What Cory Doctorow writes about music certainly applies to e-books in many ways. I still have yet to buy a book with proprietary DRM. Freebies, gifts, books from the KnowBetter.com library–well, I’ll put up with DRM in those cases. And maybe there’ll be a special case where I just can’t live without a specific title. But so far, when I want copyrighted books, I order the good old-fashioned paper variety if I can’t find non-”protected” titles. You can bet that would change with the introduction of a Universal Consumer Format and sensible DRM. Meanwhile I’ll do the wallet-vote act and hope that you will, too. When you depend on proprietary formats, you might as well think of yourself as renting instead of owning books. /s Cory says: “Protect your investment: buy open.”
Related: In Solving and creating captchas with free porn, Cory shows how ingenious people can be in bypassing protection schemes. Of course, if you try to anticipate every possibility, then the DRM becomes clumsy to the extent that it inconveniences users and saps away revenue. The best solution remains a mix of DRM Lite and a realistic business model with appropriate pricing.
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