|
Certainly some piracy is going on: but nothing like what happened in the music industry when CDs came out. The difference was that everyone who had a CD basically had easy access to tools to share the CD they'd bought. Plus, folks shared individual tracks as well as whole albums. And, the USENET was way bigger then than it is now. Trading was trivially easy.
Books are different: it's hard to turn a pbook into an ebook; and most books are still on paper. Who wants to trade just a chapter? Consumers are also much better trained to pay for stuff on the net than they used to: iTunes and Amazon have been a big part of that trend.
Lastly DRM on ebooks doesn't get in the way of enjoying your purchase and its not something that will be consumed dozens or hundreds of times like a favourite tune is. So DRM is also not put to the test as often. Sure, some people worry they might be inconvenienced by DRM someday, but, as a practical matter, almost no one is.
|