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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
Well, good luck. It's a gamble you have an increasingly large chance of losing. Not giving customers what they want is always a bad idea, of course.
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Not giving customers what they want is a good way of losing sales, obviously. I won't dispute that. But the chance of a paper book being pirated isn't increasing in the foreseeable future, because the technology hasn't advanced that much. when it's affordable for an individual of modest means to have a scanner that can take a 300-page book and scan it in a few minutes,
then it's time for publishers to worry about paper books being pirated. I haven't heard of any such scanner, and I don't see it on the horizon. Scanning a book two pages (at most) at a time is still a very laborious process, and most people are going to have better things to do with their time -- such as watching paint dry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
That doesn't make sense. Either you are afraid of illicit copies, or not. How can the source (publisher's ebook vs. scan) possibly matter?
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Because the easier I make it to get my book in electronic form, the more people are going to be able to copy it. If it's only in paper form, the barrier to entry (in terms of labor) remains relatively high, and there will be fewer people willing to do that. Thus, there will be fewer seed copies out there. Fewer seed copies mean that my book is more protected.
Look at it this way: How many e-books can you strip DRM off of through programmatic means in the time it takes you to scan
one paper book?