Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No, I'm not justifying anything. I'm just saying that for most people it just plain doesn't MATTER. And that's the truth. We, who collect eBooks, or have multiple different readers, are not representitive of the typical user of these devices. But we know how to get around these issue, so once again, it doesn't matter.
Without DRM, most mainstream publishers wouldn't be publishing eBooks. That's a fact. It's not the bookstores who are insisting upon DRM; it's the publishers. If it's a choice between having eBooks published with DRM, and not having them published at all, give me DRM any day.
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Give it a couple years. It will.
The market is diversifying. And your average person, who has a longer device replacement lag than your average user here, may wind up getting their second ereading device from another company.
Then, it will matter. It will matter a lot. Even if we're going to go with your "they don't use their rights thus they don't need them" argument (which is wrong both factually and ethically, but we'll go with it), how many ebooks do you have that are waiting to be read? Probably a lot more than you've read.
What happens when you try to transfer those books, that you haven't even read yet?
Apart from that, it doesn't matter if your average user knows how to strip DRM, or even what DRM is. They know what Pirate Bay is. When I was 13, I didn't know what DRM was but I did know that my music wasn't playing on my new mp3 player. And I knew that when I got another copy off the torrent sites of the times, they worked.
That was all I needed to know. That's all it took for me to pirate something. And I did it without having any idea why I was doing it. I just knew I had already bought this music with what little allowance money I made, and I wasn't buying it again.
Are you saying publishers wouldn't be going to ebooks without DRM because the market is inviable or because they'd be too scared of losing a few cents? Either way, you're wrong.
On the point of viability, we're talking about the industry that has had more of its cut taken by used sales than any other
by a country mile.
The music, movie, and game industry have changed form factors multiple times in the last 3 decades. But the format for books hasn't changed in over a thousand years.
I am perfectly likely to buy a used copy of Catcher in the Rye from 1970. However, I'm not going to buy a VHS copy of anything even though it's only half as old because I don't own a VCR anymore.
The book industry has always had to deal with this issue. If there ever was an industry prepared to make the shift online, it should have been the ebook industry. The fact that they're screwing it up so badly is almost comical.