[danskmacabre]

Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley

My point was that if someone had committed some other crime and were to have secondhand ebooks on their hard drive, it's not such a stretch that the DA might use them as a reason to give someone grief.

That's the risk people take when committing crimes, minor or major. You risk getting caught and punished. That's just life.

I've never said that changing the format of a purchased DRM'd ebook for personal use was a big crime, though I've never done it.

Seeing as you said that you can extend the life of an ebook by converting it, you must be considering it as an option.
The bottom line is it's illegal to crack DRM on ebooks. I don't personally like drm on ebooks, it's irritating, so hopefully one day there will be a better system in place.

But to change the format and then give the book to someone else, well, that's shady and could see someone getting in trouble for it. You'd basically have to take off any DRM to be able to hand say a Kindle book off to someone else because they're tied to your Amazon account.

That's correct, so this goes back to my original argument, you only have your kindle books for SURE as long as amazon exists and you can't LEGALLY convert it to other formats.

BTW, I used to think the spread of my books was good advertising and at least one person had to buy it for all those copies to exist, but that was before I realized how sneaky some people are. They buy an ebook on Amazon, copy it, then return it for a refund. At least with a paperback it's time intensive to scan it and reformat it, plus there's something nice about the feel and smell of paper

Having no experience of amazon ebooks I can't speak for this sort of practice. seems a bit weird you can return an ebook when it could be read within hours and returned. But there will always be nefarious people about doing this sort of thing whatever the scam is.

At the end of the day, there's advantages to pbooks over ebooks and the other way around as well.
For me I have some books in a pbook format (although I'm slowly replacing them with ebooks) and new stuff is generally ebooks.
I generally stick with indie authors as they are less likely to have drm on them, so I can put them on whatever device I want.
When the big publishers go the way of Tor and publish books without DRM, I'll start buying their books as well sometime.
I have a solid backups procedure as well, so there's a very low risk of me actually losing my ebooks.
I intend to pay for my books, I can't speak for others who choose not to and can't really do anything about that either.