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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.
The only books I have physical copies of are for ttrpgs. And even then I have a digital copy.
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.
On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It’s quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.
In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.
I’m aware of the digitization projects, but not many people have automatic OCR machines in their basement, and manually flipping the page on your scanner is a little impractical for anything more than a 10 page pamphlet 😅
There’s no PRACTICAL way to digitize hardcopies for the average Pirate willing to break copyright law
The average person would just download it. Only one needs the equipment to digitize it. And that equipment isn’t as specialized as you seem to think. For printed (mass-produced) books you can just cut the pages from the spine and feed them in batches through an automated document feeder, which comes standard with many consumer-grade scanners. Automated page-turning on an e-reader can be done with a software plugin in some cases, or externally with something like a SwitchBot. Capturing copy-restricted video is frankly much more involved, and that hasn’t stopped anyone so far.
I mean, I’d really have to disagree, but that’s fine.
The effort involved with deconstructing a book, batching it through a document scanner, and compiling it with OCR in a EBOOK-compatible format is not trivial. Most consumer-quality OCR software isn’t even that great at recognizing words, new lines, symbols, and hyphenated and line-broken words, let alone recognizing chapters, indexes, footnotes, ect. It’s just not something that would be worthwhile for what it produces in the end, and there are millions more print titles than there are movie and show titles.
On the other hand, with A/V there’s almost always a way to pass playback through a virtual media capture device. Worst-case you have to wait the real run-time in order to capture it, but at the end you at least have a near-original quality file.
If tomorrow all EBOOKs got locked down without a means to strip DRM, I don’t think anyone outside of historical archivists would start spending their time manually cataloguing copyrighted hard copy books to distribute freely. Best-case, only the highest-demanded books would justify that amount of effort, and certainly not enough books to sustain a digital library worth frequenting.
Historically speaking, people have gone to the trouble of manually digitizing hard copy books to distribute freely. There were digital copies of print books available online (if you knew where to look) before e-books were officially available for sale in any form. That includes mass-market novels as well as items of interest to historians. Ergo, your scepticism seems entirely unjustified.
OCR is far from perfect (though editing OCR output is generally faster than retyping), but even without it we have the storage and bandwidth these days to distribute full books as stacks of images if needed, without converting them to text. The same way people distribute scans of comics/manga.