Shelley Powers has started a must-read thread on DRM, the agruments for and against. Personally, I’m in favour of looking for business models that reduce DRM. Having lost a number of albums due to a hard drive failure, the only way to get them back at the moment seems to be to repurchase. I’ve bought them once, why should I do it again?
e=books are another area that are are impacted by DRM. Sony announced a new Reader at CES which tried to make the experience closer to reading the real thing. If the content was there, I’d buy something like this. I buy a large number of books. Some are keepers; I’ll buy reference books or certain authors in hardback. But a lot of the books I buy are more disposable; they’re thrillers or holiday books, books that will go to be recycled or to the charity shops because of space limitations. They’re often bought before travelling. These are the ones that I’d buy for a reader. But the content needs to be standardised and accessible, like mp3 not AAC. I don’t want to have to have many different readers because the tech compnies do deals with the publishing companies. I’d want the content available in the same place as the rest of the books as well (these 3 for 2 deals usually end up with me adding an additional one I would not have bought on its own). But a while before we get there – we need both the readers and the content to improve.
On a lighter note, Hugh has 10 Blogger lies, illustrating the gap between perception and reality. No DRM mentioned there.
