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Originally Posted by iain_benson
All these examples of buying paper books with silly DRM equated restrictions miss one major point in the comparison ... all the eBook websites (I have looked at) state quite clearly that the books are DRM protected
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Then you haven't looked at many.
- Baen does not use DRM.
- Fictionwise sells many, many ebooks without DRM
- The new Coolerbooks.com website doesn't mention anything about DRM, although it seems likely they use it, only without telling customers what they're buying.
Coolerbooks doesn't even tell you if you're getting ePub or PDF files; they only list the program they expect you to read the books with.
Many ebook stores that do use DRM, don't explain it--they say "you'll need X software to read these books," but they don't say, "and that means you can only read them on a limited number of devices, and even if you download them to a memory card/usb drive, you can't hand them off to a friend when you're done." They don't tell customers what they're buying.
Of course, the free ebook websites don't have DRM:
- Gutenberg.org
- Manybooks.net
- Feedbooks.com
- Munseys.com
- Dozens of small ebook sites
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I think phrase in point that is generally missing in discussions of DRM is caveat emptor: you know exactly what you are buying, if you don't like it, don't buy it!
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A lot of ebookstores have carefully arranged their site info to not tell customers either that they have DRM, or how it works.
In my mind, there's a great deal of difference between "you need this software to read this document" (which often includes in it, "or you need an alternate, nonsponsored software"--you don't
need Acrobat Reader to read PDFs, and you don't
need Microsoft Word to read .doc files) and "you need this software, plus give us your name, email address, and computer ID info, plus a high-speed connection for verification of same, plus automatic update permissions, plus we keep the ability to disable your book if we like."
Can you name any ebook websites that spell out in detail what's required for their DRM'd books, beyond "install this software?" Any that say what information is exchanged, or what the special software requires?