Quote:
Originally Posted by Boston
Yes...the inability to share books with others is the biggest drawback I have personally (and why I bought my mother a Kindle). Its also the reason many of my friends have not jumped on the eBook bandwagon.
So I should say that my biggest issue with DRM is the lack of a universal standard and the inability to transfer license. In fact, I'd even be willing to pay a nominal fee (say $1) for the ability to do the latter.
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i think in fact we are fundamentally in agreement, but simply have different ideas of how to go about things.
i agree with you ; we need a universal standard so that incompatibility issues will be a thing of the past, but for me, that is tied to format, not drm, and that is why i support epub (the new industry standard format). partly this is for purely personal reasons : i first started with an eb1150, a brilliant device which is notorious for reading EXCLUSIVELY a closed, proprietary, dead-end format that no other device will read and that can't be converted and is laughable as an archival format because it's already been obsolete for years. so every book i bought had to be converted to the appropriate format, and sometimes with pretty horrible results. and that gets tedious. (oh, and also i'm a webdesigner, so hello browser wars, haven't we done this already ?).
as for sharing with your mother / sister / wife / husband / close friends, a universal format will also help with this, but again, i refer to the file format (like epub) when i say that.
i really believe that drm doesn't change anything when it comes down to large-scale file-sharing. the people who want to do this, will do it regardless, and drm won't stop them (as we've seen, with music, films, video games, etc.). the people who don't want to do this, wouldn't do it
*even if* drm wasn't there, because they have made their decision based on their own ethics and values, and not just the superficial block of an easily-removed / broken / gotten around drm system.
drm, when you look closely at it, is really no more than an attempt to lock you in to a specific vendor, whether it's hardware (kindle) or software (mobipocket). and even there it may fail, since the people who are really determined (the eb1150 users
) will manage to convert to whatever format is convenient to them.
so in reality it's an inconvenient, pointless, ineffective waste of money. and that's putting it mildly.
