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I respect living authors and I strongly believe they should should get fair payment. I would NOT walk into a bookstore and take a book without paying for it. However,once paid for, it is mine and I am at liberty to read it in any room of my house, under a fluorescent light or a yellow tungsten bulb, in a train, in a bus or while waiting for a plane. DRM restricts normal use and I am always worried that a change of computer, operating system, loss of memory, etc., will prevent me from reading my own paid-for books. This did happen to me with something called Audible and I have quite a few of audiobooks which won't work on any of my current machines and while the Audible program allows me to log in, the superb intelligence behind the programme tells me that I cannot delete a machine except from the machine in which the machine identity was built (that machine was probably dismantled years ago) and that all my machine identities are used up. Well, it was something like that - and I just couldn't be bothered to buy another audiobook from Audible ever again. The same holds for other DRMed books - I think it is silly and amounts to saying 'you can only read this book in the third chair of the second room upstairs.' and then sticking in some silly code to try to enforce it. No, the problem lies with the ease of reproduction of electronic files combined with an attitude that denies the basic rights of living authors. There is no quick and easy solution - I can see from the voting pattern on this subject that most people are happy to pay for their books but are not willing to carry restrictions after their purchase - in other words they would buy a DRMed book and remove the DRM.
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