[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc allow you to share your ebooks for others to read. Limit of 6 except for B&N which has no stated limit. If you and your spouse/parent/child/friend wish to read one of your ebooks, no real problem.

Except that those aren't officially acknowledged methods that you'll find in any FAQ or support document as a desirable feature of the device/store. "Let your friends and family access your personal library at no extra cost and vice versa! Save $$$ by sharing with these guaranteed no-fail techniques!"

Sure, people tell each other about this and provide handy instructions for it all the time, and sometimes one of the Customer Service people may say you can do it when directly messaged.

But it's essentially a grey-area method that loopholes around attempted publisher-set restrictions (and they can set the Simultaneous Device Usage to less than the standard 6 at Amazon) by taking advantage of a feature built in to allow an individual to not be overly constricted in where and when they can access their purchased products, on the assumption that they won't be adding extra people-not-just-devices to their accounts with implied-purchasing-from-device-access or passing around the name/CC unlock info.

I myself quite approve of using it because it's ridiculous to expect people living in the same household and otherwise pooling the resources not to have a commonly accessible library, but likely if this way of sharing stuff ever touted openly as a value-added selling point with a handy how-to guide, there would be some sort of crackdown under publisher protests.

Originally Posted by Fbone

But SW tells you to buy a copy for each person that makes it more expensive than Amazon (unless you give them your ereader and delete any copies from your computer).

So where does your reasoning put Smashwords-to-Amazon published works, which will have the standard SW "buy one copy for each end-reader" boilerplate included right in the text of the works while the "Simultaneous Device Usage" ends up "Unlimited" at Amazon? Or works from other publishing outlets who see fit to do the same thing?

Originally Posted by Fbone

If both Amazon and SW have the same book at $2.99, some may select the DRM'd one at Amazon and let it sync and share with family members. Yes, you have some format flexibility at SW and DRM-free but you may pay a premium for it $2.99 vs $5.98.

That's a decision for them to make, based on whatever form of flexibility seems more important to their needs (although personally I think that many would just plain share their single copy, regardless of what the boilerplate says).

And that really depends on the assumption that whoever puts up the book in question will automatically sanction you to have the allowed 6 devices include other peoples' devices.

Here's an author who's just gone exclusive with Amazon and yanked the books in this particular series from all the other stores. They're sold with the standard 6-simultaneous devices DRM. Open up the Look Inside sample of one of her books and scroll down, and you'll see:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your online retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

This is only a minor change from the standard Smashwords boilerplate, substituting "online retailer" for "smashwords.com".

Perhaps one might argue that the author was just copy-pasting from her tweaked Meatgrinder-output file into the DTP thingy and is a perfectly reasonable person who'd understand a little harmless simultaneous device usage bookswapping between up to 6 close friends and family members which increases her potential readership and didn't mean it that way.

But then again, she did take the time to change "Smashwords.com" to "online retailer" (assuming that wasn't already done as a byproduct of the original Smashwords-to-Amazon automated process, but I think that if you want to DRM your book, you have to separately prep and upload it yourself?).

If one really respected that boilerplated request as much as one would the SW/FW T&C, then one would then pay for extra copies on Amazon as well, to comply with that.

At least if you bought the old Smashwords edition of her book, you got all your copies DRM-free.