RE: Re: Copy protection and Smashwords

First of all, sending to five friends who send to five friends who send...is
called incidental sharing gone wild, and it's another form of piracy but on
a smaller scale (in most cases) than when it's loaded on a mass piracy site.
Overall, it's not your biggest piracy concern, though it has the capability
to be very troublesome. And never assume the piracy problem is a small one.
The numbers on it are staggering. 

 

Why is DRM a problem for honest customers? There are several reasons. 

 

1. DRM often blocks text to speech, which blind readers use to legally
access ebooks. It strips one of the major selling points of ebooks for
customers that needs this adaptation.

 

2. DRM keeps customers that legally purchased your book from using it on
other electronics they own. Sure, I can read the same book I purchase on the
Nook handheld and the Nook for PC reader on my laptop (both assigned to the
same account...and you can do the same thing with Kindle), but I cannot take
a secured/DRMd book I purchased for my Nook account and read it on the
Kindle I also own. With Calibre, I can take the unsecured (non-DRM) ePub and
turn it into Mobi that I can read on my Kindle. One of the reasons many
people mistrust DRM ebooks is that they don't want to lose their books, if
the company they purchased from goes under or they are forced by
circumstance to change the brand of tech they are using. 

 

3. Worse, DRMd books can be difficult to (or sometimes impossible to) put on
a new copy of the same tech. Your Kindle goes bad. The books you've
purchased from Amazon can be loaded on a new one, but any DRMd ebooks
purchased from elsewhere are hit or miss as to whether you can put them on
the new Kindle unit. Granted, most indie/e publishers don't use DRM, so this
isn't an issue, but having purchased a DRMd book or two from Fictionwise
long ago, I know I lost them when I changed machines. It was quite annoying.

 

4. DRM prevents copy/paste, which is a pain when writing a scholarly paper,
using the ebook as source material to do so. Yes, I know...they're spoiled.
Anyone my age is used to having no choice but to retype it. Not so these
days.

 

 

Brenna  



I've heard several people advise against 
DRM because it 'annoys users', and I have to confess I'm unclear on the
reasons.  I understand 
that it won't stop hackers, but I'm not really worried about that small 
group.  I'm more concerned about the reader who is sincerely excited 
about the book and attaches it to an email to her 5 closest friends - 
who then do the same.  Part of the argument I've heard is that copy 
protection is annoying to the average consumer, but I don't see why... 
when I download a Kindle book to my laptop I just open it and read it. 
There's nothing the least bit confusing or annoying about it, and from what
I 
understand the Nook and Kobo versions are similar.  Am I missing 
something?





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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