM is all smoke-and-mirrors meant to hide the dilemma.
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I think DRM will disappear because it is unworkable. Current pricing on many e-books is terrible, and consumers are not biting.
In regards to technical books, I came to my own conclusion a while back. I had bought a hefty tech book, didn't like to carry it about. The pdf version was about 75% of the paper price. I called the publisher- no discounts available for purchasers of the paper book.
I stripped the pages out of the book, scanned them in my company's high speed copier and did OCR, and formatted to the 2 electronic formats that I prefer. Time spent- less than 2 hours, of which maybe 10 minutes was hands-on.
And this is the way I will solve that problem in the future, too. I am not a pirate, and wouldn't give these files away, but it made me realize how very easy pirating text is, and convinced me that publishers had better start adjusting their ebook business models. Because much text will indeed move to machine readable formats, and the publishers can either lower prices and ditch DRM, or the pirates will be doing the publishing.
The best e-book scheme I have seen to date is the one from Ereader- unlock the books with full name and valid cc number. Not many people want to give books stamped with this information away, and it is unobtrusive. Just wish they offered their books in more formats.