Quote:
Originally Posted by Ntsimp
 That doesn't count. Amazon would never try it. No one here would buy books that were only delivered that way. It's an absurd, unworkable idea. |
I'm pretty sure that Amazon wouldn't do that, but I'm equally sure that they would still have plenty of customers if they did. I won't buy a digital product unless I know beforehand that I can defeat the DRM, but it's obvious that many others feel differently. The inconvenience that DRM creates is felt differently by different people and if Amazon had a system of wirelessly delivering pages to Kindles that matched the current speed of paging, most customers would continue exactly as they are now.
My guess is that both Amazon and Adobe have found a sweet spot. The barrier to casual copying is reasonably high, but those willing to invest more time and effort into e-reading can overcome the DRM. I've no real way of knowing, but my gut feeling is that the ebook industry sells more books with "leaky" DRM than if they either had no DRM or unbreakable DRM. There are certainly those in the industry that are incensed enough by the thought of people pirating their stuff that they'd even accept reduced sales to stop it, but based on the other decisions they've made, I don't think Amazon will do that.
To answer the original question, if DRM were to become unbreakable, I would stop buying ebooks. I still have a number of copyright-free ebooks on my TBR list and free ebooks are easy enough to come by that I don't think my reading habits would have to drastically change. There is probably a price point below which I would be willing to pay for DRM encumbered books, but it's much lower than prices are now.