Quote:
Originally Posted by forcheville
Yes, watermarking is the way to go. Since there are very many possible watermarking schemes that can be used in an ebook, many should be used simultaneously.
This will not affect readability or in any way harm the systems of indirectly involved parties, but will make piracy much more risky by tearing away some of the anonymity that pirates hide behind.
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For ePub (and it is probably similar for mobi) removal of cover page and images (both binary and svg), custom fonts, "flattening" of the UTF8 to ASCII + normal typographical characters (m-dashes, hyphens, etc.), simplistic and minimal ePub (x)HTML tags and single spaces between words is something that can be automated and would be rather difficult to defeat with watermark schemes. End result would be a rather "bland" ebook, but the principal content, the text, would be unaffected. Not much can be done to hide a watermark in ASCII text file, when everything is said and done.
IMHO, watermarking effectively protects the work of the typesetter, but can not do much about the rights of the author. And a particular watermarking scheme can rarely be used more than a couple of times (pirates become aware of the protection with the first court case).