Quote:
Originally Posted by OtterBooks
Either way, ebook sales are rising. Fast. Any anti-DRM argument that takes up the "Publishers are just hurting themselves" angle better be accompanied by a crystal ball, Mayan calendar, or the Book of Revelations, because the current reality doesn't support it.
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It's not the anti-DRM crowd that insists publishers are hurting themselves. (Well, okay, we kinda do, but it's not a "oh noes! publishers must fix!" but closer to "well, if that's the kind of stupid they want to be, they're welcome to it.") It's the publishers who insist that DRM isn't working well enough for them.
One firm says
ebook piracy has cost publishers $3 billion. (They counted a cluster of popular books' downloads, assumed every download was a lost sale, and multiplied it by the number of books currently available, or something like that.)
An older article
estimates the damage at $600,000, and mentions Dan Brown a lot. Author David Carnoy also falls prey to the fallacy that
every download is a missed royalty payment. Another bemoans the
amount of time spent sending C&D and DMCA takedowns to pirate sites.
If the DRM method is working, why do they need a
piracy awareness drive?
That sounds like the DRM model is failing. If the business model requires the active, consenting participation of the customers, it's got problems. If it simultaneously involves insulting the customers and accusing them of being criminals just waiting for their opportunity, it's got even bigger problems.
Ebook sales are indeed up. Plenty of small indie publishers are gleefully taking advantage of that. Superselling authors are coming out of nowhere--and non-supersellers are happily noting their 20 sales/month, hoping for a wave to catch them, but otherwise content to actually be making money they can see from their writing. (Some are, of course, less content than others.) But with all this booming sales activity, why all the panic--unless the main business model the large publishing houses have chosen doesn't work?
People don't mention Amazon & iTunes because the music industry is so similar; it's not. They mention those because every digital industry that relies on DRM, has been shot down: the only way to make DRM work is to provide an ongoing service that uses the DRM. Provide something static, and many people will insist on the right to use it on their own terms.
We--the anti-DRM crowd--are not saying, "Random House must provide me DRM-free ebooks!" We're saying, "we won't put up with DRM;" we'll either strip it or go without; in either case, Random House doesn't get whatever they thought they were paying for when they bought the DRM software.