Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script. Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.

Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.

I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.