Quote:
Originally Posted by afa
Man, this DRM business is worse than I ever thought. I better teach myself how to strip it, pronto.
Oh, and thanks to everyone for the info. I appreciate it.
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It gets complicated, because today, if you bought books on your Kindle 1, then upgraded to a Kindle 2 or DX, your books are still available.
But there are people who remember that Amazon and B&N sold ebooks maybe 8-10 years ago, then decided to stop. Download your bookshelf now or forever hold your piece. And those are the people who bought the Microsoft LIT and/or Adobe PDF books that no longer are tied to their current computers for one reason or another.
Adobe epub books are tied to an authorization that is limited to up to six machines. Oh, today, if you have problems and re-authorize and re-authorize and you need more than six, you can contact them. But there's no guarantee they'll expand you beyond six, or that they will tomorrow or next year or whatever.
Amazon may allow you to download your Kindle books for the rest of your life, but they may not. In the past, they definitely haven't. So we're wary of trusting the "promise" of an eternal digital bookshelf.
One of the big discussions you'll see here is the wish (longing, yearning) for a single format - one that reads on anything you play it on (like a CD). That would allow some of the fear ease - but it still depends on the form of DRM.
When I decided to start buying digital books (before most of the hacking tools were around), I chose to limit my DRM purchases to eReader format. The DRM is built into the book, and uses my name and credit card number to unlock the book. But as long as I have a copy of eReader software, I can read those books (I still have the same credit card number, but others have complained about books tied to credit cards they haven't used in a decade of years!)
Even that's not perfect. If eReader goes away, then those books are only as good as my own backups of that software (assuming they'll continue to installable on newer versions of Windows down the road).
Some people say, so what? The 8-track tapes we bought in the 70s don't play in anything today! They've repurchased favorite music on cassette tapes, then CDs, now MP3s. I have paperback books from the 70s that are falling a-part. And I have some that are in almost pristine shape. Eventually, that paper will rot or mold or whatever.
I don't care. I want to buy my books once and read them on whatever gadget I'm reading on today, tomorrow, next year. And I'd love to be able to pass them on to a young fan when I go (although I doubt that'll ever be legal!)
The sad thing is, DRM is a fact of life right now, if you want books by the mainstream publishers. If you're adventurous, you can try to independent ebook publishers and buy books with DRM. But if you're looking for the latest John Grisham or Janet Evanovich (or Dennis Lehane, to stick with my earlier example!), you're stuck with DRM at this point.
And then...you're having to decide whether you're going to trust your ebook store to be there tomorrow, or whether you're going to be willing to rebuy books when your current versions become obsolete, or - to become a hacker and law-breaker!