A publishing exec speaks out [ Edited ]

[gb18]

Anonymous?  Maybe apocryphal......maybe fiction.  But a good read.

“Why I break DRM on e-books”

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/24/breaking-drm-publishing-exec/

[patgolfneb]

Those supporting DRM are engaging in an obvious misrepresentation. Its justification is anti piracy, but the major benefits are locking purchasers in and raising the cost of entry for small firms. If a major company goes down and access to purchased content is lost things would change quickly. I just hope it doesn't come to that.

[moogs]

Fiction...

[roustabout]

Fictional or not, it lays out the basic arguments for de-drm'ing.  My core reason for managing DRM for myself is that I don't intend to rely on others' cloud service reliability once I've paid for access to a title.  A side benefit is that if the copy isn't laid out properly, I can clean it up myself rather than paying for it, then writing email and waiting for the file to be fixed.  I've seen some really amusing mucked-up titles.  A collection of science fiction stories, for instance, where chapter jumps were done wrong, leading to > 90% of the text being one long blue-underlined hyperlink with no way of actually using the chapter markup to skip around. It also lets me use the much lighter weight nook touch versions of magazines I subscribe to on the NT rather than the great big enhanced versions.  Those are occasionally worth using, but not that often, and I find maintaining the back issues to be much simpler with Calibre than with the website. 

My guide to managing this stuff on your own is at

http://nookworks.blogspot.com/2011/09/information-security-and-digital-rights.html

[bobstro]

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roustabout wrote:

[...] It also lets me use the much lighter weight nook touch versions of magazines I subscribe to on the NT rather than the great big enhanced versions. 

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Do you find many magazines DRM-encumbered? I subscribe to several through B&N (Asimov, Analog, Discover, PopSci), and was surprised that they are not. I'm able to read them with other readers and on other devices with no issues.

I agree with you on quality control issues. The ability to fix missing covers is what drove me into reasearching a lot of this stuff in the first place!

[frantastk]

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bobstro wrote:

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roustabout wrote:

[...] It also lets me use the much lighter weight nook touch versions of magazines I subscribe to on the NT rather than the great big enhanced versions. 

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Do you find many magazines DRM-encumbered? I subscribe to several through B&N (Asimov, Analog, Discover, PopSci), and was surprised that they are not. I'm able to read them with other readers and on other devices with no issues.

I agree with you on quality control issues. The ability to fix missing covers is what drove me into reasearching a lot of this stuff in the first place!

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I was wondering about that. None of the magazines I've subscribed to have had drm. I checked them once just for fun and I was able to view them in calibre. I was actually surprised by that. I haven't read anywhere around here about magazines not having drm, so I just assumed they did.

[roustabout]

I had not realized the magazine issues were DRM-free.  Very cool.  

I was mostly noticing that I was downloading huge New Yorkers on the NC and nook tablet for no apparent reason.  Copying in the files from the NST works well, but I would have expected it to work well since the devices are on a common account.