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DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry
Presto Vivace writes "In a blog post, danps explains how the music industry initially thought that the Internet meant that people wanted their music for free. In 2003 Apple persuaded the industry to use an online music store with DRM. But DRM just does not work for consumers, so by 2011 online music stores were DRM-free. Sadly, the book industry has not learned these lessons. And there are larger lessons for the gadget industry: 'The tech industry right now is churning out lots of different devices, operating systems and form factors in an attempt to get the One True Gadget — the thing you'll take with you everywhere and use for everything. That's a lovely aspiration, but I don't see it happening. What I see instead is people wanting to only carry around one thing at a time, and rotating through several: Smart phone for everyday use, tablet for the beach, laptop for the road, etc. If you can't get the book you paid for on each of those devices, it's a pain. As a reader I want to be able to put a book on everything as soon as I buy it so I always have a local (non-Internet dependent) copy — no matter which thing I run out of the house with.'"
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
With good OCR, books can be transcribed even faster.
Some people will read your book without buying it. You can't stop that. A lot of people are going to check your book out from the library and read it free too.
So DRM especially just prevents your legal readers from reading your book.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I bought a couple of books on iBooks until I figured out that they were crippled by DRM. Naturally I couldn't view them on my Nexus 7, so I did two things:
1. I found torrents to decrypted copies of the books I purchased.
2. Never bought another book from iBooks.
I still buy DRM-laden books from Kobo, but I can still decrypt those with ePUBee. The minute I can't do that any more, I won't buy from them either.
As a bit of a kudo, any SF nuts out there, head over to Baen, who has a big chunk of their catalog available as non-DRM ePubs (along with other formats as well).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Provides just more than that. Syncs reading all across tablets, e-readers, cellphones, and desktops. You can even put your own (or purchased elsewhere), DRM free book, send to kindle, and read in whatever device you have, in all of them if you want. That is a killer feature in a world where you can use a lot of different device, for different environments, to access your books. A service like that is needed, from Amazon or other players, but what matter is the broad reach across devices.
That books are DRM free is somewhat orthogonal with that. You must own what you purchase, DRM, in the other hand, is turning it into renting in practical terms.
Please stop spreading this myth about Amazon. Publishers are perfectly free to list their books without DRM - you can tell because the last sentence of a book's description will say "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied." You can also load DRM free books from other sources into the Kindle app. Of the 102 books on my Kindle, 49 are DRM free or in the public domain.
The reason is, PDF and ebooks are really at odds with one another.
The point of PDF is to render the exact same on each screen. Like a physical book, each page should always look the same (only zoomed or not zoomed). An ebook needs to be able to reflow the text to support changing aspect ratios, font sizes, etc. When you do this with PDF, you can just zoom in or out. If your application is actually reflowing a PDF, that means it's not really displaying a PDF. Instead, it is taking the content, extracting it, and displaying it in some native format.
I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.
So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I thought I preferred the real thing. Until a trip to Cambodia resulted in me reading 6 of the eight books I had on the flight over (I just couldn't sleep), leaving me trying to stretch two books over the remaining 14 days plus the flight home. That was an extreme example but any lengthy trip can result in not having sufficient reading material for the duration if you are a fast reader. At least with most trips I find myself in places where I can replenish, but Cambodia was an exception.
With my nook I never have less than a hundred unread books ready and waiting to be read, it lasts weeks without a charge and can charge anywhere I can find a USB socket and my laptop battery can charge it a couple times if I don't use it for anything else. I like owning books, but haven't cracked a physical book in months.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.