Drm is a problem, not only for games, but also for...e-books.

Many e-readers are based on Adobe's technology. And the planned evolution of that technology might very well kill a large number of e-readers and leave many users with books they can't read anymore.

http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/adobe-killed-e-readers

Note that Adobe replied to this article but doesn't seem very convincing.

Do you have a link to that reply? I always like reading the kind of spin PR assholes put on these things.

I meant : in the comments below the article :

Shameer Ayyappan
• 6 days ago

Hi Michael, I'm the Sr. Product Manager for the ebooks business at Adobe. I wanted to clarify Adobe's stand on some of this:

Background: One of the biggest concerns publishers and resellers had with ACS4 was about the easily available DRM hacks on the web. We addressed this with the latest version of ACS (v5) and RMSDK (v10).

We will leave it to the discretion of our resellers and publishers to set the DRM flag in ACS 5 (thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers to download books via ACS 5).

Bottomline- Resellers and publishers will benefit from the hardened DRM if they use ACS5 and their customers are on RMSDK 10 based readers. If their customers are on RMSDK 9 based readers, they will continue to be able to deliver books- but without the hardened DRM. i.e, people with older readers can continue to purchase or read new books.

And Adobe has NOT discussed any plans for an 'always online' form of DRM.

Ninja'd.

The main reason I hate DRM is that they are basically stealing from you. If I go and get a book, music CD, or DVD someone isn't going to come along and say guess what this isn't yours anymore because we've decided to change the format to make sure we make even more money. Money is pretty much bottled life, if I spent 8 hours worth of my life to get this I expect it to be mine. This is why people turn to pirating. They are tired of all the BS they are forced to sponsor with their hard earned cash.

Thank you.

Drm is a form of war.

War (noun) : 1.1 a state of competition or hostility between different people or groups:
1.2 a sustained campaign against an undesirable situation or activity

Now, when a war leaves the ennemy unscathed and inflicts blows to those that support the industry, it's either time to use other weapons or to face trial ... my 50cts

This is why I don't have a problem with folks who "pirate" a working copy of a game they already paid-for, but that no longer works because someone changed the rules - after-the-fact - of how that product can be used and accessed.

At some point the digital content industry oughta realize that day-one hacks and cracks means their DRM is often a useless effort right out of the box, and hopefully they'll eventually realize it isn't worth the programming resources to keep coming up with ways to prevent us from using the products we bought.

lol pirates will pirate, you fuck with your customers even they will join the pirates

Well as long as there is paranoia, Narcissism and greed, there will be DRM. So yeah, DRM is going to be around for a long time unless people unite and fight back. So we should all be boycotting everything that comes with DRM because DRM = a huge risk for people who spend their hard earned cash. Problem is..most people just don't have that kind of willpower...and yes, I am one of those people who lack the strength to say "No"... :( It's not easy saying NO to an awesome game that is 75% off because it comes with DRM like Steam or Origin or worse. If I had that kind of willpower, I'd probably have a six pack, make millions every year and be enjoying life right now instead of hating it.

Once again DRM punishes the buyer and no one else. I thank the hackers who circumvented early ebook DRM and enabled me to rescue my legitimate purchases when I moved from the Nook to an Android tablet. I no longer buy any kind of proprietary book format, as much as love having my library in digital format. So not only does DRM punish some customers, it also keeps other potential customers like me away.

If I were a betting man I'd lay almost any sum on the new Adobe DRM being hacked within the first week.

DRM didn't kill e-readers for me, e-reader providers did.

I wanted an e-reader to read technical books, most of which are offered DRM-free from various vendors (though I totally get why DRM would be a huge block if you mostly get non-technical books).

However, I wanted a ~10 inches screen and pretty much all vendors from North American offer 7 inches or less (because that's where most of the market is and screw you if you don't follow the majority).

So, I had to import a 350$ Icarus Excel from Holland from a Canadian re-seller and pay a significant shipping charge on top of the base price.

Then, after about 6 months of usage, the device stops working seemingly on it's own and when I contact support, they tell me the screen is broken and screen damages are not covered in the warranty. That's about ~450$ after taxes down the drain in 6 months because they sell a device so fragile it should be treated like a container of eggs and of course they can't afford to cover damages because they know their device will break for a significant portion of their customers (most commuters really). And of course, alternatives are quite limited as outlined above (I think the next high quality alternative might have been a company from Mexico if I didn't mind risking half a grand with them...).

So, I got a tablet and never looked back. Didn't have a problem getting a 10+ incher and the screen is resilient enough to last me years. Not as friendly on the eyes when reading, but a lot less BS to acquire a good device that will last me at least 2 years.

e-reader manufacturers and distributors lost my patronage due to their own ineptitude, not because of DRM.

I've followed ebooks for a while, and this is not the first time this has happened.

Unfortunately, the first time Adobe did this was at least part of the impetus behind every ebookseller rolling their own DRM. So now we have Amazon's, B&N's and Kobo's own individual flavors of DRM in the US market. I think the lesson most likely to be learnt from this is that everyone should use their in-house DRM scheme, not that DRM is a bad idea.

It's the libraries that will get really hammered with this. They all use regular Adobe DRM. And people who can't afford to upgrade their old ereaders.

I would consider that a terrible thing.

I didn't go to the bottom of it, but from what I gathered from a quick search when I was looking for a ereader (didn't look deeply into it as I was looking to buy books in open format and was mostly interested in the support level for those formats), I understood it meant that if you want Amazon books, you needed an Amazon ereader, if you wanted B&N books, you needed their ereader. What I did infer with a certain degree of certainty though is that many of those vendor-specific ereaders didn't have good support for open formats because they didn't want to encourage that (since it competed with their own ebooks).

Collusion of interests is the source of many evils (in this case, them wanting you to buy both their ereaders and their ebooks and tightly coupling both together so that it's hard to buy one without buying the other).

Why do you think I hate Mac so much? Complete collusion of interest, all the way down to the hardware.