Publishers need to ensure that selling a copy of a book to someone does not mean that 10,000 copies are downloaded for free because that book was uploaded to a free download site. That can't happen with physical books in the same way — yes, you can scan pages and upload a PDF of the page images, but it's often a much poorer reading experience (although there was a story here just last week about bad actors selling photocopy duplicates on Amazon).

This is a hard problem for publishers. Some publishers have decided to sell ebooks without DRM — though the biggest example of this that I always pointed to for years and years, O'Reilly, stopped selling ebooks directly in 2017.[1] (It appears from that article that DRM/piracy concerns were not primary for O'Reilly, but the unprofitability of their ebook store and the rising profitability of their subscription business.)

[1] https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-n...

Most publishers don't believe that it is in their best interest to sell DRM-free ebooks. (This includes all the publishers I have done business with, which is a fairly representative sample). It's not that they're trying to get rich, it's that they're trying to stay alive. Ebook sales have been declining or at best have stabilized. Physical bookstores are declining. Publishers have a fear-hate-dependency relationship with Amazon, so they would like to sell ebooks directly, but very few have achieved any profitability there, and they don't believe that selling digital files without some form of digital copy protection is going to lead to more sales.

I have not been arguing here for DRM, I am simply telling you the reality of the publishing business and how it is grappling with a very different distribution environment than what we had 20+ years ago before there was such a thing as ebooks.[2]

[2] I built my first commercially distributed ebooks in 2000 for the (old) Microsoft Reader, Palm, and Rocket Ebook platforms. I've been in the publishing industry since 1997.

Now I will argue for DRM — or at least, for finding a solution that works for everyone.

I would like to think that DRM-free ebook distribution would work for publishers, and I used to try to convince them that they should move in that direction, but two things dampened my idealism: (1) my aforementioned experience talking with western publishers about DRM-free distribution. (2) I started talking with publishers in developing-world cultures. Many of these publishers (especially in post-colonial contexts, where books were traditionally donated by ministries and thus were free) have a very hard time making ends meet, and they cannot envision getting their customers to pay for digital files that don't have some kind of protection. There is too much precedent in those places for both books and digital files to be free.

In short, very few publishers are going to embrace a solution that fails to protect their content. If you buy a copy, they need to be able to ensure that it remains a single copy.

But at the same time, few publishers think, "I love having my customers locked into Amazon's platform. It's so good for my business that Amazon owns my customers."

What we need is a system in which:

* publishers and distributors can sell ebooks to customers and ensure that those ebooks are protected as single copies

* customers can buy ebooks and ensure that they will always have access to those ebooks, on any platform that they own, no matter whose DRM servers go down (because no single entity owns the DRM / licensing platform)

* customers can loan / given their ebooks to others, either permanently or for a limited period of time

* bonus: publishers (and therefore authors!) get a royalty on the resale

* important: buyers' full purchase history is knowable only by the buyers themselves

I believe the technical infrastructure to make this sort of system possible are just now being put into place. And I believe that someone will succeed in designing, building, and selling it to the publishing industry in the next few years.

And yes, I'm looking forward to it: I would like to see the publishing industry much less dependent of a single all-powerful distributor, and more able to sell directly to their customers without intermediaries and without fear. And as a reader, I would like to be able to buy digital books (and movies, for that matter) and know that I will always have access to those copies, no matter what, without being dependent on a single distributor. Or resell them if I so choose.

[edited to reformat because hacker news doesn't speak Markdown]