[neilv]

I don't approve of a company shutting off network service for a device it sold, but...

If this is a hint at much more formidable DRM coming out, could a silver lining for authors and publishers be more sales?

Or is mass piracy going to just continue, full steam ahead?

(Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)

[beej71]

If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.

Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.

Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Does stronger DRM lead to more sales? It was my impression that actual studies were at best pretty mixed.

[sbarre]

Anecdotal: DRM actively discourages me from purchasing digital goods.

[timdiggerm]

Yeah but HN commenters are not a representative sample of the ebook consumer base

[wombatpm]

But we do have families. I’ve set my wife and kid up with Calibre

[johanyc]

Most consumers probably never heard of the word DRM

[sbarre]

Like I said, anecdotal...

[mrguyorama]

DRM is why I will never own a second ebook reader and have returned to buying books.

None of my books stop working after 12 years, but my kindle, which still works fine, has indeed failed to do it's most basic job.

[beej71]

I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.

[theshrike79]

I'd like to be the person with the massive shelf of pretty books in a bookshelf.

But alas, I don't have the square meters for that. Also I tend to like THICCC books and carrying around a 1600 page monster daily on my commute isn't it.

So Kobo Libra Colour it is then.

[TimorousBestie]

> (Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)

Amazon accumulating even more control over the ebook market is not good news for authors and publishers.

[neilv]

I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.

But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?

(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)

[amarant]

Lock-in effect probably? I kinda wanna switch to kobo, but I own like, several books on Amazon.

The notion that copying books I've bought and paid for to a second device from a different manufacturer should be considered piracy is offensive.

[snowe2010]

That control is only held by Amazon with their drm scheme. It’s not held by the publishers or authors. It does nothing to prevent piracy and only helps Amazon consolidate more control.

[Beretta_Vexee]

DRM has always been a means of protecting a monopoly; copyright protection is merely the excuse given to justify the measure and the monopoly.

[big-and-small]

How do you imagine DRM can possibly protect text?

[Modified3019]

Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script. Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.

Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.

I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.

[exe34]

Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.

[Modified3019]

Speaking of llm OCR tools, had a quick look and immediately found this: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export

If anyone has similar tools they like I’d love to hear.

[avgDev]

Piracy will never be stopped. Never.