[rollover]

O'Reilly, NoStarch, Packt and Leanpub books are fine since they're completely clean. But books from Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, Apress, Addison Wesley, Pearson and Sams are watermarked which I consider just as bad as DRM. I never buy digital books from publishers who watermark.

[kccqzy]

It's rather easy to remove watermarks from PDFs with just UNIX tools, btw. (Of course it involves regular expressions.)

[detaro]

Why is watermarking "just as bad"? It doesn't interfere with me using the files, so I personally don't care.

[rollover]

Watermarking puts the liability (maybe not legally) on the customer to protect the files from any third party access because there's always the risk that someone who gains access to them puts the files on the net with your name/email or user id on it. This is something no customer can realistically ensure and to me this is a huge restriction to the usage of the books. Second it's ugly as hell to have the watermark on every page. Third it sends the message to me as a customer that I'm not trusted. WTF dear publisher. I want to buy your ebook although I could find 90% of all ebooks for free on the net. Why do you think would I do that if I didn't want to support your business? You watermarking publishers need to realize that by watermarking you create a defective product. The people who pirate your books get a better product, one without a disgracing watermark. Whenever something like that happens, where the pirated product is better than the legally purchased one, it is a clear indication that the anti-piracy mechanism should be dropped. Big respect to Tim O'Reilly and Bill Pollock who are two of the few people who have fully understood that.

[jsjohnst]

Ditto! This might be an unfair stance for me to take, but my thought is anyone opposed to them adding your name inside the book isn't using the book for a legitimate authorized use case most likely. It most certainly isn't a DRM to me in any normal sense and I'm perfectly ok with it.