Quote:
Originally Posted by EndStop
Well a decent attempt would be to create an encripted book that can only be read by a licenced reader program that checks the books licence via phone home to get the encryption key. So you can, say, read your book on a laptop but only with a kindle reader utility.
However....
Nobody controls what programs, or indeed what drivers, a user chooses to install on a laptop. Once a legal copy of an Ebook is on a laptop it can be read. The ouput of the reader goes to a video driver and that driver is not protected. If no easier method is found then an altered video driver can pass the output to another program which can write a DRM free copy of the book. That DRM free copy can be released to the net. So in principle, all the DRM ensures is the payment of a single licence.
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One of the main reasons that DRM is pointless is you always have what use to be called the analog hole in music. That's why music has been sold DRM free on iTunes since 2007, over a decade. As long as people can scan paper books, DRM for electronic books is rather pointless, especially as scanning technology gets better and better. I can remember when Harry Potter 7 hit the darknet before it hit the bookstores. Even if they slap on an unbeatable DRM on all ebooks, you will just see a return of most books showing up in a scanned form on the darknet, but I really doubt we will see that. It's a lot more likely that DRM will eventually go away.
DRM is for the most part a publisher decision. I doubt Amazon cares all that much as long as you buy the books from them. The vast majority of ebook buyers are fine with the walled garden of Kindle, Books and Kubo. I suspect that Nook buyers might not be real happy when B&N finally shuts down the Nook.
TOR went DRM free back in 2012. That's 6 years of data. Given TOR hasn't slapped DRM back on, I suspect that they aren't seeing a significant loss of sales to piracy. Indeed they say they haven't. Baen, of course, has always been DRM free.