DRM on e-books? Five possibly good reasons to crack it

[astrodad]

I remove DRM for device independence. I remove it as soon as I buy it and store it in calibre. I buy a lot of books for my kids and I don't want to commit them to a specific device that may or not be available in the future. If I control the books, I can put it on any device they end up owning.

For example, right now my eldest owns a used Nook ST with glowlight but as of last week he owned a 2nd gen Kindle that committed suicide down the stairs of our resort. If I hadn't removed the DRM I would have been forced to buy him another device instead of just letting him use our old NST.

[Man Eating Duck]

Another reason to de-DRM is to change formatting. 175% line-height, 1.2in margins and spacing between paragraphs are not to my liking, so away they go. Without the possibility of changing them the majority of the epubs I buy would frankly have been very annoying to read.

[anacreon]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

1. Leave the country, lose your ebooks
2. Anger Amazon, lose your ebooks
3. Own too many devices, lose your ebooks
4. Switch to a different book store, lose your ebooks
5. Bookstore shuts down, lose your ebooks

There are more reasons to de-DRM books. My main ones are

• the poor quality of ebooks: too many books I bought had no TOC, or worse, terrible conception, which means I had to learn a minimum of coding, and thank god there is Calibre and its plugins to correct my tentative Sigil adjustments; I had books all italics, or all bold for instance, and once a Penguin that was so slow turning pages that I gave up reading it
• the unavailability of books I was looking for in the standard epub format;
• the erratic pricing: I learned that it is best to shop around, since usually amazon is the highest priced but sometimes the lowest; and even for epubs, some sites add 20% VAT on the VAT included price set by editors, and applied by other sites;
• and finally, I like to be able to add my metadatas, choose margins, type, etc., and cancel the publicity at the end of the book

[sadievan]

#'s 2, 4, 5 mostly.

Carol

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by Barty

Reasons? We don't need no steenking reasons!

[Julius Caesar]

How did Steve Jobs manage to convince the music industry to sell songs without DRM?

[cromag]

Itunes didn't drop its DRM until well after Amazon started selling DRM-free MP3s, IIRC. Competition can be very convincing.

[dilysb]

Has anybody managed to use Adobe DRM with Windows 8? It seems not to be supported. None of my devices (Nook, Nexus 7, Kobo Arc, Kobo Mini,Kobo standard, Binatone, EZ Reader...) is recognised and I am now shut out of Gutenberg

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Julius Caesar

How did Steve Jobs manage to convince the music industry to sell songs without DRM?

He didn't. He tried, and failed.

Amazon persuaded them to drop DRM as a counter to the dominance of the iTunes music store, allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3 files.

Apple did eventually get permission to sell DRM-free, but Amazon was first.

[5thWiggle]

Originally Posted by cromag

Itunes didn't drop its DRM until well after Amazon started selling DRM-free MP3s, IIRC. Competition can be very convincing.

EMI started selling DRM free music on iTunes before Amazon opened the mp3 store. Jobs was pressuring for DRM removal, and EMI was dropping copy protection on CDs anyway (They had been dropping it since 2004, but not re-mastering or re-printing any dics inserts, so it took a long time to filter out). The rest of the big music companies waited unitl their contrancts ran out before going drm free. Amazon opened with DRM free music from Sony, EMI, Univeral, and Warner because they were going DRM free on iTunes eventualy anyway.

We closed the last EMI CD plant about a month after going DRM free on iTunes. I had been working for EMI for 21 years.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by 5thWiggle

EMI started selling DRM free music on iTunes before Amazon opened the mp3 store. Jobs was pressuring for DRM removal, and EMI was dropping copy protection on CDs anyway (They had been dropping it since 2004, but not re-mastering or re-printing any dics inserts, so it took a long time to filter out). The rest of the big music companies waited unitl their contrancts ran out before going drm free. Amazon opened with DRM free music from Sony, EMI, Univeral, and Warner because they were going DRM free on iTunes eventualy anyway.

We closed the last EMI CD plant about a month after going DRM free on iTunes. I had been working for EMI for 21 years.

Thanks for a view from the inside. I had forgotten that EMI went DRM-free before Amazon started selling MP3s.

EMI dropped DRM at iTunes in April 2007 (although at a premium price). Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store opened (in beta) in September 2007, and with DRM-free music from the big companies in January 2008.

[Mivo]

I wonder how long it'll take until book publishers decide to drop DRM, too. It didn't kill the music industry and it won't kill the e-book industry, either. It may even help it grow.

Removing DRM from e-books is easy enough (unless you buy them at iBooks), but it's still violating EU regulations even if it's done for personal use only. Does it stop anyone? Nope. But people shouldn't essentially have to become "criminals" to use their e-books/licenses the way they want as long as they are not being distributed.

[5thWiggle]

For music, DRM made no sense anyway. It's only purpose was to stop people from recreating an exact digital copy to foil counterfit CD's. Since most people ripped to mp3 with compression, they never got an exact copy anyway. After the inital years, copy protection was only used at the artist's request (EMI North America anyway).

Since you could always go analog to digital, trying to foil home copying or format conversion was a moot point anyway.

[crdf]

I just saw this statement from Baen Books:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and our reasons for not implementing it

Digital rights management restricts the number of formats in which you can enjoy electronic media you have purchased. At Baen, we believe that when you purchase an Ebook, you should be able to access that book however you choose. For that reason, we sell only DRM-free Ebooks -- when you purchase one you have access to any and all formats we offer.

What does that mean for you? If you get a new eReader that uses a different format than the one you had when you built your Baen Ebook library, you can download your Ebooks again in the new format for no additional charge. If you have several eReaders, you can download your books to them all; this lets you read your favorite Baen Ebooks when you're at home with your favorite reader, on the go with your mobile device, or anywhere with any other device.

Once you've purchased the Ebook, you've paid for your right to enjoy it. We try to make it as easy to do that as we can. As long as you purchased it through our website and it shows up in your My Books list you can download to your heart's content.


Enjoy.

Smashwords is another publisher that offers DRM-free books

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by banjomike

I thought the OP (or Digital Trends) was referring to a limit on the number of devices that can be attached to any one account with a supplier (Amazon, B&N, or whoever). Are there any suppliers with such limits? I've seen discussions that suggest that Amazon have restrictions on the number of devices but never seen an actual number or even proof that such limits exist.

Adobe does. (But, with all the devices I activated, I never bumped into it.)
So, good enough.

The 3 download only limit per books I bumped into.