Quote:
Originally Posted by izaack
Hi Zelda & thanks again for your advice!
a question regarding your 3'rd point: "...it *will* cause trouble for their legitimate customers ..." - what trouble will DRM cause their legitimate customers?
Cheers,
Izaack.M
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that is a good question. it will cause trouble ranging from inconvenience, to outright loss of legally purchased books, and it also unfairly limits the ways that you can use a book you've purchased.
you can lose access to your books in many ways : because your reader fails and your new one is not compatible with the drm system, or because you have to reinstall your computer operating system, or even worse, because the drm content provider goes out of business (this has happened many times, including previously with amazon's original ebook store, ironically, and more recently with Overdrive : more about that later). for inexperienced customers, they might accidentally buy the wrong format for their reader ; drm means they are stuck, and can't do anything with the file, and must purchase the book again in the correct format, unless the bookseller is understanding and willing to make the exchange.
drm is all about vendor lock-in. it sometimes ties your books to a specific device using an individual device id. but what if your device breaks, or you lose it, or replace it, or just want to upgrade it ? the new device does not have the same id, so your books won't work. if you're lucky, you bought them from a bookstore which is still in business, and you have the possibility of registering the new device and redownloading ALL the files again. this is not very convenient, but at least you still have access to your books. but what if the bookstore is no longer in business ? well, you're out of luck. what if your new device doesn't support the same drm format ? out of luck again. what if the format is obsolete, and no longer supported by
any devices ? out of luck yet again.
to give you some concrete examples, i'll start with something that happened to me about 2 months ago. until recently, my main reader was an eb1150, which can only read the .imp format, a closed proprietary format no other device can read. imp can't be converted to any other format, and it's almost guaranteed that one day in the near future i will no longer have a device capable of reading it (because it's already obsolete), so i always bought a better archival format and converted the files to imp. some books are only available with drm. in this case, i would buy MicroSoft Reader (lit) format, because the drm can easily be removed and the format converted the lit format is a thin wrapper over an html core : once you convert it, you can save the html file for archival purposes, and also create whatever format you need for your device. the drawback of lit format, is that you can only download it using MS Internet Explorer, and only if you have an "authorised" copy of the MS Reader application on your computer.
about 2 months ago, my computer died, and i had to get a new one and reinstall the OS and all my applications. but, when i reinstalled MS Reader, it was reinitialised with a new authorisation code. so, i am no longer able to download any of the lit books that i purchased from fictionwise ! even though i paid for them, and they are still showing in my account at fictionwise ! but the drm code in my account doesn't match the one on my computer, so the drm server refuses to give me access to them.
in my case, it could have been worse : i had already downloaded them when i bought them, and luckily immediately removed the drm, and the html files were backed up on a drive which was not damaged. but if i lose those files due to a disk crash, i'm out of luck ; i have to purchase them again. not very fair, i think you'll agree.
also, i recently bought a sony 700 reader. the 700 cannot read the .imp format of course, so if i want to read the books i purchased before, i have to convert them to a format the 700 *can* read (like epub). well, unless i have removed the drm from the books i buy, that is impossible. how is it fair for a publisher to dictate to me how i read my books ? on what device, in what format ?
another example is the Overdrive incident i mentioned. as you can see in
this thread, Overdrive, which is one of the major drm content servers, recently decided to stop serving fictionwise, which is a popular ebookstore. this means, that all drm books which came from the overdrive servers, would no longer be available for download AT ALL by the people who legally purchased them, through no fault of their own. effectively, they were being robbed of access to their own books that they had paid for, and Overdrive was offering no compensation at all ! i don't know how that can even be legal.
now, it happens that fictionwise had already had a problem like this in the past, and as a result they purchased the eReader drm format to be sure that there was one format they could control and always be able to provide their customers. and because fictionwise is a decent company, they went out of their way to negotiate with publishers and get the eReader rights to as many of the affected titles as possible, and replace the Overdrive mobipocket and lit format books with their own eReader versions, so that at least their customers would still have access to their books, although not in the format of their choice.
The drawback of that solution, of course, is that currently NO e-ink device supports the eReader format natively ! so these replacement books were no good to anyone without removing the drm and converting them to a different format. In essence, honest customers who just wanted to read the books they had paid for, were forced to jump through hoops of drm-removal and format shifting, because a major drm server abruptly decided unilaterally to stop service. add to that that drm-removal is technically illegal in some countries, and you have a truly absurd situation where customers are almost being forced into illegal actions despite their best intentions !
the overdrive incident is a recent example but that situation has happened many many times previously, both with ebooks (amazon...) and with music (too many too list).
i hope that answers your question. there are actually even MORE ways drm causes problems for honest, legitimate customers, but this post is long enough i think !
