What an interesting (and really long) thread!
I'm almost afraid to post anything here, because maybe I'm just repeating an argument that happened on (say) page 14 of this thread. But I have a few semi-random comments ...
It seems to me that, pragmatically, the ebook sellers need to figure out the "sweet spot" in pricing for an ebook -- where that's a price plus ease-of-process that (for most people) beats searching for a pirated version. This "spot" won't be the same for everyone, but if you can come up with something that works for 80% of the population, you've really got something. I think iTunes got it right pricing songs at ~99cents.
Looking at ebook prices on Amazon, B&N, and elsewhere -- I gotta tellya, $10.99 is *not* the "sweet spot". Not in
this economy. But -- $4.99? With no shipping, direct download of a quality edition? That might be more realistic.
Also -- I hate DRM, but I could probably learn to live with it if I got a DRMed ebook with my purchase of the paper book. My biggest issue with DRM is that it's practically a guarantee that the book will be unreadable 5+ years down the road. I sometimes wonder about "time-lock" DRM: the book is DRMed for 3 years, and then it automatically opens itself up. Given the average lifespan of books in bookstores -- would that be so bad?
I think that the ebook sellers should emphasize that they're providing a quality product. I don't know how many of you have actually *looked* at any of the ebooks that're out there in torrent-land, but a surprising number of them are junk: no formatting, or OCR'ed by someone who never bothered to inspect the output. Or just irritating formatting that would take hours to fix. The publishers have a definite edge here, and I think they should exploit it.
I really do think that copyright law in the USA is broken badly. IMHO, copyright should last until the author's death.
And finally -- something that I think gets overlooked when talking about piracy is that many people, once they have a shiny new ebook reader in their hands, immediately want to go out and fill it with electronic books
that they already own and enjoy in paper. This in mind, I think that many "pirates" are simply people who don't feel that they need to pay twice for the same book. And you even have people like Randy Cohen, the author of the NYT's column "The Ethicist", saying that it's okay to do this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/ma...thicist-t.html
Okay, I'm done. I hope you had as much fun reading this rant as I had writing it.
Craig