[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

THank you for your serious, fact based response. At least you didn't stoop to personal attacks like some .
THere is a lot of really good data about the music business. Unforetunately , there is data that sharply contradicts your position.

While the RIAA's income has been dropping, indie musician income has been picking up. There's no way to tell how much difference there is between those, and especially no way to compare income to the musicians as opposed to income to the various producers & distributors that have traditionally taken a slice of the revenue.

One of the factors people don't talk about (in music, books, and so on) is how much revenue is "lost" to people enjoying what they already have instead of buying new content. Music, especially, is prone to this... if I buy secondhand CDs of my favorite 100 songs from my high school years, I won't be spending that money on new music. If my old favorites weren't available, I might.

Publishers don't talk about how much Project Gutenberg eats into their income, how many people aren't buying new mystery authors because now they've got easy access to all of Sherlock Holmes, which they'd always intended to read and never got around to.

There is more free ebook content available today than I can read in the rest of my life. There is more free ebook content in genres I like, by authors I like reading (although I haven't found them all), than I could finish in a lifetime. Buying *anything* is a matter of deciding to support the industry; I could read 50,000 words/day for free instead.

I didn't say I know where all that free content is. And I'd rather pay $3 for an ebook right now, than spend two hours looking for a comparably-enjoyable one for free.

The industry insiders blame digital music for the collapse in revenue. This is substantial evidence that offering DRM free music hasn't helped things.

The music industry dragged its feet about offering DRM-free music for sale, allowing a solid bootleg network to be established. It also dragged its feet on allowing sales of some songs at all (which I expect was mostly a matter of rights negotiations--not quite their fault, except failing to recognize & meet a market demand is never a good idea).

The print industry is working at following exactly in their footsteps, only slower and at a smaller scale. Which is a disaster for the publishing industry; it doesn't have the merchandising & performance aspects to cover for lost direct content sales.

Faced with such data, it is far from clear that going DRM free will lead to a healthy publishing industry. You would have to explain why a similiar collapse in revenue would not happen in the publishing industry, as people got in the habit of sharing bestsellers with all their Facebook friends. Thanks in advance for your response.

There is NO EVIDENCE that DRM-free availability leads to lost sales. There's no hard numbers (or even fuzzy soft numbers) that show that "piracy" causes any notable loss of income. Tobias Buckell has a long article about digital piracy, which more-or-less concludes, "all the studies I’ve seen demonstrate a neutral effect. I don’t buy that it helps me either, as the individual case studies also show that what you get is a neutral effect."

Originally Posted by kennyc

We're still waiting on the answer as to your motivation here.

Please answer that before we proceed further. Otherwise you are just tolling.

He's not trolling. He's been politely discussing the topic here & in the Kindle blog. If it gets a bit heated at times, well, we're all talking about subjects we care deeply about, and using loaded words to push our points.

I don't believe he works for the publishing industry. Even if he does, I don't care; the publishing industry has just as much right as I do to encourage people to believe its economic model of choice is the best one.

He's not blindly expecting people to be convinced because he keeps repeating his points; he keeps repeating them because he sees flaws in the answers he's gotten. And he's at least somewhat right--if everyone hands their favorite books around to all their friends on Facebook, those authors won't sell enough to be able to write more books.

He thinks this is likely to happen if non-DRM becomes the standard. I don't. Neither of us has solid numbers to support our claims; there's no way to track the casual sharing that does happen and relate it to sales to find out if it helps or hurts, much less speculate on how much more there would be if the locks were removed.

Doesn't mean it's pointless to discuss; maybe we'll find ways to get those numbers in the future. Recognizing the maybe-problems lets us speculate on maybe-solutions. But we should all be aware that we're discussing possibilities, not facts; we don't have enough data to discuss facts.