Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Call me a cynic, but I’m thinking the biggest reason the publishers are invested in DRM is that they don’t want anyone to find out just how irrelevant they’ve become. They used to provide value added by editing, typesetting, printing, binding, warehousing, shipping, etc. Things that your average author had neither the resources nor skills to do himself.
In today’s digital world, all those things are well within the realm of not only being possible, but not really very hard, and the only real value added that the publishers provides is marketing the products. And with places like Amazon and Baen even that is not beyond the realm of possibility.
|
They're not irrelevant. They're just no longer the only option. Many authors would prefer to hand over everything but the book-writing to someone else; going through a publisher means not having to find an editor, a formatter, a cover-designer, a marketing person and so on. It costs a lot, but for some authors, it's worth it.
But for those who'd rather arrange those parts themselves, and keep the profits--heh. Now they have real choices.
Publishers haven't been tech'd out of the book industry; they've just lost their monopoly. And they'll get to find out exactly how much of their business model was contingent on being a monopoly, instead of the quality of the services they had to offer.