Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
That has, I think, a cautionary message for those insisting on DRM: Their worst nightmare should not be that they fail, but that they succeed. If they do, they, like TSR, will quietly starve in the corner while the people who would have been their customers become someone else's customers instead. TSR learned that if you jerk the players around too much, they'll go play something else. Publishers are going to learn, and learn to the detriment of the market, that if they jerk the readers around too much, they'll go do something else. Reading is not the only game in town -- it's competing with TV, video games, movies, and a host of other things. Make it too inconvenient, and people will decide it's not worth their time, and customers are lost forever. Then there's nobody left to pay the authors, and we bookaholics lose.
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Ha! WOTC lost me with D&D 4E's MMO-ing of D&D. My friends and I didn't play for almost a decade but we got back to playing (helps that some of us are in the same city again). We play mostly 2E and my campaign is Pathfinder. Who, BTW, sells pdfs of their books with only the social DRM that someone else mentioned (your name and email address). I bought one for $10 (IIRC) - a far cry from the ~$35 I spent on the Hardcover book - and find it super useful. I would have never bought a DRM'd pdf from them.
I know that WOTC basically put the Kabosh on places selling PDFs, right? Too bad. I could still use a few copies of some of the rarer Dragonlance 3.5e books.
Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
It also establishes an antagonistic relationship between the publisher (and by extension, the authors) and the readership, particularly the most informed and vocal segment of the readership, which is no good for anyone.
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I agree. I stopped purchasing music almost completely as I was fed up with the RIAA and their anti-customer attitude, price fixing, and lawsuits. I really mainly stopped consuming their content. I used to buy tons of CDs. Now I buy maybe an album or two a year - and I try to buy from indie labels. I listen to more podcasts, listen to more internet radio (I guess they get a tiny bit of money there), and buy used CDs if I must buy music.