Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Look , the success of Baen is a wonderful thing, but so long as its the ONLY significant success, well, its a hard thing to bet a whole industry, that supports millions of authors and related personnel , on a model that hasn't enjoyed widespread success. Mobileread forum supporters don't have that responsibility, so its easy for them to blithely say, "Leap by faith into the dark. The landing won't be so bad!".
And this over something-DRM- that is more of an annoyance than anything else and can changed to allay the most serious concerns of the digerati.
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Baen is not the only example. They're a useful example of a publisher who refuses to use DRM across the board, but there are plenty of examples of individual authors refusing to use DRM (
Wil Wheaton,
Cory Doctorow who also releases all of his works under Creative Commons licenses, etc) and the publishing houses they use that allow them the
option to skip DRM.
This is a leap of faith that has
already been taken by individuals, larger companies, and even entire industries, and in every single scenario it has worked out better than keeping the DRM in place. So really the question is not, "Why shouldn't publishers stop using DRM?" but instead, "Why
should publishers continue to use DRM when all of the evidence proves that it's more harmful than helpful?"