Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Baen is a scall scale publisher , serving a niche market. His example may just not scale up to a worldwide publishing industry on which millions of people depend for their livelihood. A "no locked doors" policy works in a small rural community; it isn't advisable in the big bad city.
Most people may not be thieves: but they sure like to share things they enjoy with friends. In the Facebook age, they can share with dozens of people at a time. Its a whole nother thing than lending a book to Daddy or your best friend.
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Baen is indeed a small-scale publisher, serving a niche market. But their (not, his! Jim Baen, RIP, no longer runs the company) success remains an existence proof that DRM is not a requirement for commercial success.
And even as a small scale company, let's take a look at the NYT hardcover bestsellers, eh? There are about 780 (=52*15) slots on that list in any given year (not counting numbers 16-30 on the extended list that isn't printed in the paper). Baen has published enough books that hit that list to capture more than 1% of those slots for each of the past several years. And that percentage would be higher if we counted the extended list. So "small scale" and "niche" have a relative meaning here. Baen certainly isn't Holtzbrink or one of the big six houses. But they're also not a "small press" by any means.
The main point of my earlier post was that the DRM-free strategy isn't limited to tiny presses and tiny-market books. You know, the equivalent of the "small-town" analogy you used. It sure appears to work just fine for
bona fide bestsellers too.
Your observation that the model may not transfer to other businesses is, of course, reasonable. There's no guarantee that Baen's model applies everywhere. In fact, I'd be shocked if it did! An earlier poster was correct to point out, however, that "what can be done once can be done twice."
Given that Baen has demonstrated quite conclusively that DRM-free ebooks and the buzz and profits they generate can take a small paperback house and transform it into a less-small hardcover-and-ebook-and-paperback house, well... the rest of the industry would be wise to study their methods closely. Simply saying "They're different, and it won't work for us" loses credibility. Unless it's followed by "because list-of-well-researched-and-well-founded reasons."
Much of what frustrates the MR audience (IMHO) is that many of us have enough insight into the publishing world, and have done enough background research to recognize that the majority of the reasons presented by Big Publishing (and also by Stonetools) fail on both the "well-researched" and the "well-founded" part of that statement. Especially the claims of "But-piracy..." and "but-casual-copying..." reasons that are typically presented.
My favorite response to big-publishing folks who start to tell me that "Baen is different, because..." is to ask them "So what does that tell you about what YOU are doing wrong? Baen has been succeeding in eBooks for a decade; you haven't. So if 'Baen is different...', hadn't you better consider that the difference relates to something they've been doing that you need to learn about?"
Xenophon
(whose collection of over 1300 ebooks is 100% squeaky-clean legally purchased or otherwise legitimately acquired with the consent of the copyright holder if any)