DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday April 23, 2006 @08:32AM from the better-viewing-methods-needed dept.

bcrowell writes "The New York Times reports that textbook publishers are backing off somewhat on the level of DRM used in the electronic editions of their textbooks. They no longer become unreadable after a certain amount of time, as in RMS's famous essay The Right to Read. Even so, most students aren't interested, because the books can't be sold back; the solution, however, may be to make it impossible to return printed books either. No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free books."

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Re:Like New by Wesley+Felter · 2006-04-23 08:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

In general, there is no secondary market for digital goods. Either it has DRM which disallows resale completely, or it has no DRM in which case people just copy it for $0. In theory there could be "friendly DRM' that allows resale, but if publishers feel threatened by it they can simply not use it.