Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
If the inclusion or absence of DRM has no impact on publisher's sales, it automatically means that customers don't care if their books are controlled by a third party.
I don't know what to think about this...
1. Is it ignorance, and would they care if they knew?
2. Is it stupidity and don't they understand, even if they know?
3. Is it neither, and they just *really* don't care?
If there hadn't been an "easy-ish" way of removing DRM, I wouldn't be e-reading. The one thing I dislike about digital books and music is that it requires A LOT more forethought and work to keep it usable in the future:
Physical book:
1. Buy it.
2. Read it.
3. Put on shelf on the correct spot (however you arrange them).
If your house doesn't burn down, this book will be usable as long as it doesn't fall apart.
Digital book:
1. Buy it.
2. Download the ASCM (in case of an EPUB)
3. Put it into ADE.
4. Pull the book into calibre to have Alf's plugins remove the DRM
5. Fix the metadata
6. Put in a cover (as they often don't have one)
7. Use the editor to have all problems fixed
8. Put it onto your e-reader
If you don't un-DRM and don't care about errors in the book, you can skip steps 4-7, or even just buy the book from the device itself. In that case however, usage of the book in the somewhat distant future is uncertain.
Many people don't (seem to) care, but I do.
You can't imagine how much time I've put into my e-book and music libraries to future-proof them as much as possible, and to remove all inconcistencies so I can easily convert them to newer formats if I ever need to. E-books and music together at least took me about half a decade. With a physical library, it'd take me half a day to arrange it in a sensible way.
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I'm with you, but I suspect it's mostly 3. (they really don't care) nowadays for the majority, sometimes perhaps 1. Most people don't seem to reread, and most people don't have libraries consisting of thousands of e-books. I've read opinions on Amazon forums that even if they somehow lost their books, it would be no particular problem to buy them again (those few they would want to keep). We with our huge libraries which we painstakingly back up and keep in order are in a very tiny minority, imho.