Thread: DRM is necessary and good, stop complaining
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Old 11-29-2007, 08:27 AM   #96
igorsk
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Join Date: Sep 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire View Post
Baen exists in a small niche. I am not convinced their model would survive Joe Public exposure once e-readers are common.
I was thinking of writing a small article on it, but couldn't find the time, so I'll just summarize here quickly.
There is a new Russian company, LitRes, which recently opened an e-book shop (http://www.litres.ru/). It has some pretty remarkable features:
  • All books have no DRM, and are available in the following formats: fb2.zip, rtf.zip, html.zip, txt.zip, doc, prc.zip, rb, java.
  • Any book can be read completely online, for free (with weak copy/paste protection and some ads). Authors still get compensated.
  • Average price for a 700KB book is 25 roubles (around $1)
  • Currently 1922 books are available. The main slowdown is not the number of texts available in e-form, but having to settle contracts with every author (majority of contracts are signed directly with authors, not publishers).
  • Several authors have their complete bibliography available.
  • Reportedly, authors get a 30% royalty
  • Selected authors can be "rewarded" by sending an arbitrary sum directly to them
  • Books can be offered for free, if desired so by the author
  • A lot of content on the site comes from the major "pirate" online libraries (now owned by LitRes), where content was scanned and OCRed by volunteers. Many major contributors now work in LitRes (and some are actually founders).
  • Whenever possible, LitRes offers "master" text from the author/publisher. If not, it is scanned, OCRed and proofed from hardcopy. Because they were doing it for years, LitRes employees are professionals in this, and the book texts have not many errors.
  • The "pirate" libraries still offer many works for download (over 30000 in total), when the rights are not yet settled with LitRes and the author/publisher did not request a takedown. New works are added every day.
  • It's still very easy to find about any book for free, either on one of the less known online libraries or in big torrent collections with complete archives of the "big" libraties. Only the worst offenders, which try to ignore takedown requests, are pursued by LitRes.
Last edited by NatCh; 11-29-2007 at 10:49 AM.
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