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Originally Posted by emellaich
On the other hand, remember that Sony used to have a music store and then they closed it down. If you bought copy-protected music from their store, and you have since bought a new music player, you are now out of luck. Unless of course, you remove the DRM yourself.
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At least it's easy to get rid of the mp3 DRM, since it only requires, at most, playing the music through to another file. I'm totally ignorant about removing DRM from ebooks, but it's not quite that easy, is it?
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As I said earlier, Ian's story is simply an illustration of why DRM is anti-consumer. It doesn't matter who you buy your reader from. If the content is locked you face potential headaches down the road. And you are at the whim of whatever changes are made by your content provider.
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I'm beginning to switch my mindset to the idea that I'm not "buying" ebooks when I "purchase" them. Rather, I'm "renting" them, not unlike borrowing from a library, but for a price.
Thing is, when I think about renting ebooks rather than buying them, I begin to think that the prices are too high for a whole lot of them. So the publishers obviously aren't thinking that they are renting the books out to us readers.
But what if some publisher started renting books out on the basis of how long the reader wanted to keep the book? Say that you could "rent" a book for three weeks for three bucks, or two months for six bucks, after which the book evaporated off your reader. Would you do that?
I have to say that personally, I don't care much about keeping my ebooks after I've read them. I know that there are people who find pleasure in rereading books, but I'm always thinking that there's another book that needs its first read. I have reread some books, though, and I believe that I would prefer to have those books in treebook form anyway. So I'd probably rent all my books in ebook format if I could, then purchase the treebook for my keepers.
Heck, I can imagine that at some point, it should be possible to buy the treebook directly from the ebook file:
"Did you enjoy this ebook? Would you like to have a permanent edition of it, to keep on your shelf and read it again with all the pleasure that a well made book brings to your reading, or as a gift? Click here, and <insert book purveyor> will ship the permanent edition to your doorstep. We'll even credit your purchase with the amount you paid to rent this ebook!"
In that context, the problem with DRM for me is just that all books aren't available in a DRMed format my 505 can read.