Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey
Oooh, didn't realize that Adobe DRM had a call home to authorize - I generally buy DRM epub from B&N on the rare occasions I buy it.
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It doesn't have to call home each time the file is opened or downloaded, but most ADE books only work on the authorized devices--if Adobe stops supporting ADE (they way they stopped supporting PDFs usable with Acrobat 6) after a few more upgrades, you won't be able to transfer those books to a new device, because the new device won't be able to be registered.
For B&N's DRM, all you need is the credit card number that was used to purchase the book. How long will you keep that around?
And if the publisher pulls the book from the store, it may or may not be available for future download. While this is less problematic--after all, you don't expect a replacement copy of a pbook if it's no longer being sold--the stores encourage people to load to their devices, not their computers, and delete from the device when done reading, and re-download if they want to re-read. They often imply, without stating outright, that once you've bought it, it'll always be available, which is not necessarily true.
Simple reason why not: if a lawsuit decides the book itself was infringing copyright--if John Scalzi's "Redshirts" is pulled from publication over trademark or copyright issues--it may be pulled from people's libraries as well. (I don't think that'll happen in this particular case.)
Basically, DRM means you don't control how you can use the book; the company *providing the DRM* does. Not the author, not the publisher... whoever verifies the DRM controls the future use of the book. As long as their control isn't very restrictive, very few people care. However, at least three major ebook DRM providers have gone out of service, leaving customers stuck with books they can't read in the future:
Amazon, with its PDFs from 2005-2007,
Adobe, with PDFs readable on Acrobat 6 (which included the ability to read on PDAs)
Microsoft, which stopped supporting .lit entirely fairly recently.
I suspect the next major one will be non-Kindle Mobipocket, which is owned by Amazon; they may decide to stop allowing other mobi books to be sold with DRM. Since most other stores have shifted to DRM, this wouldn't affect them much--but it'd leave thousands, maybe millions, of customers stuck with books that can't be read on future devices.