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Originally Posted by Alisa
Either out of touch or actively lying. There were still tons of defectivebydesign tags all over the Amazon store last time I checked.
As for the publishing guy, I'm not surprised he trotted out that old argument. I was disappointed the reporter didn't question him more. The fact is, there are books all over the darknet. There are already several formats out there that are easy to strip and enough people willing to scan and OCR that it's a moot point trying to stop piracy this way. It only takes one illegal copy getting out to mean that you have inconvenienced the rest of your customer base in vain. Like many others, I believe DRM is primarily for customer lock down. Besides, it's unreasonable to think you can stop piracy completely. If they want to discourage piracy, they need to do what the author said: make books easy to get and reasonably priced. Her entire series is available in electronic format and the first one's free. That's the way to sell books.
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I partly agree and partly don't agree. Yes, DRM can be removed from SOME books but not everyone is going to be able to do it nor everyone is going to have the time and energy to do it. So, the effects of DRM that limits its distribution is not null. In other words, it's not a moot point.
Take me as an example. I bought three Adobe Digital Editions book. They are all academic books which I'll use over and over again (if I continue to be in this profession). And for both, I want to remove the DRM. I've been having tremendous problems figuring out how to do it and finally emailed a forum member for clearer directions. I haven't yet had the time or energy to figure out how to execute his detailed reply. No, it's not a moot point for some of us.
I do hope though that DRM goes away. DRM is so dependent on an ecosystem that is not very permanent. Those DRM servers and institutions can go away and many do. Furthermore, let's not forget that digital technology is evolving rapidly. In a decade, what happens to the Adobe Digital Edition book that I bought when the original server no longer is authenticating using that technology because "it's passé"? What happens then when we want to transfer those DRM'ed files to new computers and new readers? This is also one reason I'm going to, hopefully, be able to remove the DRM from my three purchases.