[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by frahse

Elfwreck, you don't know that you haven't read my work.

I didn't say I hadn't read your works (although I don't think I have); just that you hadn't gotten any money from me. That, I'm fairly sure of. I'm very selective about what pbooks I buy new; it's a tiny handful and mostly nonfiction. (Religious books & gaming books.)

Granted you haven't read a drm copy, but besides that, you can't be sure. I have been around a bit longer than eBooks in general. I will point to first ISBN issued to an ebook in 1998, and the MS Reader in 2000 as the practical first dates, with more in 2002 and the start of wide use maybe 2005 with Amazon mobi and 2004 and 2006 with Sony.

I have bought exactly zero ebooks with device-specific DRM. I have bought a number of locked PDFs, which I then tear the locks off of so I can crop the whitespace out so they're somewhat tolerable on my Sony.

A few authors make a decision to not use DRM and then most of those publicize that in order to curry favor with "their public."

How many significant authors do you know that do that?

Depends on how you define "significant." And what kind of announcement you count as "currying favor."

The most obvious answer is "that lady who wrote something about teenage wizards." Other than her? Harlan Ellison. Diane Duane. Lois McMaster Bujold. But listing authors is pointless if I don't know your criteria for "significant."

Bottom line?
Only one year has seen me make more from books than engineering.

But you're still insisting that DRM is better for you economically. Or perhaps you're making a firm statement of "because my main income doesn't come from books, I don't care how many readers I'm losing by not offering more flexibility." Which is not what most authors mean when they say a decision is better for their "bottom line."

DRM has faults but it is the best system available.

For whom? For authors whose readers don't bother recommending their books to friends who can't afford them right now? Children learning to read, who'll be better off if their parents need to buy every book new? Teenagers learning to enjoy literature, who'll appreciate it more if every book costs a week's allowance and they can't share it with their friends?

In the long run, whom does DRM benefit?

Hopefully it will get better, and perhaps in the future once a book is sold to a person, in DRM form for a certain eReader, that person will have a lifetime ability to transfer that one copy of the book to any eReader they then choose.

"Lifetime?" Why can't they leave their ebooks to their heirs? Why can't they transfer ownership of that ebook just like they can with pbooks?

I have no idea how you think DRM could get "better." As long as people have access to keyboards, there will be no perfect DRM. The earliest bootleg books on the internet weren't scanned-and-OCR'd; they were typed in. While almost any DRM can be cracked by talented hackers, the *simplest* way around DRM is just to display the book on one device, and type the contents into another.

But it's not like we're going to run out of copying & screencapping tools, nor that encryption will somehow get better. It can't--because in order for the customer to read the book, they need the key. Then it's not a matter of "how do I break the encryption" but "how do I copy content out of one program into another"--a much simpler puzzle, because if it's displaying, it's somewhere in the computer's temporary storage.