Only for certain books.
Book DRM has been a nightmare. Tying a book to certain readers is an automatic showstopper for a lot of folks (like me). I recently bounced a tech book I purchased, because I had to download their crappy hybrid app to read the book. The same people that sold it to me, used to sell unlocked reflowable EPUBs (my preferred format), or watermarked PDFs (I have no problem with simple margin watermarks). I'll lay odds that the app they make you use phones home. I didn't bother downloading it, or reviewing their privacy policy.
I'm not so concerned with privacy, as I am, with perpetual access to the books I want to read, on whatever reader I want to use.
I often go back and re-read books, years after the the last time I read them. I want to have that book available, then.
Also, this goes for all types of media, region locks are garbage.
There are quite a few places especially technical ones. However, many major pulishers don't offer them, so you then have the choice of DRM stripping, searching for illegitimate copies or giving up/in and using a DRM copy somehow.
https://www.ebooks.com/en-nl/drm-free/
https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/
Note places like ebooks.com don't sell exclusively DRM free, so you will need to check per book. I returned one to them and got a refund because of my mistake in buying a DRMd copy.
> Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost.
(Not affiliated, just think they do great work!
Discussed before:
They somehow watermark your books though, but they don't contain any DRM.
O'Reilly was very good. Now they only rent their books via Safari. I feel betrayed.
One could argue it is ethical, if not legal, to obtain a drm-free digital backup from a pirate site if one has a physical copy on their shelf.
Eventually I gave up realizing it is an extraordinary effort to personally rip books just to have drm-free digital copies.
Instead I built a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and filled it.
I read ink on slices of dead trees now, like a barbarian.
Pretty much all e-paper readers are proprietary and track all reading too which is a second order problem.
Really all creators should just have anonymous donation options for people that want to support -them- without supporting the toxic labels and DRM situation.
Do you know of services that can do this without damage?
Edit: Ask and ye shall receive: https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-SV600-Overhead-Scann... - had no idea this existed. Very tempting - Fujitsu makes solid scanners .
Also, see e.g. Steam, you cannot charge for these digital goods the way you used to. It's shifting towards (searchable) collections, not just individual books. It's ridiculous, when digital edition cost almost as much as print. They are emotionally and functionally different things.
A hardcover will cost around $3-$4 in printing costs. Even still, ebooks can be a good deal. To use a recent example that wouldn't yet have any digital discounts, there's the John Boehner book [0]. As of this comment, it has an MSRP of $29.99. The Kindle version is $14.99. At actual retail, Barnes & Noble charges $23.99. At Amazon it's $17.99, which makes the savings on print costs a wash.
Mid-size paper backs are usually a fair bit cheaper too. Mass-market editions are the bad deals: In print they retail around $8 to $10, which is usually the ebook cost too. However, many books never make it to mass market editions theses days.
The bulk of the costs involved in bringing a book to market are the people: Time to review the "slush pile", pay the author, editor, copy editor, typesetting, marketing. And many books either lose money for the publisher or barely earn out the author's advance. Mid-list authors who can consistently earn out their advance with a healthy margin are the ones that keep the lights on long enough for the publisher to (hopefully) catch lightning in a bottle with a block buster, or at least an outsized success.
Of course all of the costs above assume you're buying a new copy. Used books are often a very good deal.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/House-John-Boehner/dp/1250238447/ref=...
Still I think ebooks are a different product. At least in my head. I have a different emotional relationship with a physical book. The information within isn't in competition with the endless a "wealth" of information available legally or not.
For text books piracy is a victimless "crime" in my case, as having a digital copy or not, is independent from financial loss above a certain price tag. That is, I can't afford most text books, so I won't buy them; piracy does not influence the income of the publisher. On the other hand, if I really need/want to buy a book, I am likely gonna get much more intimate with it. Let's face it, digital copies are much more likely not to be read. Maybe only indexed and searched as part of a collection. Digital has a different value. (Although, I ofc understand the superficial dilemma here.)
This is the situation we got IMO.
Side note: You, as someone from the industry, I assume we can both agree that at the very least, a free digital copy should be included with every physical one, right? That just silly and artificial to separate, if you make an argument for the value of content and presentation.
There are in fact more of such stores, but this is the one that I use and remember.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QGM36KB/
"At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."
What I've doing is buying physical books and then downloading DRM free ebook versions from pirate bay. I know not everyone will agree with those ethics, but I'm ok with it.
I like ebooks but I'm not comfortable with all the layers of DRM involved in it.