Quote:
Originally Posted by Snibborg
I am afraid we are in the situation now that the record industry was in in 1999 and it seems the book publishers are destined to make the same mistakes.
By hiking the price of ebooks more people will start downloading. One famous Torrent site already has a top 100 downloaded ebooks list. Add into that a small software package that converts ebooks to whatever format you want and you are just waiting for it to happen.
I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth already. You ain't seen nothing yet.
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As Amazon demonstrates, once a customer has figured out how to easily acquire an acceptable product from a site, he or she tends to go back to that site to get more of that product.
It seems to me that the publishers and sellers think that they are engaged in establishing captive markets for their respective EBRs and ebooks. But maybe what they are doing is teaching a significant number of their customers to learn how to acquire ebooks from someone else, at which point it will be difficult to lure them back.
It makes me wonder if Amazon might not, at some point in the next couple of years, do what Apple did, and drop DRM from some of their ebooks. Their pricing is generally the lowest anyway, and they have the best ebook purchase & delivery system. It just might suck up a lot of their competition's customers...