an article on ebooks in the Guardian today 22 February 2018

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Thasaidon

I have more books than I can read before I "pop my clogs" (die).

I think that is a common symptom of being a reader. I know I will probably never finish all the books I have. Paper or ebook.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Physical book:
1. Buy it.
2. Read it.
3. Put on shelf on the correct spot (however you arrange them).

If your house doesn't burn down, this book will be usable as long as it doesn't fall apart.

My workstream for physical books

1)order book
2)wait for it to arrive
3)add book to Calibre (I bought a Palm way-back-when so that I could move my book catalog from index cards to digital and still carry it with me)
4) download cover and fix metadata including where the book will be stored
5)read book
5) rearrange my double layered bookshelves to make room for it in the right place (the fact that my history books are organized chronologically according to subject matter probably doesn't help)
6) consider the merits of buying a sixteenth, sorry, eighteenth bookcase and then realize I don't have room
7)replace a few more of the most battered books with ebook copies so that I can stand the thought of maybe throwing them out sometime in the future

My paper books will last until they fall to places, are lost/demolished by children or we move somewhere which can't hold that many books. The second possibility has been greatly reduced by draconian policies but since I do want my children to read my books it can't be completely eliminated.

Digital book:
1. Buy it.
2. Download the ASCM (in case of an EPUB)
3. Put it into ADE.
4. Pull the book into calibre to have Alf's plugins remove the DRM
5. Fix the metadata
6. Put in a cover (as they often don't have one)
7. Use the editor to have all problems fixed
8. Put it onto your e-reader

If you don't un-DRM and don't care about errors in the book, you can skip steps 4-7, or even just buy the book from the device itself. In that case however, usage of the book in the somewhat distant future is uncertain.

Many people don't (seem to) care, but I do.

You can't imagine how much time I've put into my e-book and music libraries to future-proof them as much as possible, and to remove all inconcistencies so I can easily convert them to newer formats if I ever need to. E-books and music together at least took me about half a decade. With a physical library, it'd take me half a day to arrange it in a sensible way.

Most of the ebooks I buy do have covers and my obsessiveness lies more in organization than appearance so my ebook workflow normally doesn't include 5 or 6. It does include regularly backing up my books and data.

I've been around long enough that some of the books I bought in university or second hand are falling to pieces just from normal use. The fact that ebooks have the potential to survive decades with just a bit of tweaking was a relief when faced with the need to replace a well loved book again

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I feel the same way about ebooks. If, in five or six (or ten) years, an ebook I want to re-read is unavailable (lost, DRM-stranded because a book store went bust--whatever), I won't mind giving a little more money to an author I like to replace it (or I'll get it from a library).

The only reason I remove DRM these days is if the formatting is so atrocious that I need to fix it to read it comfortably (rare).

Most of the books I buy on Amazon are hard to find or not available in paper. If the small publishers who sell them go out of business, they may not be available in five to ten years. Most of the books I buy are not novels or genre fiction (I usually just borrow those from the library). Most of my paid for books are for reference. I do have fiction books I don't want to lose, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and a few others that I've bought from different sources. I don't see why I should re-buy these in ten years if the DRM goes AWOL or the seller's site has some kind of online glitch. It just makes more sense to save them in Calibre -- besides, I bought The Hobbit from Amazon and The Lord of the Rings from Barnes & Noble (because I felt sorry for them). With Calibre I'm (at last) able to join them on the same devices and reset the fonts to match. And it really doesn't take much time or effort.

[Richwood]

An awful lot of the books and ebooks published these days are done "print on demand" by independent publishers or ebook distributors such as Smashwords and Dreamspinner. Even a great many Amazon distributed printed books are from independents or Amazon themselves and the printed versions are done with on-demand printing. How much longer will the big publishers survive once B&N goes under? How many hardbacks are sold by Walmart? I am surprised that most college textbooks are not sold directly by the teaching professor or through the college bookstore in PDF format.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Many people don't (seem to) care, but I do.

Originally Posted by darryl

if effective DRM was implemented then, as has been discussed elsewhere, it is likely the vast majority simply do not care. Those who do care at all seem to be only a tiny proportion.

The vast majority of people don't care about DRM. Even when it bites them, they'll just shrug and get on with other things.

For myself, if an ebook has DRM that I can't remove, I won't buy it. I didn't buy DRMed ebooks from around 2003 to 2008 for that precise reason.

[darryl]

@pdurrant. Same here. I simply won't buy an ebook if I can't remove the DRM. I'm sure there are many of us, but, as you say, a drop in the bucket next to those who simply don't care. Of course, implementing effective DRM simply does not make sense commercially if sales stay the same when drm is removed. From Amazon's point of view, for instance, there is a risk in implementing effective DRM, in that there is some unknown portion of ebook readers who buy ebooks from Amazon but read them on other devices. Likely such a market would not be that significant, but then again I suspect that many who buy their ebooks from Amazon buy many other things from Amazon as well, and join Prime. They at least would seem to have nothing to gain.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The vast majority of people don't care about DRM. Even when it bites them, they'll just shrug and get on with other things.

For myself, if an ebook has DRM that I can't remove, I won't buy it. I didn't buy DRMed ebooks from around 2003 to 2008 for that precise reason.

Originally Posted by darryl

@pdurrant. Same here. I simply won't buy an ebook if I can't remove the DRM. I'm sure there are many of us, but, as you say, a drop in the bucket next to those who simply don't care. Of course, implementing effective DRM simply does not make sense commercially if sales stay the same when drm is removed. From Amazon's point of view, for instance, there is a risk in implementing effective DRM, in that there is some unknown portion of ebook readers who buy ebooks from Amazon but read them on other devices. Likely such a market would not be that significant, but then again I suspect that many who buy their ebooks from Amazon buy many other things from Amazon as well, and join Prime. They at least would seem to have nothing to gain.

I am a member of this club too.
Apache

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Apache

I am a member of this club too.
Apache

I suspect that a lot of us are members of the club.

I think Darryl has the right of it. Amazon is fine with how things are now. Good enough DRM to say that they have it and discourage the casual reader, but easily by passed by those who care about such things.

When Apple changed iTunes last fall in a way that broke the converter programs for movies I stopped buying movies on iTunes until I can once again convert the movies for backup purposes. Instead, if there is a movie that I want, I now buy the blu-ray DVD on Amazon.

[John F]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

...

For myself, if an ebook has DRM that I can't remove, I won't buy it. I didn't buy DRMed ebooks from around 2003 to 2008 for that precise reason.

I'm similar, but I'll be a little more specific. I won't buy ebooks with DRM that prevents me from using the ebook the way I want (I'm not talking about pirating). If it is a watermarked ebook, as long as I couldn't perceive the watermark while reading, I would be fine with it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The vast majority of people don't care about DRM. Even when it bites them, they'll just shrug and get on with other things.

I disagree. I think most people don't care about DRM UNTIL it bites them.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by John F

I'm similar, but I'll be a little more specific. I won't buy ebooks with DRM that prevents me from using the ebook the way I want (I'm not talking about pirating). If it is a watermarked ebook, as long as I couldn't perceive the watermark while reading, I would be fine with it.

Fair enough. As I've said elsewhere, I'd quite like an elegant 'Ex libris' frontispiece in my purchased books give where, when, and for how much I bought the book. If it also had an invisible 'watermark' with the same info, it wouldn't concern me.

[Richwood]

In some categories such as MM ebooks I note that the vast majority seem to be from independent authors who use Dreamspinner, Smashwords and other independent distributors, including Amazon. Anyone know what percentage of authors sales are ebooks and what percentage are printed from those sources? Saying ebooks and readers are dying without including the independents seems like stupidity on the part of the big publishers.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Apache

I am a member of this club too.

And me as well, but I only started buying e-books AFTER I ascertained for sure that EPUB2 / ADE DRM was broken. Then I went on a buying spree lasting 4 years. Now I have everything I want (= everything I want & know of), and that's more than I can read in my entire life. I'll only be adding books on recommendation or interest. Sometimes I don't buy any books for months.

@DiapDealer & others: I don't pay again and again for my media if I can help it. If I buy something (book, movie, game, software, or even electronics) I buy it with the full intention of using it for the rest of my life.

I probably won't, but I am known to be playing some 20 year old games right now, so 'the rest of my life' can be seen as 'as long as possible.'

At some point, I'll shelve them and won't care if they'll still run in 2038 or 2048 because they'll keep deteriorating graphically, on newer and newer screens, but as digital books and lossless music age much better/easier, I fully intend to be using my current e-book and music library in one form or another in the next 40-50 years. (Assuming I live that long.)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Fair enough. As I've said elsewhere, I'd quite like an elegant 'Ex libris' frontispiece in my purchased books give where, when, and for how much I bought the book. If it also had an invisible 'watermark' with the same info, it wouldn't concern me.

Same. As long as the DRM doesn't prevent me from doing with it what I want (including converting it to other formats), it's fine with me. Even very old games had 'DRM' in the form of a CD check, or "Type word X from page Y from the manual."

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992) had both: it required the CD, and it only had the names of the planets printed in the manual. The game would tell you to go to Pollux, but the star chart wouldn't have any names. You needed the manual for that, and it had some sort of copy protection as a copy of the star chart would have a black area where the names would have been. (Although, a few years later, scanners did work, as do newer copy machines. I know, because I turned the game into an ISO-file and scanned the manual.)

That kind of DRM never bothered me that much.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

DiapDealer & others: I don't pay again and again for my media if I can help it. If I buy something (book, movie, game, software, or even electronics) I buy it with the full intention of using it for the rest of my life.

I don't pay "again and again" either. The vast majority of my ebook purchases are consumed only once (I don't buy/read non-fiction or reference books in electronic format). So very rare would be the need for me to re-buy

I had no qualms about buying new copies of physical books I loved and wore out (or lost), so I fail to see why I should be upset about needing to re-buy the rare ebook I loved enough to want to re-read some day and found I had "lost."

The loss of my entire ebook library wouldn't really trip me up at all. They've all been read already, and there's only a handful I would ever consider re-reading. I won't mind re-buying one of those when the time comes (if I have to). Or I'll grab it from the library.