Hi, well it’s December and NaNo is over (I won!! yay). I’m having a little problem engaging in the world where word counts don’t matter so I poked around some postings about e-publishing. I found a request on LinkedIn for a recommendation for the best DRM available.
Yikes, my eyes did the cartoon pop out on springs – boing. DRM is a hotly contested issue these days. I have to say I’m on the side of as little as possible – I hate the fact that Apple tries to control where and how I’ll play the music I bought from them.
I fall on the side of the argument that thinks of e-books as similar to paper books. If I pay you for it, I should be able to lend it to whoever I want and read it on whatever reader I have. A paper book gets shared and donated, just because you can put rules around a digital copy doesn’t mean you should.
It came home to me when I looked into downloading a Kindle book from Amazon.com. They use mobi format which I can read on my Blackberry from any other etailer. Surprisingly Amazon.com mobi is only readable on the Kindle or my PC. Hmmm, I don’t get the link between selling books and confining people to a proprietary software.
We’ll see these things change over the next while. I think we’re in the eight track v cassette or VHS v Beta stage of the hardware development and the end result will be common format and competition back to how many books get sold. I don’t know if Kindle will continue to be the reader of choice or not, I’ll just wait a few months before buying a reader.
What are your thoughts on DRM and the future.
Perry
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