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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Is DRM annoying? Maybe. So are closed stores when you want to shop at 3AM. Doesn't mean you have a God-given right to break a window and take what you want. Some things in life are annoying. Get used to it.
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Closed stores are keeping me away from other people's property. DRM keeps me away from *my* property.
Even for property I'm required to keep in a particular way for safety, I get choices about how to apply those safety measures. My house may be required to have a fire-resistant roof, but I get a selection of materials, styles & colors. I may be required to keep a gun in a locked case, but I get to pick the case. If I work with hazardous chemicals, I can't just throw them down the kitchen drain, but I get to decide whether to keep them in a glass or ceramic container, and how often to take it somewhere for disposal.
And DRM prevents legal uses of what I've paid for. Closed stores at 3am don't prevent me from using what I've bought.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
An ebook can potentially be reproduced and shared with thousands of your closest friends, with no money going to the author beyond the first file. Authors stand to lose orders of magnitude more on e-book sharing compared to used book buying.
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Is there evidence of this, as opposed to panic? Any actual studies that indicate that massive file-sharing cuts down on sales?
Massive pirating of Avatar doesn't seem to have cut into box-office profits.
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This hints at one of the matters that would make sharing more palatable to authors/creators: Establishing a way for them to make some money off of each new iteration of their book, no matter who duplicated it or who got it. If, as has been suggested in another thread, we have the technology to solve many of the problems of the new market of ebooks, we should be able to solve this.
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This, definitely. Until ebooks can be legally and *easily* loaned and transferred, filesharing will continue to be the only way to reproduce one of the best and most important aspects of books: when you're done with one you've liked, you hand it to someone else to read.
It's possible that publishers are fighting against that tech not just because they *want* to lock people into a "1 purchase = 1 reader" pattern, but because they're aware that's one of the last few stumbling blocks that prevents ebooks from starting to replace print. As soon as someone can sell her used Harlequin ebooks for $.50 each, just like the physical ones at used book stores, the printed versions are in big, big trouble.