Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
A decade or more ago, there used to be at least one usenet feed where people posted ebook versions scanned from paper. I looked at a few, they usually were pretty bad, scanned but poorly proofread. After the publishers finally gave up and started selling ebooks of all of their catalog, I think the feeds morphed into ebooks from cracked DRM. If the publishers were to switch to a DRM system that is much harder to crack, I suspect that most DRM breakers would switch to whatever retailer(s) sell versions that are still breakable and they would not go back to scanning.
It would take a long time to switch. Amazon, B&N and Kobo probably sell a lot of their ebooks to consumers with ereaders that they don't sell anymore, and switching to a DRM still that those ereaders can't read would cause a lot of bad press and unhappy customers who might chose to buy a reader from a different walled garden instead of upgrading.
Macmillan and Baen aren't the only ones to go DRM-free. Simon & Schuster's Saga SF line did too. Macmillan seems to be more concerned about libraries, they added a 6 month window between publication date and ebooks available from libraries.
I think that if B&N gives up on the Nook, they'll do what Sony did, and sell the customer base to Kobo. Even if Kobo only gives them a pittance, it's better than shutting down without anything to show for it.
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Yea, I had a bit over 200 books with Sony. Fortunately, I downloaded them all and removed the DRM before the store closed. Most of the books transferred over to Kobo (and appear on my Kobo Aura), but around 25 didn't because the books were no longer available for purchase. Still better than nothing and it did get me to at least try the Kobo store.
Way back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Baen was the only publisher putting out ebooks, there was a usenet group that did scanned books. It was a kind of Guttenberg style situation where someone would scan and put up the first iteration, and different people would edit and put up corrected copies. Popular books got multiple editing iterations, so after a while they were pretty good. Books that had been scanned and no one edited, not so much. For the most part, the participants didn't really see it as piracy since there were no ebooks to pirate. They just made ebook versions of books they had purchased. There seemed to be a fair amount of pride in workmanship.
The vast majority of ebook buyers don't care about DRM. They buy a book on their kindle and read it on their kindle. Or they buy in the Books store and read in Books. They never leave their walled garden and are quite happy. They are fine leaving the books in the cloud. There are very few people who really care one way or the other. The big reason it's still out there is there are a few authors/publishers who worry about piracy and because it's already out there, so why change.