[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Unlikely. If that were the case people would be flocking to Smashwords too, but most of the ebook sales are still on Amazon.

You're arguing about the wrong thing. I never said anything about the universality of the "no DRM" demand, merely that the people who DO shop at Baen do so primarily for the unencumbered formats and the variety of the formats available and only secondly (but a close second to be sure) for the low prices. That doesn't easily extrapolate to Smashwords and Amazon (and by the way, do we actually know the numbers for the two? Do we also know that after allowing for relative sizes and market penetration, there actually IS an imbalance between Smashwords and Amazon sales?) You do realize that Amazon is a retailing giant - very few online retailers (or offline for that matter) can compete with it. Smashwords is relatively new and rather small (Baen has been around for a long time as a publisher and as a retailer), all things considered - it will be a while yet before they can start matching the resident retailing Goliath.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

DRM is transparent to most people, and they neither know nor care about it.

Yes to the first part, but a resounding NO to the second part. I was going to say why but then noticed that you did it for me in your next statement -

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

The only reason it was (reluctantly) removed from mp3 files was because people were upgrading their players and finding out they could no longer play their music.

You see? You don't have to know whose crap you stepped in to know that your foot smells. As you said yourself, people don't care about DRM and the ethics and the principles and so on. Ironically, the less people know about DRM, the more they run up against that invisible wall and complain about it LOUDLY (I've been on the B&N forums - I know the seven stages of grief for non-techy people when it comes to DRM. People who don't know about it end up knowing a LOT about it and hating it with a passion AFTER they buy their first ereader.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

With so few manufacturers in the ebook reader market, and all the main ones aiming to tie users to their own hardware forever, that won't be a problem for most people.

So few manufacturers? This is the most competitive market for consumer products in the world today . Just look at the huuuge list of devices in the MR forum list. You forget that non-techy sites (again B&N is a prime example and I have been observing it ever since the original nook came out) are rife with complaints about books not being available for their particular brand of device.

In any case, if all books are available in all the (closed) markets -there's really no problem is there? Right now, the device-centric markets are (ironically) driving people against DRM in a way that was totally preventable. It was dead easy to keep people in a state of apathy when it comes to DRM - provide a method that did the job without inconveniencing the legal users. Oh wait, that's sort of ... um ... impossible .

The point (of the linked article) is not to rehash the same old matters of principle against DRM, just to show why as a matter of sheer pragmatism and business strategy, DRM simply doesn't work as it's intended and why it alienates people who might not even understand what it is on their shoes that smells so bad .