What an interesting area. The publishing industry has a lot to gain or lose from ebooks. On one hand, putting books up as downloads cuts production and distribution costs to almost zero, an idea which will be welcomed by anyone who paid a small fortune for a technical book as I did. On the other, the small size of ebooks makes them more vulnerable to piracy than even music. Quite a dilemma: Continue to pay to print real books, or risk piracy.

This is only complicated by the complete ineffectiveness of any text-protection. Making uncrackable ebook protection is about as easy as making an audio protection that cant be broken with a tape recorder and microphone or a video protection that cant be defeated by inviting friends round to watch the movie. Its just not going to happen. Already most popular books are available illegally on the internet, but not through any kind of complicated decryption crack. These books are made available by teams of dedicated fans who scan, OCR and (usually) proofread entire books. Sometimes to bring what they regard as a work of art to a wider audience, sometimes because they think its wrong to charge 40 pound for a book and sometimes just because they can. Any text protection would be subject to the same problem. No matter how secure the DRM, even if the program uses overlays or goes to the extreme of poking and clearing directly to screen memory in sync with the vscan to get round screenshot programs, someone will still put their laptop screen in a scanner or photograph the screen, and once a book gets popular enough someone will have the time to use even the most time-consuming methods.

Because of this there are few attempts to sell legal ebooks over the internet. One interesting approach used by Baen is to put up free unprotected ebooks on their website. Usually the first one or two books in a series are made available to increase demand for the others, or a few books by a new author are made available to gain a few fans to buy his other books. Its a very interesting idea, and according to Baen has been a fantastic success.

To be anywhere near as convenient as a paper book, Ebooks must be viewed on an expensive PDA. This investment puts many off the idea. I now have two of these PDAs, and very rarely buy paper books. I would still pay for all books if I could afford it rather than download, but my unusually high reading speed (harry potter in one day, all three LOTRs plus the Hobbit in five. About a book a day.) makes that uneconomical.

Theory is interesting, but if you have somehow brought a real ebook and are finding it wont work on your palmtop, or wish to quote a section in an email, or even feel like contributing to the collection available on p2p networks, you need an approach slightly less time consuming than screenshoting the book. How you do that will vary according to the protection system. There are two ebook protection systems available, by Microsoft and Adobe. Both are now cracked, but in different ways.