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If you read through the threads, you will see that serious ebook consumers despise DRM. It just causes difficulty all around for purchasers, who curse and swear they will never again buy anything that author writes. And anyone who wishes to break into it and pirate the story will do so anyway. Luckily, this has not proven to be a big problem in ebook world. Sure, there are some pirates, but they are in the suburbs of fringe and do not make a big impact. Mostly, pirates seem to excel in getting non-ebooks digitized, by scanning paper versions for their own use and sharing. I've never encountered a tale of a pirate who was selling ebooks, but instead, the ones I've heard of have free downloads of mostly obscure and/or textbooky type things, with copies of their own personal pbook collection thrown in as well.
Meanwhile, your customers who paid money for the book are stuck with something that may or may not be useable to them. Every ebook reader is a bit different, and what looks great on one will look weird or not even load on another. That is where DRM crosses the line into alienating potential repeat customers. If they have to strip the DRM and reformat it, then they are forced to make the decision of whether or not to break the law in order to read something that they bought and paid for. I promise, when that happens to me, I do not hesitate to broadcast it to the 40,000 MobileRead members, and will never again pay good money to buy that author's work.
If I am not mistaken, aren't there levels of DRM? Can't it be set so that the book can not be printed, without restricting it otherwise?
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