Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
I was going to quit, but then I saw this again. ONCE AGAIN, passing a physical book along to your daddy or office buddy is completely different from sending DRM free copies of an ebook to your Face book friends or your AIM buddy list or your favorite mailing list.
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You're the only one talking about sending a book to one's entire FB friendslist or a mailing list; people were talking about sending a single copy to a friend, or to a sister with whom, for whatever crazy reasons, they don't want to share full access to their ebook account. Social DRM would prevent widescale sharing because few people would know how to remove it; it wouldn't prevent sharing among intimates--which is what publishers seem most interested in stopping. (Otherwise, why restrict which titles can be shared once for two weeks?)
And as far as Baen being a specialty shop--Baen's clientele are generally tech-savvy, internet-friendly, and often voracious readers. They'd be exactly the demographic to be most damaging for a publisher to allow DRM-free ebooks to; they have the resources to set up a tight network of ebook exchanges so that only 1 Baen fan out of 20 ever has to buy an ebook. They could even have public "BaenFans" mailing lists and set up ebook swaps, wherein one person buys the webscription each month and loads those books into Yahoo's archives for everyone to download, and then they're rotated out with the next books the next month.
And yet, with this as a possibility for more than 10 years, Baen has not collapsed. Do you assume that, with FB and other large social network sites, Baen will begin to collapse as its ebooks are shared too widely to for them to get enough new sales to survive?