> That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing.
While this certainly used to be true, I think this is an arguable point. You posit two choices in the next sentence:
- the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices
- the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use
But: if I buy a Kindle book, DRM or not, it is very easy for me to buy and it is very easy for me to use on any device that runs the Kindle app. Buy it one device and it's in the library on all of them; at worst I have to just tap to download it.
This is the way most companies have effectively competed with piracy: make it more convenient to get something legally. I've gone the whole "set up automated scripts to scan piraate sites and wait for specific videos of a certain quality to show up, download them via torrent, tag them with proper metadata, convert them and put them in my iTunes library" route. It was clever and cheap and just super, super fragile and finicky. Pirate sites go up and down, metadata is wrong, something somewhere in the chain breaks mysteriously. You know what was more convenient? Clicking "Season Pass" in iTunes. Boom. Done. Convenience is also the proposition of streaming video and music, in a very real sense: it's all technically DRM-encumbered, but your Spotify music is available on every device that supports Spotify with almost no effort on your part beyond logging the device in. If you have a strong enough philosophical objection to DRM that you find Spotify, Netflix, et. al, unpalatable, that's great, but while it's pretty easy to move DRM-free music files around it's not as easy as just streaming -- and DRM-free video files are still kind of a pain in the butt compared to streaming, or even any centralized library system like Amazon or iTunes. The same is basically true for books: I appreciate Calibre, but "It's so easy to manage your ebooks and reading devices through Calibre compared to using the native Amazon Kindle or Apple Books apps" is not a sentence most people are ever going to utter with a straight face.
Sadly, Kindle only really provides English content. Finnish books only really get released on Finnish propietary platforms that, like Op's experience, are laden with DRM.
I don't really need to read Finnish literature (although it would be nice to be more well versed in my own culture) but I can't recommend ebook readers to my family and friends because there's no way for them to enjoy any content on them. Which is a shame as they're dope.
It's no longer the case only because some companies understood what piracy offered and adapted (note that the most reactionary parts of the industry fought back even against this -- they thought every one of these services encouraged piracy. The movie industry is noticeably backwards, which is hilarious when they themselves thrived thanks to breaking laws. But let's not digress). A lot of game devs I know (some semi-well known) cut their teeth with pirated games. I wonder how many will openly admit it.
DRM is still a step backwards. I like law-enforced laws ( :) ) because if they overstep I can ignore them. DRM/tech enforced laws often overstep, and it's harder to ignore them, and it's ultimately my business what I do with the stuff I bought. I can share paper books, and I can damn share digital books I bought if I so want. When did we let this nonsense of DRM happen?
While this certainly used to be true, I think this is an arguable point. You posit two choices in the next sentence:
- the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices
- the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use
But: if I buy a Kindle book, DRM or not, it is very easy for me to buy and it is very easy for me to use on any device that runs the Kindle app. Buy it one device and it's in the library on all of them; at worst I have to just tap to download it.
This is the way most companies have effectively competed with piracy: make it more convenient to get something legally. I've gone the whole "set up automated scripts to scan piraate sites and wait for specific videos of a certain quality to show up, download them via torrent, tag them with proper metadata, convert them and put them in my iTunes library" route. It was clever and cheap and just super, super fragile and finicky. Pirate sites go up and down, metadata is wrong, something somewhere in the chain breaks mysteriously. You know what was more convenient? Clicking "Season Pass" in iTunes. Boom. Done. Convenience is also the proposition of streaming video and music, in a very real sense: it's all technically DRM-encumbered, but your Spotify music is available on every device that supports Spotify with almost no effort on your part beyond logging the device in. If you have a strong enough philosophical objection to DRM that you find Spotify, Netflix, et. al, unpalatable, that's great, but while it's pretty easy to move DRM-free music files around it's not as easy as just streaming -- and DRM-free video files are still kind of a pain in the butt compared to streaming, or even any centralized library system like Amazon or iTunes. The same is basically true for books: I appreciate Calibre, but "It's so easy to manage your ebooks and reading devices through Calibre compared to using the native Amazon Kindle or Apple Books apps" is not a sentence most people are ever going to utter with a straight face.