I've heard of this practice before for piracy prevention, but the publisher wasn't named. Does anyone know if there are other epubs doing it too, or whether it's just Silver?
I hope not. I
don't upload e-books -- unless they are Project Gutenberg files, Baen Free Library books, etc. where it's OK to share. After all, if somebody wants to read something from Silver Publishing, surely they can spend the $3.99 or whatever to buy their own freakin' copy. Sheesh. But I can see lots of cases where this would be baaad. For example, what if I bought the e-book as a gift for someone else? What about websites that buy e-books to give away as prizes in contests? What if someone stole my computer or my e-reader?
Also, if a company thinks it's OK to do this to my personal information, how do I know they are careful with that information at all? We all know that some e-book publishers aren't careful enough about sensitive information. Years ago, when e-books were still fairly new, I bought an e-book that was only available as a CD -- I think because it wasn't out yet.
Weeks later, it arrived in my mail box, and the letter accompanying the disk contained my entire credit card number. Oh, yeah, way to treat your paying customer's sensitive information.
I remember wondering: 1) what were they thinking?!; 2) in all that time, how many people at their office had access to my credit card information?; and 3) what if the package had been lost or stolen? Oh, and on top of that, their database was later hacked. What a shock.