Publishers want to know that copyright in the works they publish will be protected. For years it has been their strong belief that without sufficient technical and legal protections, digital copies of works are subject to unauthorized copying on a mass scale.
The status quo?
Today we have a plethora of non-interoperable e-book file formats (Adobe, Sony, Microsoft, Mobipocket and eReader, just to name a few), further "enhanced" by proprietary DRM systems. All attempts so far to introduce industry standards have failed. Honest users are being punished for buying e-books they cannot freely use on all e-book devices and/or sell to another person. At the same time, there are striving sophisticated underground communities who offer all the e-books you can think of - bootleg copies, free, without DRM, and of course unauthorized. The fact that people are doing this, are
able to doing this despite all DRM efforts by the publishers, really does indicate that the latter has failed to prevent piracy, and that there's a whole lot of demand for e-books.
In the words of Wired blog editor
Rob Beschizza (link via
TeleRead):
Quote:
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With the masters of digital music finally relenting and offering DRM-free tracks, it's time to kill e-book rights management once and for all: give us we want, in the file format we want, and you get our money. Once.
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Related: DRM, or not DRM: that is the question (poll)