Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
A third is DRM. In many ways this is the biggest, and most harmful issue facing the industry today. Not only does it place obstacles in the way of reading the ebooks, but it also raises the price, and the spectre of the thought that the company can rewrite the license or go out of business taking your purchases with it. We've seen it happen with Google's paid video service, and with Mobipocket. Turn off the DRM server and you lose the ability to access what you've paid for. Without DRM you can keep a local archive copy and access it when and how you want.
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I really don't agree with you that DRM is the huge issue that some people make it out to be.
I turn again to iTunes as an example. iTunes has DRM for the overwhelming majority of its content, and it's been a massive commercial success. I don't know anyone who says "I'm not going to buy music from iTunes in case Apple goes out of business."
I know that one person here reported that they were unable to read a MobiPocket book that they'd bought while the MobiPocket server was down, but that's a bit of a mystery: I'm also a member of the "Fictionwise" Yahoo group and, while you couldn't buy new content from FW that depended on MP's DRM server, nobody there reported that they couldn't read what they already had. I don't know why that one person had a problem.
I really don't think that the average "man in the street" cares two hoots about DRM.