> Let me get this straight, the author has a bad experience with one website selling ebooks, so they decide they’ll never buy ebooks ever again?
It may be hyperbolic, but I basically feel the same way, because I had more or less the same thing happen: I saw a book I wanted to buy, it said EPUB; there was absolutely no indication that there was DRM, that I'd be required to install Adobe software, or anything. I bought the book, and after paying for it, was told about all this.
I was so furious I emailed them immediately and demanded my money back (which they complied with). But it certainly put me off buying e-books from random websites -- I haven't even thought about doing it since.
> It’s just optional for books to support it or not.
Translation: It's optional for the publishers to enable DRM restricting it or not.
If I buy a paperback book, there is nothing stopping me from building a machine I can insert the book into that scans the page, OCRs it to text, and then converts the text to audio.
DRM'd ebooks are a travesty, which is why I immediately remove all DRM as soon as I buy one so that I have full freedom to do whatever I want with it.
> Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one.
It seems like less of a scam and more of a technology constrained by publishers and authors. Lots of people borrow digital books from libraries, for example, without ever buying them.
> There's no reason that DRM could allow the easy transfer of a book from one person or platform to another.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what they do and what publishers use them for!
> The publisher could easily offer the same book in multiple formats.
Yes. I know exactly one publisher that does it: Bragelonne. They sell DRMed ebooks on Kindle and Apple store and DRM-free books on all other libraries, and freely give the DRM-free to any buyers of locked books.
> DRM does add complexity, but as most people read via an application rather than a text file, this can be abstracted for almost all readers.
There exists no application to read DRMed books on my computer on my tablet and on my smartphone. I can only read Adobe DRM on my e-reader. However, I can read DRM free books on all those devices.
> this is a problem with the implementation.
Yes, but since there will never be any implementation for my devices, this is a purely rhetorical argument.
> Authors not getting paid so that they can eat also stifles innovation.
Authors published by no DRM publishers also get paid. Authors published with DRM also get pirated.
> In summary, the issue with DRM for books is the implementation. Many of the problems listed are real but could be almost completely negated by the publishers doing things that cost them almost nothing, even following the assumption that everyone wants to read their books for free.
DRM costs a lot to publishers. publie.net chose to be DRM free also as it was not able to pay adobe for using DRM.
> [if] you are using something like a Kindle you are licensing content. If Amazon goes away, I wouldn't be surprised if your content does too.
I break DRM on all the Kindle content I buy. If I couldn't break the DRM, I wouldn't buy it.
I also try to support non-DRM books by buying them preferentially. Baen books, for instance. There are other non-DRM publishers. And no, I do /not/ share.
I have a Kindle DX for reading papers (e.g., from the ACM). I haven't tried reading conference papers on a tablet (e.g., iPad) mainly because I don't have one, and while I wonder if the experience is better, I like the fact that the Kindles don't have to be recharged every day. The fact that I can go a week or more without recharging makes them a lot more book-like to me.
"This is incorrect. Figurative book burning is an explicit design goal of the Kindle. Without it, Amazon would have a very difficult time getting major publishers to put their works on the Kindle. Even if your statement was correct, design intentions are irrelevant; the fact that the capability is there is what matters."
Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.
"You're also making the faulty assumption that deletion is the only option. Modification is far more dangerous. Did you know that the average Chinese citizen older than 40 has no idea how heavily their search results are being censored? Picture a Grandma sitting in her living room in China with her Kindle. She's reading Animal Farm. Her copy is sufficiently doctored that she thinks it is a novel about farm animals, not a work criticizing the corruption that results from a communist revolution. After she's done Grandma will go to sleep feeling happy, enlightened, and unoppressed by her government, blissfully unaware that she's been duped. Sounds far fetched? If you had asked me in the early 1930s whether a German political party would be able to convince a large portion of the German population that an Aryan race was desirable, I would have said it was far fetched too."
Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years. I don't think a grandmother in China would even want to read an anti-communist novel, considering the consequences. China is a scary place.
"Not if using encryption or circumventing DRM is illegal. If DRM achieves sufficient market penetration, you wont be able to go about your daily life without it. You barely can as it is."
You cry about DRM yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works. DRM is the direct result of the slow attack of the current copyright system through large amounts of people online that not only have no problem copying copyrighted materials, but feel it is their right.
Err, no, it only takes half an hour at most and a Xerox machine. It's much cheaper than buying it too. We used to do it all the time when I was in college, which helped a lot given that sometimes we needed books that were out of print.
And btw, the best thing about a printed book is that it's forever yours and you can rent it, burn it or copy it with no technical restrictions ;-)
> Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them
Welcome to the world of capitalism; supply and demand is a bitch, isn't it?
My problem with such an argument is that it tries to take a moral stand, whereas there's no morality in it, because being paid for shit is not a fundamental right. Plus in a world in which copyright terms keep getting extended such that Disney will never lose their rights for Mickey Mouse, some people find it hard to give a shit about copyrights.
But the freaking elephant in the room is that DRM does not protect the interests of "creators" and it does not stop people from pirating content. DRM only achieves two things - (1) lock-in for the company owning the platform (e.g. Amazon) and (2) milking loyal customers.
As an example, I'm resetting my phone like once every two months or so and reinstalling everything ... the Kindle app is now telling me that my books were downloaded on too many devices and so I can't download them. I can't "unregister" devices either, because this is simply a software bug. I then searched those books on torrent sites, found them, downloaded them and I'll never buy books from Amazon again.
> I have none of the same rights of these physical books.
So much effort spent creating DRM systems that try to destroy the natural advantages of ebooks over paper books.
Ebooks and the internet could have ushered in a golden age of worldwide digital libraries unlimited by the location or quantity of physical paper books.
The current copyright and technical control regime may be good for some publishers and authors, but at what cost in terms of lost value to humanity as a whole?
> and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works
Okay, go on, stop publishing these. If a book is such nobody would voluntarily buy for a reasonable price DRM-free e.g. on Gumroad, it probably isn't worth existing.
I doubt many people pirate content instead of buying it just because they can. People generally pirate what they can't afford easily enough and what they aren't excited about nearly enough to pay for (also whatever comes in ugly locked-in formats so a pirated version means better UX). In both cases they wouldn't be paying even if they couldn't pirate so there is no actual lost profit here. Except in cases when someone could unfairly force people to pay unreasonable prices which is the usual case with textbooks.
That is a strawman. Three are certsinly booksellers who never went near DRM and argue strongly against DRM.
Exempel: http://www.baenebooks.com
reply