Will DRM on ebooks go the way of iTunes

[MerLock]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

The fact that you don't know them does not mean it does not happen.

Oh, I'm not saying because I don't know anyone who hasn't done it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'm just implying that I believe the number of people who scan and share books are fewer than those who do the same for music.

I agree, that there are probably more books out there that can be obtained by illegal means than I can read in a life time. But how many are out there that I actually am looking for. For music, it's not that difficult to find a song even if it's not that popular.

Currently for music, some songs are released in the illegal world before the song is even released to be sold. I'm not sure how often that can be said for ebooks.

Also, quality of scanned and shared ebooks is a point to consider. I'm sure there will be people willing to buy ebooks even if the cost is slightly higher than what they want to pay because illegal copies may not be that great in quality if they were created by scanning. So if people are willing to buy, then publishers aren't pressured to sell ebooks without DRM.

Then there is also format. When you find an illegal copy is it necessary in the format you want? With music, it came mostly in mp3's and the only thing you have to worry about in terms of quality is the bitrate and generally they were of acceptable quality.


But I'm sure we'll see more of them in the Darknet as ebooks become more popular and if the DRM is simple to remove. I see the ones on the darknet will be the same as the one you would buy but with the DRM removed. If people are willing to turn to the darknet for these I'll also agree that the time that publishers stops selling DRM ridden ebooks will happen sooner rather than later.

[MerLock]

Originally Posted by ATimson

* Apple's format can only be sold to those who own devices which can read Apple's format, so it's more-or-less irrelevant at this point.

I'm not sure it's all that irrelevant to those who purchased one of those books through an Apple device but want to read it on another, now or possibly in the future.

For example, if someone owns and Apple and a Sony reader. Both supports epub but when they try to move their epub that was purchased through Apple to Sony it can't happen.

Same is sort of true for Kindle books I believe. It's not easy to get them on other devices without learning how to strip DRM and coverting and all that.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by MerLock

I still can't agree with that. I don't know anyone who has scanned an entire book but I know quite a few people who have "ripped" music.

I'm not familiar with scanning a book using new technology but I just assume it takes longer to do than music and that it takes special equipment and might be filled with errors.

I have half a dozen books I've scanned for personal use, and have professionally scanned hundreds (I work in a copy/print shop).

The technology is still troublesome; it's only "easy" in comparison to how difficult it used to be. And yes, scanned ebooks are prone to errors that are time-consuming to fix. But the technology is changing, and it's very likely that in a few more years, we'll have personal page-feed scanners with good OCR that can churn out HTML files of scanned ebooks in about an hour.

They won't be great, or perfectly accurate--but they'll be readable.

People used to record music from radio stations and make music mixes from those. We're at about that stage of personal ebook production.

[notimeflat]

I seriously doubt it. DRM is vastly more important to authors and book publishers.