Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Whose legitimate ebook presence is zero. I'd bet if you checked the darknet, you'd find plenty of Perry Mason books
|
Well, I'm not interested in stealing or depriving the legitimate rights holders of their due payments. As you stated later in this thread, you'd love to "subscribe" to a $4/week/month Perry Mason Ebook-A-Thon. I'd be in line, too.
And, yes, I've sourced a dozen PM titles on the
darknet that easily become Kobo-ized and Kindle-ized for my collection. (I might add I already own most PM titles in pbook format). I will buy e-copies when they eventually appear. In the US, there are 30 years of sales ahead; in Canada, 10 years thanks to dead author + 50 years rule.
Where you and I part company is seeing DRM as the bogey man here: the availability of ZERO Perry Mason novels -- a 20th century icon -- has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with stupid, greedy, legal stalled processes and participants within the publishing channels that tie up the rights to profitable, saleable backlist content.
A great deal of Nero Wolfe / Rex Stout has been re-issued by Random House in the past six months -- a content trove about the size of the Perry Mason oeuvre -- and both Random House and the Stout heirs are now enjoying an e-book revenue stream lost to the Erle Stanley Gardner heirs.
So to wrap up: DRM ... applied as it is today which doesn't interfere with legitimate readers who purchase eyes-wide-open pre-defined usage ... works because it discourages piracy and is seamless to most users. But the glaring backlist gaps -- such as Perry Mason
where e-books haven't been pirated because they've never been issued ... in fact, FANS have typed/OCRed and corrected the darn things that are otherwise out of print -- encourage piracy because the publishing infrastructure is mired in greedy rights disputes instead of focusing on keeping titles in print as e-books. DRM is neither here nor there for these works.