Quote:
Originally Posted by Doranna Durgin
However, I do also need to eat. And I do think that I deserve to be paid for my work just as everyone else is, and not to apologize for preferring not to live in poverty (not that anyone has suggested I should, but I feel an implication in the conversation as a whole). So I don't have any embarrassment about my concerns for finding the right balance when it comes to finding the best approach for getting paid for what of mine is being read, whatever it might turn out to be... If I'm uncertain about DRM issues, it's with good reason: my personal stakes are pretty large.
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Doranna, there are two basic issues:
First, does DRM help prevent piracy of your work? The answer is "almost certainly not". I don't know of any DRM system that has not been cracked almost immediately after release. And once one copy is cracked and the DRM removed, the floodgates are opened. The person who cracks it can upload it to file sharing sites, and it might as well not have had DRM at all.
DRM is about as effective at preventing piracy as the average door lock is at stopping a burglar who is a skilled lock picker. The good ones will go through the door without breaking stride.
DRM
is effective at pissing off the customer. I have a simple desire. I want to download electronic content
once, and read it on whatever I happen to have. That may be a desktop PC, a laptop, a netbook, a tablet, a smartphone, a PDA - for that matter, there a ebook viewer app for Nintendo DS handheld gaming devices. I want it in a format I can convert, if necessary, if the format it is delivered in if one I can't read on the device I want to use. (For example, my usual ebook reader is a PDA that handles everything expect ePub. No problem if there's no DRM in the way: I can convert the ePub to something I
can read.) DRM schemes usually work by locking the content to authorized devices, and may not let me read the content on everything I have. It will certainly prevent me from format shifting to accommodate devices that don't have native support for a particular format.
Most folks I know on MobileRead immediately strip the DRM from content they purchase to avoid such issues. I take it one step further, I simply refuse to purchase DRM protected content.
Second, you got pirated. So what?
Sure, there's a nasty feeling of violation and outrage. You're upset, and I don't blame you. But what have you actually
lost? How many potential sales did you lose because your work got pirated? How much money did you
not get because someone downloaded and read a pirated copy of your work instead of purchasing a legitimate one? You don't know, and you
can't know. You can to some extent track the number of illegal downloads, by creating an account on file sharing sites and watching the activity, but all that tells you is that someone downloaded a file. It doesn't tell you what they did with it afterward.
For example, I found a torrent file that had links to 13,000 SF/Fantasy titles. Do you think anyone who downloads the torrent will actually read more than a tiny fraction of the total?
It all comes down to your feelings about the market.
Mine is that piracy is like shoplifting of physical goods at a retailer - a nuisance, not a disaster. Yes, there are pirates. Yes, there are people who will happily benefit from the pirate's labors, and grab a pirated copy instead of buying one.
But while I may be a starry-eyed optimist, I think that the
majority of the market is honest. They are willing to pay for value. Your challenge is to
provide value they find worth paying for, price appropriately, and make it as easy as possible for them to find your content and give you money.
Instead of worrying about and trying to take measures to prevent piracy, invest the time and effort into letting the folks who might like your work know that you and it exist, and grow your readership. The more people who read your stuff and want more, the more who will pay you for it, pirates or no.
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Dennis