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Originally Posted by Barty
I forget, how was music DRM done away with? Did apple twist the industry's arm? Or was it Amazon? Did the industry achieve enlightenment by itself?
I think the situation there was different because Apple didn't own the DRM scheme and it was not tied to their hardware so they didn't have an incentive to keep DRM. Amazon IIRC was trailing itunes so they had an incentive to drop DRM to differentiate themselves. Otoh, apple wants to tie people to their iBooks and iThingies and Amazon wants to tie customers to their store and kindle. So it seems we're unlikely to see book DRM dropped absent significant customer revolt. For now, most people either are unaware of it or believe there's nothing they can do about it. I know six people with either a kindle or nook; they all think (aside from free and library books) they can only get books from amazon/BN resp., but they're ok with it since their chosen store works well and has all the books they want.
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here. Steve Jobs called for removal of DRM, Amazon actually implemented it, and then a year later Apple followed suit. Given that Steve Jobs was the impetus for change, I suspect Apple would've gone DRM-free even if Amazon hadn't forced their hand.
It's interesting to note that Amazon didn't really have a dog in the hunt when it came to music. Without their own player, there was no reason to enforce any lock-in, and so going DRM-free was an obvious choice from a store perspective. With ebooks, they definitely want to lock you into the Kindle (note that they're very careful about saying "Kindle books" and never "ebooks", because they're not selling ebooks -- they're selling "Kindle books"). Apple's actually in a better position to go DRM-free here, since iBooks is severely lagging behind Kindle, Nook, and others (also why Apple's going nuts about getting a percentage of book sales from iOS apps). If they went DRM-free and opened up the iBooks store in iTunes itself rather than just on iOS devices, I suspect they'd see their sales soar.
On the other hand, Apple forced the agency pricing model on us, so it's pretty clear they don't "get" ebooks like they "got" music. Apple had no problem telling music labels to stuff it when they wanted control over pricing, but they couldn't stand up to the comparatively smaller and less powerful publishing consortium? I don't buy it. I think Apple just doesn't understand that market.
Amazon does, but they want everybody locked into Kindle so they have no incentive to fight the publishers.