Rich Adin, one of our regular contributors, is conducting a poll on the above topic. It will last a week and consists of a listing of various impediments to ebook purchases. Go over and take it.
I chose “DRM that is not cross-device” as my biggest impediment.
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Calibre has been updated to 0.6.39
* Add ability to control how author sort strings are automatically generated from author strings, via the config file tweaks.py
* Handle broken EPUB files from Project Gutenberg that have invalid OCF containers
1. Provide color and better rendering of graphics. These sometimes convey information better than text.
2. Add pagination and footnotes
3. Get rid of DRM entirely
4. Lower prices for ebooks. Why pay near-hardback prices for a DRM-crippled product that Amazon says we don’t really own, and which the vendor can alter or remove at will. Ebooks should be price lower because they provide much less value than print books.
1) end geographical restrictions
2) DRM I can’t remove
3) lower prices
given the limited choices there I chose 1 as a proxy for high prices – I bought quite a few ebooks over 9.99 but I also have forgone buying quite a few others at 9.99 that I may have bought at 5.99 or so
the one unambiguous choice is drm I cannot remove but sadly it was not offered in the poll
geographical restrictions are another bugbear though I would not call it an ebook buying obstacle from *my part* more than *not released as ebook* would be and the intent of the poll was to find why people chose not buy ebooks rather than why they actually cannot…
Liviu, the option you wanted was “DRM of any type regardless of whether it affects device portability”.
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You don’t “own” the text of a book any more than you “own” the music on a CD, or the movie on a DVD, or the source code and art resources for a video game.
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I kind of wish that the “device portability” hadn’t been tied to “DRM”, because that makes it seem like the two are related. It’s possible to have no DRM and still lack device portability (ALAC on anything but an iPod, for example.)
To those who say that the presence of DRM reduces their demand for ebooks, may I ask a follow-up: do you not simply remove the DRM because…
a. You don’t know how.
b. It is too much effort.
c. It is illegal and you fear prosecution.
d. It is illegal and you think it morally wrong to break the law regardless of personal opinion about the law.
e. You are opposed to DRM regardless of how easy it is to remove and whether or not it is illegal to do so.
a.
How do you remove DRM?
b), d), and e). In particular WRT e), I don’t buy DRMed ebooks (except for very special circumstances).
Regards,
Jack Tingle