[Worldwalker]

Stone, I'm getting really tired of this. We were having an interesting and productive discussion before you jumped in. I was actually enjoying your absence. We've heard your "the publishers are always right, and you pathetic little consumers should just thank us for allowing you to pay inflated prices for whatever we choose to sell you" line time and time again, and it makes no more sense this time.

Look, neither one of us is an idiot. You're a professional; I am, shall we say, a talented amateur. We're not arguing with each other -- we know that is futile, because I have readers' and authors' interests at heart, and you have publishers' interests to look out for. So we're presenting our arguments for the benefit of the lurkers, and just using each other as foils. You know this, and I know this, and everyone with two brain cells to rub together in this (and every other) thread knows this. So how about an end to the pretending?

For example, you keep using the term "digerati" to refer to those who disagree with you under the assumption that the people you're talking to will believe that there is some sort of privileged "upper class" and resent those people. I have to assume that was somewhere in some publisher's talking points ... "refer to your opponents as 'digerati' so the silent majority who resents those people will be on your side." Except it doesn't work that way, not on MobileRead. Nobody here pretends to be any kind of technical upper class -- not even me, and I'm the resident grouch. There's no "silent majority" to feel oppressed by those self-entitled aristocrats, either. We're all just people who like ebooks, and your attempts at insulting me and others, and at stirring up what I can only see as a strange sort of class warfare, are not only falling flat, they're getting really annoying. So knock it off and play nice. Tell your bosses "that doesn't work here, MR is different" and discuss matters like everyone else does ... sans insults.

Originally Posted by stonetools

Look, WW, I understand your argument-that piracy, no matter how pervasive, CANNOT affect sales of a pirated product because people who go to pirate sites never want to pay for stuff. I think that argument is nonsense, myself.

First of all, I did not say that. And as for people not wanting to pay for stuff ... look up, you said that.

People go to pirate sites because its easy and it doesn't cost them anything. Make it hard to get to the pirate sites (IOW, ENFORCE the law) and people will pay for things they want to enjoy.

That is in direct contradiction to what you said in the post I was replying to. I've caught snakes that were less squirmy. How am I supposed to respond to the points you raise if you immediately deny that you said them?

If you make it easy to pirate or casually share, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less.

If you make it easy to buy an ebook, people will do that a lot. Make it difficult, and they will do it less.

So what are the publishers doing? They're making it difficult. They lock their ebooks with DRM and prevent people from using them -- at least once a week we get someone here who, unknowingly, bought a book from Amazon for their Nook, or some other combination. They implement georestrictions so that people with their money in hand, trying to buy the book, aren't allowed to buy it at any price. They raise the prices of ebooks to higher than pbook prices, all the while delivering less. They are, in other words, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

And some of those people are going to find ways to get the books they want that they can't buy for their platform, or they can't buy as cheap as a pbook, or they can't buy at all. And when they do, it's a whole lot harder to get them back.

Something a disturbing number of businesses don't seem to get: Customers are a commodity. You have to buy them, just like you buy paperclips. If you waste the customers you have, you have to buy more of them, and with each new batch, they're more costly. Yet business after business seems to act as though there is an infinite supply of customers, and new ones arrive free. After all, there's no receipt for "customers, twenty gross, boxed" that they can turn in to Accounting. But they are paying for customers. That's what advertising and promotion are: the cost of buying new customers. Driving away customers -- and that's what DRM does, that's what georestrictions do, that's what higher-than-pbook prices do -- is business suicide. Google "New Game Enhancements" for one example of what happens when a business drives away the customers it already has and hopes it'll pick up new ones ... and guesses wrong.

Let's also squelch the dumbest argument, trotted out repeatedly in these discussions-that if anti-piracy measures don't work perfectly to stop ALL piracy, they shouldn't be attempted at all. Let's try that argument on for size with other crimes.

Laws against murder haven't stopped all murders, so let's do away with homicide laws
Locks don't stop all burglaries, so let's dispense with locks
Anti-fraud laws haven't stopped all fraud, so let's stop enforcing anti-fraud laws.

Stupid, isn't it? Yet its trotted out as being somehow self-evidently true in the case of piracy.

I haven't seen that EVER suggested, recommended, or proposed. Well, except as a straw man propped up to be shot down, which you seem to do so a lot.

I'll say again, for benefit of the lurkers:

DRM hurts the good guys and doesn't hurt the bad guys. That's exactly the opposite of what a successful business needs to do.