[superuser2]

Fuck no. Life is too short and literature matters too much to pass on good books and read worse ones just because of their publishers' DRM politics.

Don't reward DRM-encumbered ebooks, sure. If you want to punish the publisher, just buy it used on paper or go to the library. But read the books you wanted to read in the first place.

[bad_user]

Not sure what you're disagreeing with.

First of all, all Kindle books are DRM-protected, yet you can find many of them DRM-free, especially the technical ones, if you buy them from their publishers directly instead of places like Amazon. I can also show you books selling in Google's Play Store or other places without DRM, whereas all Amazon Kindle books are DRM-enabled.

But speaking about short lives, while I agree with buying books in print (I love to buy used books btw), authors that are alive and that still own the copyright are often complicit in this. So why should I read the ebook of somebody that doesn't respect me? From my point of view, a book takes some resources to read, which could be better spent on authors and publishers that do respect me enough to not DRM-enable those books. Or in other words, there are thousands, tens of thousands of books I could be reading, I only have bandwidth for about 2-4 per month and the rules of competition still apply.

Also, to get one thing straight, there's nothing holy about reading books. It's just another form of entertainment.

[kakarot]

I didn't say anything about not buying paper. I don't know how you extrapolated that.

I prefer books in print but those two philosophies can coexist. Get DRM-free e-material when appropriate, and print otherwise. I prefer manuals in searchable ebook form while books and novels are definitely more pleasing in print.

[abawany]

I kind of do a variant of this. I buy used paper books and then send them to bookscan.us for scanning. Et voila: non-DRMed ebook. Oftentimes, the price of this activity, ignoring the time element, is lower than the price of the DRMed ebook.