MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Open Source culture to blame for e-book piracy!

etienne66 · 01-03-2010, 09:26 AM

From what I can tell the publishing industry wants to take away "fair-use" if they can get away with it. If they truly wanted to succeed with DRM then they should do the following:

Allow you to loan your ebook an unlimited number of times. Unlike only once like the nook. Of course while your book was on loan you would not have access to it, but unlike a real book you wouldn't have to worry about your friend forgetting to return it to you as you would set an expiration date.
You should have the right to sell or give away your rights to an ebook.
They should put in the same amount of effort on the proofreading and formatting as for a printed copy. Yet anther reason people strip the DRM is to simply repair badly formatted books.
They should not take away our right to use text-to-speech software. If they want to sell an audiobook version then make it worth peoples while by having a good voice actor, actress or even the author read the book as TTS will probably never be as good as this.
Offer ebooks at a reasonable price. Sure I can see them charging more for a newer ebook and then decrease the cost over time. If you are currently selling the paperback for US $9.99 then the ebook should probably be the same, but after a while that ebook better be far less than a new paperback. If the ebook has been out there for more than two years it really shouldn't be over US $5. But then again I should be able to pick up a used ebook at halfpriceebooks.com(domain is up for sale) for less than that after a while.
Setup a central repository that is stored in local libraries to store the rights and guarantee that it will always be available. If the library where your rights are stored is closing then they should be required by law to transfer your list of rights to another library of your choosing. I imagine at first most people would have to be using a small number of libraries as not all of the smaller libraries would be able to have a DRM rights server. But I don't think it would be too dissimilar to the Overdrive library that so many are now using.

This is not a question of whether the technology is there or not as all of this would be easy to implement although setting up the infrastructure might take a little bit of time, it could easily be done within a year and only require minor firmware or software updates to existing readers.

Sure there would still be people who would strip the DRM and pirate ebooks, but if you take away most of the bad parts of DRM you are more likely to have fewer people doing so.

Etienne66

01-03-2010, 09:26 AM	#48
etienne66 Groupie Posts: 185 Karma: 9832 Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Texas, US Device: Kindle 2, PRS-600 Black, PRS-650 Red, Adam w/ Pixel Qi(pre-ordered)	From what I can tell the publishing industry wants to take away "fair-use" if they can get away with it. If they truly wanted to succeed with DRM then they should do the following: Allow you to loan your ebook an unlimited number of times. Unlike only once like the nook. Of course while your book was on loan you would not have access to it, but unlike a real book you wouldn't have to worry about your friend forgetting to return it to you as you would set an expiration date. You should have the right to sell or give away your rights to an ebook. They should put in the same amount of effort on the proofreading and formatting as for a printed copy. Yet anther reason people strip the DRM is to simply repair badly formatted books. They should not take away our right to use text-to-speech software. If they want to sell an audiobook version then make it worth peoples while by having a good voice actor, actress or even the author read the book as TTS will probably never be as good as this. Offer ebooks at a reasonable price. Sure I can see them charging more for a newer ebook and then decrease the cost over time. If you are currently selling the paperback for US $9.99 then the ebook should probably be the same, but after a while that ebook better be far less than a new paperback. If the ebook has been out there for more than two years it really shouldn't be over US $5. But then again I should be able to pick up a used ebook at halfpriceebooks.com(domain is up for sale) for less than that after a while. Setup a central repository that is stored in local libraries to store the rights and guarantee that it will always be available. If the library where your rights are stored is closing then they should be required by law to transfer your list of rights to another library of your choosing. I imagine at first most people would have to be using a small number of libraries as not all of the smaller libraries would be able to have a DRM rights server. But I don't think it would be too dissimilar to the Overdrive library that so many are now using. This is not a question of whether the technology is there or not as all of this would be easy to implement although setting up the infrastructure might take a little bit of time, it could easily be done within a year and only require minor firmware or software updates to existing readers. Sure there would still be people who would strip the DRM and pirate ebooks, but if you take away most of the bad parts of DRM you are more likely to have fewer people doing so. Etienne66