> 1. Yarr, pirate it. Easier to consume things when you have few qualms as to how to obtain it.

Don't some e-Book readers disallow you from reading things that you didn't download from them (or they don't support epub)?

> 2. Nothing lasts forever. Lock-in only exists if you can't let go for the next thing that comes along.

But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).

Kindles don't have that restriction, and they're by far the biggest ebook reader family on the market. Yeah, they only support MOBI, but that's just a simple file format conversion that Calibre (FOSS, available on all major platforms) can easily handle.

> Don't some e-Book readers disallow you from reading things that you didn't download from them (or they don't support epub)?

If theory 1 is true, then the readers without this user hostile approach will thrive. Obviously pirates don't care for DRM locked devices.

> But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).

My point was mental, not physical. People might naturally just drop old stuff for new shiny things. If things appear plentiful compared to the old ways, this attitude is easier to adopt. Do you regret throwing away your coffee cup in the morning?

do you regret throwing away your family photos? your car? your friendships?

The true problem with piracy is actually not the issues that others have mentioned with readers disallowing sideloaded files.

The main issue with piracy is that both Amazon and Apple have far more advanced typesetting systems in the custom file types (Kindle Format 8 and iBook format) that you get when you buy from their store.

The .epub format its still based on what, XML? .epub makes up most of what you see when you pirate. If you look closely you can see that most epubs actually are really badly typeset compared to the versions of the store.

I wish there was a guarantee that when you bought a legal eBook from Amazon that it would be well edited.

I bought the Kindle version of A Deepness In The Sky recently and it's full of what seem like OCR errors. Missing punctuation, spelling errors like "A1" instead of "AI", the word "hands" mysteriously in italics for a chunk of the book... There's no way anyone read it before putting it up for sale. I wrote to them in their formatting feedback form thing but that's just gone into the void.