Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
holy cow !!! the RIAA saying "drm is dead" is like some kind of miracle ! are you listening, publishing industry ?
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You'd think so, wouldn't you? But no, many publishers (& pundits) argue that while music on CDs is easy to convert to MP3, paper books don't convert to a digital format so easily, and so DRM on ebooks is still necessary.
This position ignores the obvious point that it only requires one person to remove the DRM, or OCR the book.
I'm sure that within the next five years the book industry will come to the same realisation as the music industry - that DRM only affects their paying customers, not the people who download for free illegally.
Good quality content, easily found, and at a reasonable price.
So far the book industry is missing on all three
* Quality of commercial ebooks is poor. Lots of text and formatting problems, even in books that are already published from digital files (e.g. Lord of the Rings)
* Multiple formats split the market. Restrictive publishing contracts split the market. Find a book can be hard.
* As much or more than the cheapest new paper copy is not reasonable.
Some publishers know what to do (
Baen), but even they don't have the work flow completely right - on first release there are often be problems caused by formatting conversions. At least they fix them fairly quickly, once reported.