
The Danger of E-Books - tomkwok
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html
======
rocky1138
On one hand, I understand the dangers from a philosophical viewpoint. On the
other, I don't care what Amazon considers their rights or licenses with my
Kindle.

I'm going to read what I want to read, when I want to read it, on my Kindle,
whether Amazon wants me to or considers me to have a license or not.
Basically: I don't care what the EULA states for my Kindle.

It's the same attitude I have around pirating movies or shows: if a movie
company won't let me pay them to let me watch a movie/TV show via Steam,
Netflix, or even from their own site, then I'll just watch it on Popcorn Time
and it's their loss.

If it ever came to the point of Amazon disabling Kindles for sharing this
viewpoint, then I'm sure there would be a groundswell of support for an open-
source OS for the Kindle and we'd all get coding. In the end, I'm not all that
scared.

~~~
alive2007
> if a movie company won't let me pay them to let me watch a movie/TV show via
> Steam, Netflix, or even from their own site, then I'll just watch it on
> Popcorn Time and it's their loss.

Right, except you don't have the right to do that. You have no carte blanche
entitlement to access media or entertainment. If the executives at HBO figure
that, financially speaking, it's in their best interest to keep new _Game of
Thrones_ episodes accessible to cable customers only, you have the right to
not buy it and be frustrated at that and protest it until eventually enough
people protest for HBO to budge.

What you don't have the right to do is then to circumvent the legal and
technological system set up for you to purchase _Game of Thrones_ and access
it for free, which, yes, is fucking theft. I can hear the scoffing through
TCP/IP.

And you're not just harming the company, you're not just harming the already
rich suits at HBO. This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. People
figure getting their music for free is a more rational individual choice than
paying $16 for a CD. Everyone then makes the decision to get their media for
free. Who cares about those stupid record labels, anyways?

Suddenly, smaller markets around the world have their industry gutted by
piracy, smaller labels have to shut down, bigger labels have to fire hundreds
of less successful artists that they used to be able to support from the money
they made on the more successful artists, the more successful artists have to
stop relying on royalties from album sales and have to whore themselves out
doing nonstop touring year-round for money. Thank God it's physically
impossible to "pirate" concert tickets.

I know we're going on a tangent here, but people often falsely conflate open-
source access to information and piracy into this one big, happy revolution
against the evil gatekeepers and their evil transactions that involve my
money. No. Piracy is just fucking theft, period.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>No. Piracy is just fucking theft, period.

No, you don't get to redefine a word because you feel like it. "Piracy" is
often wrong, but it is not theft (the owner is not deprived of the item).

~~~
will_brown
I am a lawyer...I know these definitions pretty well, so Ill chime in.

Let's take George Bernard's famous quote: “If you have an apple and I have an
apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one
apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas,
then each of us will have two ideas.” According to your definition, one could
not engage in theft of an idea, because one could never be deprived of an idea
like with the taking of an apple.

However, let's look at the actual legal definition of theft: The actus reus
(act) of theft is usually defined as an unauthorized taking, keeping or using
of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea (mental
state/intent) of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner
or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.

You limited the definition of theft to only include when one's mental state
intends to deprive someone. The actual definition is not limited though, but
alternatively includes when the taking was done dishonestly. Therefore, if
someone takes something not belonging to them, and does so dishonestly that in
fact is theft. Since I foresee the definition of dishonesty being the next
issue here, that has been defined in case law, but generally where the person
intended to take property they did not have a legal right to take.

~~~
Karunamon
_You limited the definition of theft to only include when one 's mental state
intends to deprive someone._

As a lawyer, I'm surprised you are not familiar with the Dowling case, which
is where that definition comes from. It wasn't pulled out of GP's ass.

~~~
will_brown
I am very familiar with the Dowling case. However, I assure you the definition
of theft does not come from a case from 1985, the common law definition has
been around quite a bit longer than 1985. There were a few issues on appeal,
but most likely what you and GP are referncing has nothing to do with _theft_
but a conviction under 18 USC 2314 which was over turned because the
counterfeit goods in question being transported across state lines were not
physical goods, and the court found there must have been a physical taking.
This is not about theft, this is about 18 U.S. Code § 2314 - Transportation of
stolen goods, securities, moneys, fraudulent State tax stamps, or articles
used in counterfeiting, and under that very specific law of transporting
_goods_ , not theft, there has to be a physical taking.

------
panglott
Wow. E-books such as non-DRM'ed ePub are great sharing and accessibility tool.
I can't quite decide whether this conflating of e-books with the Amazon Kindle
store is stupid or dishonest. The Kindle format/store is only "typical" in
that Amazon is a major bookseller. There is nothing preventing every benefit
listed there of printed books with ePub, and even people who are blind can
access them too.

~~~
netcan
I don't get the complaint. This is the context:

 _" printed books …(stuff that applies to printed books) ..Contrast that with
Amazon e-books (fairly typical).. (stuff that applies to kindle ebooks and
other DRM restricted formats):"_

Its fairly typical in that Amazon is the biggest retailer, a trend setter and
other retailers and tech providers follow their lead putting out similar
stuff.

I don't perfectly agree with the Free Software Foundation at a high level, but
I think this comparison is pretty fair. If you compare in most people's
physical and legally obtained digital book collections, this is what you will
find. The ebooks don't come with the same rights.

~~~
panglott
e-book != DRM

EDIT: To be more clear, it says "We must reject e-books until they respect our
freedom." But every single benefit it notes of printed books is also true of
non-DRM'ed ePub book, except that non-DRM'ed ePubs respect your freedom _even
more_ —your freedom to freely copy and distribute it, your freedom to have it
displayed by a screenreader or braille device.

If you want more free e-books, just go to m.gutenberg.org, find one, and open
it in your app of choice.

~~~
netcan
I don't disagree with this and neither does the article.

It is however true that in the practice, in the wild, ebooks mostly do have
DRM. Hence, it's a problem with e-books to the the extent that it is a
problem.

------
SlimXero
I own several kindle devices, have never purchased an ebook through Amazon,
and do not connect any of them to the internet for any reason. It's a battery
hog, and I have no desire to buy books directly from the device, and if i need
to access the web, i have a plethora of other devices capable and at hand.

Furthermore, I don't allow myself to restricted to DRM'd books. In the event I
was unable to acquire a book in a non-DRM'd format, I'd purchase the book
(using a prepaid credit card, as i do with all my internet transactions) and
strip the DRM. If it was unavailable in that manner, then I would purchase a
physical copy of the book. But that is not a deterrent for me. I own a few
ebooks that don't exist in physical form (at least not for mass market to my
knowledge) and I own a few physical books that do not exist in digital format
(once again, to my knowledge). Neither will kill the other, they can both co-
exist happily, and in my case, they do. I carry my kindle keyboard everywhere
and often time have at least 2-3 paperback books on me as well. As a matter of
fact, I am currently reading a book on my kindle, another in paperback form
and a third is being read to me on Audible. Not all at the same time mind you,
but concurrently.

------
rmc
Should really be called "The Dangers of DRM'ed E-Books".

There are several advantages of ebooks over paper books:

* Less environmentally harmful * Take up less space * Easier to copy, I can send 1 subversive ebook to 1,000 people.

~~~
bartlantz
> _Less environmentally harmful_

I believe this is a pretty naive analysis. If you look at the energy
expenditures for maintaining a library over a decade, let alone a century, a
paper book would be far more environmentally friendly.

~~~
tedunangst
Well, how many joules does it take to maintain a paper library for a century
and how many joules to maintain an ebook library?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
On a hard drive or tape system?

On a reader - if you're counting the cost of electricity, let's count the cost
of shipping entire forests of paper around the world, first to paper mills,
then to print factories, then to bookshops and libraries.

And the cost of travel to and from a lending library for every reader.

And why not also include the cost of lighting to read the book? (I can read my
Kobo in the dark because it has a very low energy backlight. My eyes don't
work so well with the lights off, so I've never been able to do that with
paper.)

I wonder how many people here understand that _giant warehouses_ full of
overstocked print are regularly shipped back from stores and pulped. Does
everyone understand how much space and weight a million copies of a failed
bestseller takes up? Does everyone know that paper books are always sold sale-
or-return, so if they don't go out the front door they go out the back door
onto a truck, with the covers stripped so they can't be resold?

The original article is _factually wrong_ in significant ways.

Not all ebooks are sold by Amazon, not all ebooks have DRM, and not all ebooks
that start with DRM continue to have DRM.

At this point, arguing against digital publishing because Amazon is like
arguing against the printing press because the medieval Catholic church was
fond of censorship and burning.

------
halosghost
This is one of those things where the FSF has the completely correct idea, but
has accidentally pointed their finger at the wrong culprit. The problem here
is not e-books, it's DRM. The article even says as much at the bottom. I
completely agree with the whole point of this article but wish it had used
this case as a further tie-in to the various other articles asserting DRM's
horrible. I think that the use of the specific case with specific examples to
draw into a larger argument is often more effective than continuing to just
point the finger at the single instance of the problem.

~~~
masklinn
> The problem here is not e-books, it's DRM. The article even says as much at
> the bottom.

So… how did the FSF point their fingers at the wrong culprit when they state
black on white that the problem is DRMs but that ebooks are not intrinsically
problematic?

~~~
halosghost
The title and major thrust of the article is that ebooks are generally bad.
The real point only made at the end though is that they aren't, they're only
bad when corporations and DRM are in-control.

Imho, if they had been clearer from the get-go that the problem is DRM, not
ebooks in-general, it would be much more powerful.

~~~
masklinn
> The title and major thrust of the article is that ebooks are generally bad.

Which is not wrong either given ebooks are generally from a DRM-using company
(namely Amazon which has the vast majority of ebooks market share)

~~~
jobigoud
This is actually true only for the US market and possibly the UK one. In other
countries it's vastly different. Of the hundred+ books I have on my reader
only three or four are coming from Amazon.

------
cryoshon
Just pirate your ebooks online or buy hard copy if you're uncomfortable with
Amazon's tomfoolery. Or, "borrow" them via Amazon, then rip the DRM out with
some pirate jag.

Technologically, DRM is a solved problem, and has been for years-- just check
out the Pirate Bay.

Notice how I've mentioned the word "pirate" so many times? This is the result
of finding a practical solution to the problems that Amazon has created. This
costs them money, directly, as I could just as easily be buying books from
them rather than using them to scout books then finding the pirated version.

------
rikkus
Yesterday I wanted to share a sentence of text from an ebook with two friends
on Google Hangouts. I clicked the 'share' button in Nook Reader and chose
'Hangouts' as the destination. It pasted a URL pointing to a barnes and noble
site with some ID appended. This is not what I want to happen.

I ended up screenshotting the page, cropping it, and pasting the image onto
chat. It might have been easier to type the whole thing out (though I'm not
great at typing on mobile).

This annoyance alone has spurred me to look again at keeping my own catalog of
DRM-free files in Calibre and using a reader that doesn't do this sort of
thing.

Any advice on 'flow' to make this sort of approach easy is welcome (apart from
the DRM bit, that's off-topic).

~~~
Slippery_John
Put your calibre library in Dropbox or Google Drive. Get Calibre Cloud Pro to
have a good-looking, easily searchable library on your device (you download
from there as needed). Use Moon+ or some other reader to read the books.
Calibre also has a server function (which Moon+ supports), but not everybody
has a public IP to access their books everywhere.

These are all Android, but there's probably some equivalent on iOS. You will
want to convert all your ebooks to a format that your reader supports, such as
epub. There are extensions for Calibre that will strip DRM if you're into
that.

------
EdwardCoffin
I have a concrete anecdote about ebooks I bring up in these discussions, which
I am just copying-and-pasting below [1]:

In 2006 I purchased from Amazon the special edition of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire
Upon the Deep", an Adobe eBook (the only way this special edition was
available). Last year [six years ago, as I paste this], when I went to have
another look at the eBook on my latest computer (not the one I originally
purchased the book on), I found that it no longer worked: I could not enable
the book on my new computer because Amazon's license server for Adobe eBooks
no longer worked. It took me several back-and-forth emails with Amazon's
customer support to get someone to admit that once Amazon moved over to the
Kindle, support for the Adobe ebooks went away (most of them didn't even seem
to be aware that there were eBooks prior to the Kindle). I'd have settled for
them replacing my eBook with the Kindle equivalent, but I don't own a Kindle.
At the time there was no Kindle eBook reader for OS X. I eventually got a
refund, but it took a lot of work to get them to even recognize that there was
a problem. Additionally, I didn't want a refund, I wanted to read the special
content in this special version of the book, one that is not available in
paper. Given that experience, I'm a bit reluctant to purchase the Kindle
version, even though there is apparently an OS X reader now.

I think the thing that most disturbs me about this whole incident is not just
that a book I bought stopped working it is that I had no indication that it
had become unavailable to me until the instant I went to re-read it. It had
probably been inaccessible for months if not years without me knowing, with me
thinking that I had the book ready for me to go read whenever I felt like, but
when I went to check on something, it just didn't work. My shelves of paper
books don't present me with that kind of problem.

NOTE that when I bought this ebook I registered it to my email address. They
HAD my email address, and could have sent me an alert when the server's
retirement was imminent, so I would have a chance to at least authorize my
book on my current crop of devices.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333441)

------
trothamel
Is e-book DRM even remotely effective? It seems like with something like the
Kindle web reader, it would be trivial to write a script that took screenshots
of every page of the book, and optionally applied OCR.

Of course, this could also be done with the physical devices and an
appropriate machine to press the buttons. The "Analog Hole" is quite present
in books, which can be reproduced with no loss of quality.

I actually wonder if the Kindle DRM is more a way of appeasing publishers than
something that was actually intended to be effective.

~~~
masklinn
Depends what you mean by "effective".

It's similar to e.g. steam or appstore DRM: relatively easy to trivial to
bypass (or you can access the content with bypassed/removed DRM easily enough)
but the system is convenient enough that most won't care to do so unless and
until it's being repeatedly and widely (ab)used by the keys authority.

It won't hinder the motivated and technologically inclined but they're a small
minority, meanwhile the scheme spreads, and if/once devices or accounts get
killed it's too late.

------
akmiller
A bit over the top. Yes, utilizing Amazons devices gives them full power over
the content on your device but why do we need to suggest that E-books have to
deliver on the same business model as print books?. There are benefits to
e-books that regular books don't offer so just ask yourself if the tradeoff is
worth it. I'm certain Amazon, in general, does not want to be in the business
of removing books from peoples devices.

~~~
fixermark
Basically. "A bit over the top" could very well be the byline of
gnu.org/philosophy. They are the impractical philosophical anchor at one end
of a line of conversation; if the world worked the way the philosophy
described, everyone would be a bit technologically poorer (but "freer", at
least).

~~~
thebaer
How exactly would we be technologically poorer in this case? Would Amazon /
B&N / Apple / any ebook distributor suddenly lose their impetus to develop
ebook-reading tech / devices?

~~~
Albright
Maybe they wouldn't lose their impetus, but they might lose their ability to
sell the idea of e-books to publishers.

The major stores sell DRM-free music now, but do you think that Apple would
have been able to get music publishers on board if the iTMS had no copy
protection on day one?

------
joelberman
I download books from my library (Boston Public). They are DRM'd and only
usable on my Kindle for a few weeks. But that is enough. The range of books
available is good. ANd if it is a text or something I like, I can then buy it.
If it is just a garbage novel to ease a flight, then that is good too. The
Kindle, on a per book rate, was really cheap and the library is even cheaper!

------
Albright
> Amazon can remotely delete the e-book using a back door. It used this back
> door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984.

Tell the whole story, guys. Framing it just this way is dishonest.

~~~
jordigh
Do the other details matter? That Amazon had to recall the book and refunded
customers? Not to me. They simply could not have "recalled" all books if they
had been physically sold.

They are holding a loaded weapon pointing at our e-books. The circumstances
that make them fire it are not as important as the bizarre fact that they have
this loaded weapon in the first place.

~~~
fixermark
That's one way of looking at it.

Another way is that building the loaded weapon was a prerequisite for their
capacity to offer the world's largest library of commercially-viable ebook
content, and without that "bizarre fact," the content simply wouldn't be
available to anyone electronically because of the legal wrangling necessary to
get it into publicly-accessible electronic format.

~~~
jordigh
These manacles are always sold to the public as "for your own" or "for your
own protection" as if they were an inevitable fait accompli of how things
should proceed. Very Machiavellian, very gangsterish. We have evidence of
these libraries growing without these restrictions, so we know it's simply a
lie that we need these restrictions.

The ends do not justify these means.

~~~
fixermark
They grow faster with the restrictions. Digital music was doable, but wasn't
easy until Apple did the business work necessary to make the iTunes Music
Store possible. eBook access to the latest publications on day-of publication
across fiction and nonfiction was functionally a non-starter until Amazon did
the business work necessary to make the Kindle Store possible. Their
competition who didn't want to play by the rules of the restrictions the
content owners wanted were plowed under by the volume and convenience
generated by successful business partnerships.

It's inconvenient for those who prefer a world without business-driven
constraints that the processes that create those constraints also create
massive convenience. But they do, and the world is full of potential customers
who want that convenience. Because the alternative of a marketplace where they
can pay someone (and play by that someone's terms of service) to do the work
for them is to learn to do that work themselves, and that's not what people
want to specialize in.

------
jwalton
Awesome places to get DRM free ebooks:

Baen has their entire catalog online, DRM free:
[http://www.webscription.net/](http://www.webscription.net/) They also include
CDs with some p-books that have the complete collection of a given series,
which you can download for free here:
[http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/](http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/)
(Check out the Miles Vorkosigan series and the Honorverse series, if you're
looking for some good reading.)

All Tor/Macmillan ebooks are available DRM free from Google, Amazon, and
everywhere else they are sold.

Where are your favorite sources of DRM free books?

------
javajosh
I would like to add three other dangers of e-books.

First, that a central authority could reach out and change _all copies_ of an
extant work. Not delete it, but selectively change it. The Information
Ministry never had it so good!

Second, and this is true especially for kids, I think e-books are
psychologically problematic. A physical book has fewer degrees-of-freedom, and
that's good because the content has nearly infinite-degrees-of-freedom. The
way _the device_ works is no mystery to kids, and once you've read it you put
it on the shelf (or give it away). With e-books, you always have your whole
library right there, and focus becomes an act of will instead of the default.

Third, and this is true especially for thoughtful books, you can't read an
e-book with a pen. I shudder to think about reading Marcus Aurelius
_Meditations_ without pen in hand!

As an added bonus, books trap carbon! So the more books we have, the better
off our environment!

~~~
jobigoud
Your first point (like the points raised by OP) is not about e-books at all,
it's about a certain kind of books sold by a certain vendor.

~~~
javajosh
Consider that a sufficiently talented programmer constructing a very powerful
piece of malware could, in fact, alter every copy of something everywhere,
simultaneously, no matter what it's format.

And they wouldn't have to be 100% successful, they'd only need to affect
enough copies to sow doubt into people minds about which is the authentic
copy.

My point applies to all digital media, for the simple reason that computers
are remarkable in their ability to modify the state of very small things.

------
imgabe
I use Calibre and the DeDRM plugin to remove the DRM from all the ebooks I
buy. Very convenient and only takes a second.

~~~
pgrote
Does this leave it in mobi format and if so, can t still be read on a kindle?

~~~
scruple
You can export as various formats and it is still 100% readable on Kindle (I
have experience with both apps and a few devices). It doesn't mangle anything.
Not who you replied to, but I've been using this exact setup to protect my
e-book collection for a long time and couldn't be happier.

------
drikerf
I agree to some points but still, pdfs/ebooks will help distributing books to
more people making information more available. And with these arguments, are
libraries bad? Considering you need to identify yourself and they are in
charge for choosing which books you're can to read, and which ones you can't.

~~~
lhopki01
Was looking for this point. For me I moved over to ebooks because I didn't
want more physical books cluttering up my already small living area.

------
codeisawesome
YES. Ebooks are a great idea, but definitely not in the way currently
implemented. I hate the idea that XYZ Corp., can start streaming ads into my
books or have detailed analytics of which lines I
read/skipped/copied/researched just because I bought it from them. It's really
convenient: they control the format, hence they control the software to
(legally) read it, hence that software can behave pretty much any way it
likes!

It's even further horrible when you consider a future when books will only be
available in one format, that too by XYZ Megacorp ONLY. I don't want the world
I inhabit waltzing into that future. Thank GNU that GNU exists.

~~~
jobigoud
From the comment in the thread it seems people are not aware of Kobo readers…
They are great hardware-wise and the default format is standard epub. You can
find everything in this format, create your own books with tools like Sigil,
convert from other formats with Calibre, etc.

Please stop conflating ebooks with the crappy format of one vendor.

------
blfr
As far as free flow of information goes, you can't torrent a paper book.

It's also not true that Amazon pushes DRM. They include it as a gesture to the
publishers. You can put a DRM-free ebook on Amazon if you choose so.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"You can put a DRM-free ebook on Amazon if you choose so."

Absolutely, and many do so. You can spot the ones that don't have DRM by
looking for "Simultaneous device usage: unlimited" in the description.

Most indie books and some major publishers (O'Reilly and Baen have been
mentioned here) don't use DRM, even on Kindle.

Blaming Amazon for DRM is pointing the finger at the wrong party, IMO.

~~~
ernesth
Blaming Amazon is totally pointing the finger at the culprit:

Amazon has been threatening publishers that if they choose no drm, their books
won't benefit from text-to-speech, and various other possibilities of the
kindle, including future compatility!

[http://lexbrage.tumblr.com/post/13212628647/amazon-
bragelonn...](http://lexbrage.tumblr.com/post/13212628647/amazon-bragelonne-
drm) explains (in french) why Bragelonne (french publisher against DRMs)
surrendered to having DRM on amazon.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Amazon has been threatening publishers that if they choose no drm, their
books won't benefit from text-to-speech, and various other possibilities of
the kindle, including future compatility!"

Sorry, that is not correct.

I've got several indie books on Amazon, none with DRM, and Amazon has never
"threatened" me with anything. It's a checkbox in the publishing portal. All
of them have text to speech enabled.

Here's a link to an O'Reilly book (not one of mine). Check for yourself that
"simultaneous device usage" is "unlimited" (i.e., no DRM) and that "text-to-
speech" is "enabled".

[http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick-
ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick-
ebook/dp/B007Q4T040)

------
giaour
We went through this with music, and DRM-free files won. They were rightly
seen as intrinsically more valuable, and no one was willing to buy a
restricted file when a regular mp3 of the same content was available for the
same price.

The same is true of ebooks. Many publishers offer DRM-free ebooks, but they
cannot compete with kindle ebooks on price. A freely distributable PDF is
worth more to me than a one with DRM, but not infinitely more. Eventually the
prices will equalize and everyone will buy open formats.

------
esaym
I've thought about getting the amazon kindle a few times. I really can't make
myself do it though. It would be nice to have on airplane trips, as I normally
only read tech manuals/programming books, but the fact that there is no "used
book" market for the kindle is what drove me away. I'd rather pay $5-$10 for a
used tech book then buy the E version for $15-$30. Sure I could get online and
bootleg an ebook version but that is not really right either.

------
otabdeveloper1
e-books != Amazon.

The vast, vast majority of e-books in the world do not come with DRM nor are
related in any way to Amazon. (They also infringe on copyright, but that's
another issue.)

------
gnufied
I own a Kindle Voyage and read heavily on it and yet I can get behind this FSF
campaign with all my heart.

1\. There is no reason Amazon/publishers can't distribute DRM free books which
I can backup and share (within reason, not putting for torrent).

2\. It is amazing how badly Kindle supports other languages. I was trying to
read a book written in Hindi on it and it was meh. Page turning is slow, font
rendering is awful. Are we ready for a world where literature means English
literature?

------
jasonkester
It is easy to write a list of upsides of Thing A and downsides of Thing B. But
unless you also do the opposite, you can't really come to a good determination
of which is better for a given task.

They could just as easily written an article about how printed books are
cumbersome, and how you can easily copy text from ebooks.

It's like watching a truck commercial, reading this piece. The Good thing is
the best at everything. The Bad Thing is the worst at everything.

------
Intermernet
I'm always confused by the contradiction implied by the fact that the "free
market economy" seems proud that the price of any good or service should be
defined by _what people are willing to pay_ , until such time that people
_aren 't_ willing to pay for it at all. After which, not paying for it rapidly
becomes a criminal offense.

Somehow reminds me of Mozart and Allegri's Miserere.

------
vixen99
There are e-book publishers who offer tech books with zero restrictions beyond
basic copyright requirements applicable to physical books. Immediate access
and freedom to make copies or even resell. What's not to like? People can make
up their own mind about Amazon from whom I buy hardbacks. I wouldn't touch
their e-format but I'm not that someone else for whom the formula fits.

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yuvadam
Obligatory xkcd [https://xkcd.com/488/](https://xkcd.com/488/)

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methou
The major difference between the ebooks and paper books is that if you share a
paper book with someone, you lose it from the moment you lend it out, until
you get it back. But sharing an e-book is much painless and convenient, thus
can easily abused.

~~~
davexunit
>But sharing an e-book is much painless and convenient, thus can easily
abused.

I find it strange to see the word "abuse" used when talking about sharing.
Sharing is caring, after all, not abusing.

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zupreme
This comment is probably going to be unpopular with this audience, but there
is a really good argument to be made for DRM in the e-book space.

When selling a physical book there is a real barrier to propagation of the
entire work in the form of a prohibitive cost or effort for the average person
to produce unauthorized copies.

In an era where even little kids know how to do a copy and paste this is
definitely not the case with e-books. An author who releases his/her e-book
without DRM would be, for all practical purposes giving it away to the vast
majority of the reading audience.

Maybe the future of both books and music are that recorded and written works
will be freely given as promotion for other more lucrative efforts (like
concerts, seminars, and so forth) but as long as the publishing industry and
authors rely on the sales of books/e-books for the majority of their income,
DRM is here to stay.

~~~
Karunamon
That may be the case if it weren't for the fact that DRM both completely
destroys fair use (I should be able to move my Amazon/Audible purchased books
to any device I want), and is completely ineffectual at its stated goal,
stopping copyright infringement.

~~~
rhino369
It's ineffectual at completly stopping copying, but it's far from completely
ineffectual. The average person doesn't have a good tracker and doesn't know
how to use calibre. They could learn / be taught but it's a pain. Easier to
just pay. It's not all or nothing.

If you prevent 70% of copying, that's a huge win.

I'm not sure drm is actually worth it, music has shown its not needed in that
industry. But that industry had piracy catch on in a way that no other had. My
mom can't pirate anything except for mp3s. The napster legacy.

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mark_l_watson
I sort of agree, except I try to buy from publishers who provide PDF, iPad,
and Kindle versions.

When I do buy from Amazon, I try to copy to a PDF for backup for my own use,
which I believe to be legal. Backing up to a PDF does not always work however.

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optimuspaul
There are a lot of other sources for ebooks. I've never bought one from
amazon. This article is FUD.

~~~
sacul
So where do you buy general interest non-DRM ePubs these days? I used to buy
from Barnes & Noble when it was easy to remove the DRM. They've made it much
more difficult, so I don't buy from them anymore.

P.G. Wodehouse is a good example of an author I like to buy as ePub.

~~~
wlesieutre
Kobo has some, but doesn't make them easy to find. It's a note on the bottom
of each store page instead of something you can search by. I have no idea why;
if I could find the good books with no DRM I'd have spent way more money
there.

Recently discovered that Brandon Sanderson's books are among the DRM free
(Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, others), which is a great set of reads for
fantasy fans.

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tacos
The Stallman "cube root" thing is adorable and quotable but wasn't the right
curve then, and certainly isn't the right curve now.

Love the guy, disagree with many his methods, but love the results he seeks to
achieve. But like licensing, he seems willfully ignorant of outliers and is
increasingly guilty of oversimplification. And more so as he ages.

He's also obsessing on Amazon, and not entirely for reasons that immediately
make sense. Prior discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9355978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9355978)

------
DannoHung
Does anyone know of a store front for fiction and non-computer non-fiction
books that _all_ are unencumbered by DRM?

I _think_ Tor is releasing everything DRM free right now, but I'd like to see
any stuff from other publishers that is also DRM free.

