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Originally Posted by BWinmill
It leaves me wondering if DRM is actually meant to inconvenience paying customers. People who lend books out, give books away, or resell books are cutting into sales from the perspective of the business. If you make the assumption that book buyers are law-abiding, then it may be possible to badger them into the one sale-one reader mentality. Pirates are a different issue. DRM may not hinder them, but it doesn't help them either. So if you can extract more sales out of law abiding readers, and are doing little to aide the cause of pirates, why wouldn't you implement DRM?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
While I generally agree with the sentiment I think the one place where DRM is effective is in keeping the general ebook reading public, such as my mother, from passing their books around among friends. If she wanted to loan/share a pbook she'd have to give up the physical copy and not have access to it while it's being borrowed. If she wanted to loan/share the DRM free eBook she could send it to our entire family at once so they could all read it at the same time plus she'd still have access as well. Now I personally could do that regardless of DRM, since it's removable, but someone like my mother wouldn't be able to do this if the books are DRM'd. I think this is one of the worries that publishers have beyond "regular" piracy and a big reason they often still insist on DRM. As to if the TOR example will change any minds at MacMillan or other houses, who knows. Doesn't seem to have so far.
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You both make good points. I hadn't really thought about it like that. But I guess the spectre of any customer (even non-techies) emailing a book to all their friends and family could be one of the scariest things about ebooks from a publisher's perspective. And it does differ from music mp3s in that ebooks fiels are small enough to easily email.