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Yep that’s why I don’t understand all those people with Kindles and huge Amazon book collections. They can literally take it all away on a whim. If I want to own a book I’ll purchase a physical copy, but ebooks? High seas for me. I feel like a ‘free’ ePub in my Dropbox is safer than whatever proprietary format in my Amazon account.
Edit - getting mostly replies defending ebooks and stating disadvantages of physical books (also, yeah I know books “aren’t for showing of” lol, like that’s the only reason for owning a book).
Just want to add I have both and get their pros and cons. I read tons on my ereader too, just not a Kindle because fuck that closed system, it’s not for me (for reasons mentioned above).
Some people just want to read books and not collect them. My dad is 73 years old and reads tons of books on his Kindle. It’s not like he’s going to read them a second time, so why bother with a print copy and huge library space?
He also needs the accessibility features because ilhevis legally blind and cannot read print books.
It’s convenient, that what most people care about. But yeah, convincing people that making a copy of something you arguably own is a crime - that is some next level gaslighting on societal level.
Well I use the nodrm plugin and Calibre to strip the drm from all my Amazon ebook purchases and back them up both on my own machine and to the cloud storage provider I use. Only reason I buy Amazon’s ebooks is because they are normally the easiest to strip of drm, and very few ebook authors don’t use drm.
Physical books are certainly nice, but id rather save the space/weight for things I cherish instead of things I merely own so I can consume their content whenever I’d like. Books are for reading, not for showing off.
I do the same with DVD’s and blue-ray. Frankly, I think digital ‘purchases’ should be included in that fair-use exception, even if that hasn’t been tested in court. I don’t think it’s been established that digital media qualifies under the fair-use exception of stripping DRM, since each distributor also has a ToS that specifies the ‘legal’ arrangement of the purchase. I would hope those ToS’s would not stand in court against existing DMCA precedent, but I don’t have a lot of confidence.
If they were to ever officially disallow it, I think piracy would be 100% morally justified.
Yeah if nodrm is ever killed by a DMCA action I’d be turning to my local library and Zlibrary (or whatever the closest alternative is today l don’t know if Zlibrary still exists or not) exclusively.
If the book publishers are smart they won’t kill drm stripping software as nobody who strips drm is gonna keep buying ebooks if they can’t do that, the people that don’t care already just buy their ebooks because it’s stupidly convenient compared to piracy, and often not that expensive anyway.
No argument here, except with ebooks i think there’s little in the way of alternatives if they kill the ability to strip drm. There are simply too many books to reasonably distribute pirated copies if only a handful of people know how to do it. At least with video media there’s easily rippable DVD formats, but with books there’s basically no reasonable way to create an ebook from a hardcopy.
If they kill ebook drm removers I think they’d be largely successful in increasing ebook sales. There’d be a fair number of people who would return to renting from a library, and even fewer that would resort to piracy, but largely I think normal people would continue buying ebooks.
Don’t tell them i said that though.
I’m 99% sure it won’t have much of a positive impact in sales simply because the majority of ebook buyers don’t care about DRM anyway, only the minority of us bother to strip DRM. So while it wouldn’t be a large drop in sales I do think it would still be a drop. It might not be enough of a loss for them to care, and tbh as you said it would probably only result in a mild increase in piracy while the majority either do library loans or switch to paper.
I don’t think that those of us who care enough to jump through the hoops to strip DRM are just gonna roll-over and accept that the publishers can yoink our entire libraries whenever they see fit, but I do admit most don’t care. However those that don’t care aren’t stripping DRM anyway, they are just relying on the ability to redownload their books whenever they wish from Amazon/Kobo/Nook.
The only books I have physical copies of are for ttrpgs. And even then I have a digital copy.