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Originally Posted by frahse
DRM allows us the luxury where 95 to 99% of people cannot email their books to their friends.
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Enjoy it while it lasts.
I don't buy DRM. My children don't buy DRM. Their friends are oblivious to ebooks... and what information they get about them, comes from my kids, which comes through me. They'll figure out pirating on their own; the info they get about legit ebooks is that DRM is nothing but a form of vendor lock-in.
Right now, teenagers don't buy ebooks. They can't; they don't have credit cards. They can have PayPal accounts with adult oversight; the majority of their parents aren't going to deal with it. Ten years from now, those teenagers will be adult buyers of ebooks.
Maybe. More likely, they'll be adult piraters of ebooks, because after 3-10 years practice with acquiring books without paying for them, they aren't going to switch to a system that costs more, is harder to use, and lacks the customizability they've come to expect.
Right now, most readers put up with DRM because "carry 500 books in your pocket" is an amazing liberation of former reading restrictions. For the next generation, "500 books in your pocket, and 200 albums, and a dozen movies, and 50 games of my choice" will be standard fare. They'll ask what DRM does for them, and give blank looks when publishers insist "without DRM, you wouldn't have books to read." They've *had* books without DRM for years.
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I don't give out my personal information for that reason. I don't want to become a "cause celebre" I don't want to chance even a 1/4 percent reduction in the bottom line.
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Always nice to hear, "if my customers knew what I believed, they wouldn't buy from me." So I take it you're a strong supporter of internet anonymity, or at least pseudonymity? That you disagree with Google+ requirements to link one's "real" name across all their services?
I have no problem figuring out how not to buy from you: I don't buy DRM. I don't download freebies with DRM. It's not like I have any shortage of excellent and educational reading material lined up.
I assume that I'm not your target audience anyway. The interesting part is the assumption that none of my family and close friends are, either; the ebook evangelists in any small community are the ones who set the common habits for that group. My friends know I'm "an ebook person," and when they're interested in getting an ereader or buying books, they ask me how it's done.
I don't tell them "Don't buy DRM." I do tell them, "if you're going to buy DRM, learn to strip it so you keep access to your purchases." And I also say, "this is maybe illegal; vendors, publishers and some authors have all worked together to try to make it illegal for you to read ebooks easily. The technology supports a lot of options that the sellers want to take away from you." And, since most of my friends are techie-geek types, or at least techie-geek friendly, they're prone to ignoring laws and licenses and using the tools to their utmost.
And in another five years when book-DRM goes the way of music-DRM, they'll have useful ebook collections. In twenty years when their kids are going off to college, they'll pop in a flash drive and give them a collection of "great books from the early 21st century."