Would you be e-reading if DRM was unbreakable?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

I sort all my stuff by purchase order.
Once, I tried to sort my Audio CDs by Artist. It was a mess, adding titles to my collection almost every day.

You buy a CD a day?! Well... your avatar info states that you have 26 readers and 44 tablets. I should have known.

You could be buying too much stuff, so it doesn't matter if it's DRM-ed; you might actually never get around to reading/listening/watching it

[bevdeforges]

I don't see a "keep on reading e-books" options. But for those of us living in a country where the local language is not our own, it's an important option.

I'm now on my third Sony reader. Thanks to the way the Adobe rights management software is set up, you are limited to a certain number of computers, devices and whatever. Stripping the DRM is simply a way of maintaining control of your collection of reading devices. But e-books are often the only way to have access to current books in your native language.

[samy2]

I would either use pirate books (paper books are always a source for pirate ebooks) or just read paper books.

Anyway I have now a great collection of ebooks without DRM. To read these books would take me a few years. And there also many free ebooks here....

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I don't bother with one-off spelling mistakes or other minor things that would take more time than it is worth to fix, but mistakes that are repeated throughout the book are very annoying, and usually quite easy to fix.

This, indeed. Many books of the big BPH's have a a gap between paragraphs (about half a line), and many have huge indents of 2em or even more. Some are not justifified. That irks me. The look of the pages is all wrong.

Also, many books come with Charis SIL embedded into them. That font is hard to read for me, and depending on how the book is coded and the reader you use, it can't be changed.

These two things can be fixed easily, in under a minute.
- Remove the custom font from the book. "Modify EPUB" plugin does it automatically.
- Open the book in Sigil, or TweakBook/Editor.
- Run a regex to remove all "font-family" occurences.
- Put "p {margin: 0; text-indent: 1em; text-align: justified;}" at the bottom of the CSS file. This fixes the layout.

I think it is well worth spending a few minutes to fix mistakes that would otherwise spoil my enjoyment of a book that I am going to spend hours reading, and in many cases re-reading.

Indeed. The above procedure fixes up 9 out of 10 books for me, within about a minute. I need another minute to put the metadata in, and it's all done. I don't buy 1000 books a year, so it's not a problem.

I've bought 24 books at Kobo in the past few days, and if I didn't spend more than 30-45 minutes to get them all fixed and into calibre, exactly as I want them. 24 books is about half a year's reading for me.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

You buy a CD a day?!...

Not anymore. I've stopped buying CDs about 10 years ago. For some time I bought from iTunes, but in the last few years I've stopped listening to music entirely.
But I buy TV shows from iTunes quite frequently. My counter says, 1.753 movies and 12.196 TV episodes in iTunes. I buy about 4TB of HDs per year

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

...You could be buying too much stuff, so it doesn't matter if it's DRM-ed; you might actually never get around to reading/listening/watching it

For some time, this certainly has been the case. Mostly out of boredom at that stage...
To quote Garfield: "It's not the having, it's the buying".
I always have been a collector - for whatever reason there may be...

[OtterBooks]

I would continue to read as I do now, with slightly different line spacing on occasion.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Honestly, I never quite got that point.
What's the reason for stripping DRM?
a.) Backup. Amazon or whatever merchant might cease business and you can't access your books anymore.
Happened to me a few times. But for one, I only buy from "the big ones" and I don't expect Amazon, Apple, Google and the likes to be gone quickly. And last but not least: Would I really care in, let's say 5 years? I have about 600 Microsoft .lit books, I bought from 2000 to maybe 2004. I did strip them from DRM and I even did convert them via calibre. But I never used them. The few I still want to have, I simply re-bought from Amazon and others. After all: Reading is an extremely cheap hobby (1 Euro per hour or something like that, compare to 10 times the amount for cinema for example).
b.) Read them on other units. Why? Why buy from Amazon and read on, let's say Nook? Okay, maybe Amazon is 10% cheaper. But is this worth the effort?
c.) Be future-proof. Lots of formats probably will disappear. Is there a way, I till could read my Microsoft .lit books? I admit, I keep my paper books for years and even decades on the shelf. But that's only because it's hard to let go off physical products. Would it really be so tragic, to loose ebooks one bought 10 years ago? And how likely is it really?
d.) Because some store might pull your library? I've heard those stories, but I don't know a single case personally. Why should this happen, if I stick to the general terms and conditions?

When I did it, until maybe 4 years ago, I only did it being a collector.
I liked fumbling around with my library, switching covers, correcting flaws (author's name all in capital letters and such nonsense). But I simply don't find this important enough anymore, to spend time on it. In the time it takes to perfectly tune an ebook, that cost 10 Euros and less, one actually spends more money (time =money) than one ever might save.

I'm pretty much like this, with one huge exception; Research. E-books are soo much more convenient when you're doing research and need to quote. But, in order to do that you need some assistance from your friendly apprentice in order to do simple copy & paste. Commercially available e-readers are too restrictive. I'll read and do annotations in Kindle, and then do copy & paste on my Android tablet.

[6charlong]

Unbreakable DRM is irrelevant to me since I have both ePub and Mobi eReaders, however I doubt the publishers would ever agree to it. Remember, they make money by selling high quality books. Schemes like unbreakable DRM only benefit big, online bookstores while at the same time reducing sales of bestsellers.

It would be a windfall for independent writers and publishers though, and would probably result in a flood of book reviews of indie writers on forums like Goodreads, in newspapers and magazines, on NPR, etc., as well as increased eBook library loans. Positive criticism generally improves the quality of the art.

Developments like this can seem to be a positive good to readers like me but I don't think they would be good for traditional publishing houses.

[wizwor]

I didn't respond to the poll. It really doesn't apply to me. I don't remove DRM (much) and it doesn't enter in to my purchasing decision.

Most of my ebooks are free or were free at the time I purchased them. I've built a library of books this way and I will read for free until I pass. I have paid for some books. I paid for them because I needed or wanted them enough to pay. I have had no need to de-DRM these.

The only time DRM would matter to me is if I were buying something that I might want to resample over the ages -- beyond the life of my current ecosystem. So far, this has not been an issue. I like to have stuff to read and there is plenty of free stuff to read. Some things I need to read and I am happy to pay for these.

Sorry to be so pragmatic.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Common misconception. If the big publishers really wanted everyone to return to paper and give up on ebooks, they'd just stop selling ebooks (while camping out on the rights to do so). No, they may have kicked up their heels at first, but they've been in full-on cake-and-eat-it-too mode for quite some time now. They want readers to be able to buy the hardback, the trade-PB, the MMPB, and two copies of the ebook, if they're so inclined.

Nobody's going to invest in the hardware infrastructure upgrades necessary to stream every book ever published one page at a time to millions of readers' who are going to scream bloody murder the first time there's a connectivity issue when they're ten pages away from the grand finale.

Cripes, it sounds like something straight out of a Jasper Fforde book: "Text Grand Central was down for over five hours this weekend before JurisTech could track down the glitch."

The root of the problem is more along the lines of the invention of UltraWord. We might need a visit from the Great Panjandrum to really fix this.

[ApK]

This is a very interesting question for me.
I only made the decision to buy an ereader, a Kindle specifically, originally because I learned (through this site, thank you MR) about the various DRM related options and because I could browse the Internet on it's free 3G. The latter is not really a concern any more, and the former makes for an interesting question. I really don't think I'd have bought a dedicated reader device for myself.
My wife might have insisted on getting her first Kindle, because we buy from Amazon for the most part, and her main concern at the time was to be able to read one handed while holding a baby. So I probably would have gotten her Kindle when she retired it.
But I'd probably be sticking mostly with audiobooks and the occasional paperback.

[Ginwen]

Wouldn't change much. I rarely bother to remove it.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

Like I said before: Reading, in my opinion, is one of the cheapest hobbies of all. If you buy all your ebooks for the regular price, you pay maybe 1 Euro per hour of usage. Deal of the century...

From your description of your buying habits, you're doing your best to move that back to the €10/hour you mention for cinema, by buying ten times as many books as you read.

If you're happy doing that, I can see why DRM doesn't bother you, as you would just re-buy anything you wanted, even if you'd already bought it on a different device from the one you're currently using.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

After all: Reading is an extremely cheap hobby (1 Euro per hour or something like that, compare to 10 times the amount for cinema for example).

For a fast reader in Australia: new release local ebooks (since we're comparing to cinema) $15-$20 and sometimes even higher, for maybe 4 hours' reading. Even fewer hours for a short novel.

I love it when people financially compare reading to the cinema, as if we're all seeing several movies a week. I go to the movies maybe twice a year, and one big reason for that is the cost.