
Apple to wrap digital books in FairPlay copy protection - mjfern
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/02/apple-ibooks-drm-fairplay.html
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potatolicious
Okay - is anyone _actually_ surprised by this?

Publishers clearly gave Apple a lot of leeway in order to generate some
competition for the Kindle - but I doubt dropping DRM would be one of them.

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DannoHung
What I'm curious about is if they'll be labeling DRM/DRM-Free book downloads
like they started doing with songs.

I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

Contrast with Audible, for example. Cory Doctorow has had public arguments
about the fact that they will not let him sell audio versions of his books
without DRM.

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leoc
> I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

RPG (not "computer RPG") publishing has been in a post-DRM era for several
years now.

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aditya
Has the book publishing industry failed to learn from the music publishing
industry?

Perhaps, this is a last ditch effort at extracting as much revenue as they can
by retaining their illusion of control over something that fundamentally needs
to be easy to share so that it becomes viral and generates a lot more
revenue...

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jimmyjim
I don't think the two situations are entirely comparable.

The decision to purchase music is squarely on an individual, whereas in
colleges I think there's plenty of politics involved in bribing committees to
keep on using the newest editions of books, thereby practically forcing
students to purchase certain books.

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easyfrag
I thought FairPlay was alive and well on video files sold through iTunes?

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JeremyBanks
Most, not all. Movie downloads have it, but not all music videos do.

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Semiapies
_"according to sources in the publishing industry."_

Who?

Of course, we'll never find out _who_ , whether or not this is true.

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FluidDjango
Yes, it sort of depends on the professionalism of the LA Times reporting, but
Jobs has been making the rounds of enough different publishers (and presumably
had to share _something_ of how "protection" is going to be handled).
Certainly likely that some of those publishers loosened their lips to a LAT
reporter.

