Do book drms even make sens? i can understand games, but how do you encrypt words that are meant to be read. People used to record music on the radio. It seems easier to ocr a book and generate text that way.
A big place where this gets used is to make Kindle ebooks only able to be read on a kindle.
Any time they update and change the DRM there’s a brief period where newly-released amazon kindle books essentially cannot be read anywhere except kindle hardware and official kindle apps. People have pretty consistently found ways around the DRM (for now). But amazon is always trying to crack down on this.
DRM on media almost never makes sense from an anti-piracy perspective. Any reasonably popular book, movie, or TV show is on The Pirate Bay within a single-digit number of hours of its release.
It makes a lot of sense from a lock-in perspective, though I'm not certain why that leads to publishers insisting on it.
You can always do OCR on the paper book, so if the easiest way to circumvent some ebook DRM were OCR, the vendor would probably consider that a resounding success.
Which is dumb because that still takes very little time and effort. You can pirate any paper book in like 10 minutes with a decent sheet fed scanner if you don't care about keeping it bound. What a hurdle.
But hey, Grandma Martha can't read her Kindle version on the new Kobo her grandson got her without buying a new copy. Fantastic.
> But hey, Grandma Martha can't read her Kindle version on the new Kobo her grandson got her without buying a new copy. Fantastic.
To the business-people making the kind of decisions we hate, that sounds to them like:
"So you're telling me grandma Martha is not rich, has no big team of lawyers, and they're taking down the agency advocating for consumers rights so no one can stop us if we fck her over and 200 million people more? Seems like it's her problem."*
