Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
The naughty 10% he speaks of, how many of them would buy it in the first place, regardless of DRM? You have some people that steal if they can, and don't bother with it if they can't.
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Yep. There are people who obsess about other people who are not their customers, and never will be their customers. Unbreakable DRM would not make them into customers; they'd just watch a movie instead. Unless they are somehow costing you customers (um, sounds like DRM!) they're not part of the equation.
Imagine a universe of 100 people, and two ebooks, Book A and Book B. The publisher (a term of convenience for publisher, author, agent, etc.) makes $5.00 per book sold.
In the case of those two books, we have that 10%: there are 10 people who will pirate the book if they can. And there are also 10% of the people who will buy the book. Now, our publishers (A and B are published by different companies) focus on two different things:
The first publisher sees its problem as those 10 people sharing copies of Book A, and works to prevent them from doing so. They invent an ideal DRM system which is totally transparent to legitimate owners but utterly shuts down piracy. They now have 10 people buying Book A and 0 people pirating it. The publisher makes
$50.
The second publisher sees its problem as those 80 people who are not reading Book B, either legitimately or illegitimately. They put their money into promoting the book and making it easier for people to buy and read the book. They ignore the pirates. They now have 20 people buying Book B and 10 people pirating it. The publisher makes
$100.
That's why Baen is doing so well: not because their customers are somehow special people (although the customers
do think well of a company that doesn't seem to be trying to figure out how to dick them over at every turn, perhaps because that is so rare) but because they've made a business decision to focus on the people who
are their customers, and the people who
might become their customers, and let the people who
never will be their customers go hang.