Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.
GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.works 11 months agoYeah 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.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
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.
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
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
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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, but 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.