Neither Peter Jackson nor New Line makes the hardware or software for DVD playback, why complain to them if your Lord of the Rings DVD’s don’t play in your Wii? (Although apparently you can now download a hack/patch that will let them play).

I think your other arguments against DRM are enough, even if there was only a single app and a single device in all the world that supported e-book files.

May I also say, I’m generally against DRM. I also work for a large educational publisher. My higher ups have asked if we can DRM the e-book products we sell on CD and DVD a few times. Each time I tell them the cost in time and money balanced against the hassle for customers, and the little good it’s likely to do, means DRM is just not worth it. So far they have listened to me. We just include a license instead. I don’t have much influence on the trade side though unfortunately.

I wonder if I will get a response, and if so whether it will be a form letter. I certainly don’t expect any kind of a sea change in the publishing industry, but still, it’s nice to send in an actual printed letter that they can hold in their hands.

It’s kind of ironic that even in this era of the ebook and lightning-fast email, letters printed on paper and signed with a pen can still have a greater psychological impact.

Here’s some homework for you, Telereaders! Find a publisher whose ebooks are DRM’d and write a snail letter to them explaining how their use of DRM either turns you away from purchasing their books, or else makes you dissatisfied with the user experience.

(And by “publisher” I do not mean Fictionwise or eReader—they are happy to leave DRM off if the print publisher does not specifically request it to be added. I mean the print publishers who submit their work through them.)

It may not change much, but it will make you feel better.

However, there is a Mobipocket-compatible ebook reader available for Linux. It’s called FBReader, and it reads unencrypted Mobipocket books just fine. Whereas an unencrypted DVD would not play in a CD player, an unencrypted Mobipocket book will open just fine in FBReader. It is only the encryption that keeps me from using it. (Though, come to think of it, I did not make that clear in the letter when I wrote it. I will amend it to do so.)

If you want to talk about DVDs, it’s more like complaining that your DRM-protected DVDs won’t play on Linux, due to the lack of availability of DVD decryption on Linux. Due to the licensing restrictions on DVD’s CSS encryption, an open source decrypting DVD player couldn’t be created until hackers broke CSS encryption with DeCSS, which in turn led to the creation of the libdvdcss library.

Here’s where things get weird. According to the Wikipedia entry linked above, libdvdcss is possibly legal (or at least it has not yet been litigated) because of the DMCA’s interoperability provision—it’s okay to crack encryption for the purpose of making one computer program interoperate with another. So I can watch DVDs on my Linux box with no problem, because the decryption is done automatically.

But oddly enough, it’s apparently not kosher for me to do the same with ebooks because I would be decrypting them manually and copying the files over—it wouldn’t be software “interoperating.” (Though I’m not a lawyer and that interpretation could be completely off-base.)

(Hmm. I wonder if a “libmobidedrm” were made and put into FBReader, if it would be legal under the same principle? Maybe I’ll start a discussion about that on the ebook mailing list.)

Asking the MobiPocket people to support more platforms may be a better way to go.

You are a timid fellow. Please, *never* come to my blog. I have brought “rant” to a whole new level. I’d make your skin peel off.

Wiebe: ebookbase may have those restrictions, but Fictionwise sells many titles in “multiformat,” including unrestricted Mobipocket. So does Baen.

So even if the publisher and I think that the ebook should become available without any restrictions, the ebookbase system doesn’t allow us to do so. So either we don’t offer the ebook at all, or we offer it with drm applied. We opt for the second option. I guess the same is true for Random House.

It has always puzzled me just who the book publishers are afraid of when they insist on such draconian DRM measures. As you point out, the DRM can be cracked easily and scans of books are also available. It would be impossible to prove what effect these have on sales of authorised books (paper or electronic), but I would guess it would be extremely small. Why not target the small, relatively tech savvy bunch of people who have ebook readers with cheap DRM-free eBooks (stamped with their name). iTunes has proven that people will buy electronic copies of stuff if the process is easy, and not too restrictive

When I finish reading a paper book I can (and do) lend it to other people. Perhaps that is what they don’t want to happen – people giving their copies away. Then why not setup a scheme where you can give your ebook to a friend and they can then redeem that for their own copy with a discount? If this means that only a few people pay full price and everybody else gets a discount, so what? All the discounted sales are a bonus anyway!!