Well, it’s not that big of a mistery actually, even less a psychological manipulation to increase revenues. If I completely own an e-book, I can duplicate it, quadruplicate it, post it online for 10000 people to have it for free. And this would bring the company just the 3$ that I gave to them.
If you want to live in the olden days, buy the hard copy, share it with a friend, donate it to a library. Nothing has changed there.
Is the prevalence of DRM actually preventing ebooks from being pirated? I don't pirate books myself but I get the impression that the answer is very much 'no'.
Pretty much every single paper and research repeats the fact that DRM is completely ineffective and has practically no effect on piracy or revenue loss.
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
It has prevented it to a certain degree. If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after. And I know very few people that actually know where to find for free the book they want to read.
Anyway, my poin was: if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
> If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after.
This isn't a function of how difficult it is for the pirates themselves to get their hands on a DRM-free electronic copy of a book. Instead, it's primarily a function of the fact that piracy is illegal, and—regardless of how easy it is for pirates to obtain DRM-free copies of the media they want to distribute—such distribution activities are limited to dark and relatively lawless corners of the internet where "normies" fear to tread.
That's the basis of my point in reply to you. It may be that DRM prevents to some degree the more casual form of "piracy" in which e.g. I give a friend a copy of an ebook file instead of lending a physical copy, but that didn't seem to be what you were getting at, and anyway since lending physical copies has been a possibility since books first came to exist I think the degree to which this sort of casual piracy threatens publishers' bottom lines is not a foregone conclusion until some independent party convincingly measures it.
> if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
OP's article makes some recommendations under "Conclusions".
It isn't. It's been a while that I've seen a (English at least) book I can't find a pirated version somewhere, unless it has a really small, niche audience or it just isn't published in a way that's much harder to use (vendor provided applications, etc). All it takes is one user with the know-how to remove the DRM and a willingness to share the file, which as the history of the internet shows, is almost an inevitability with even semi-popular books.
In terms of how DRM is cost-effective for platforms and publishers (i.e. why they bother with it at all), it seems much more likely to me that it's primarily meant to prevent fully legitimate post-first-sale transfers of books, e.g. library lending, second-hand sales, and so on. Publishers couldn't do anything to stop post-first-sale transfer of physical copies, but DRM-enabled ebook platforms give them a new lever.
These days companies have been able tie in DRM with convenience value add. Rather than fiddle around with epub files, just log in with your amazon account and have everything right there. It's crap from a freedom perspective, but I can see how it actually seems better to the average user.
It is not at all preventing this. There for instance 2 major sites with millions of books and wikipedia entries and all efforts to shut done is change the tld they are offered at which is linked on Wikipedia.
If DRM were banned maybe things wouldn't be different. So long as publishers have the option, I think they're more comfortable publishing e-books with DRM than without, and more comfortable publishing more obscure e-books from unknown authors than paper books from the same as the investment is lower. So there could be a catalog of books that wouldn't be available without DRM in the picture.
