I know this is an old portion of this issue but I wonder what, if any, truly independent objective risk-analysis has been done to evaluate the revenue generation of DRM free content at a lower price vs. the status quo. It just seems that given proper analysis revenue would increase as would profit if something as minimal as portability was added via a universal DRM format or even pure wide open non-DRM.
I wish I had now spent time becoming an actuary instead of plain a plain old mathematician. And I am too cranky and tired to learn the whole topic...
No matter what the publishers and those on their side of the fence say, the cost of ebooks should be lower. And since the publishers pay a license fee to whoever's DRM they use, I would assume that cost at worst might be equal to the actual printing costs. Though there are many other costs...including transportation and middleman markup's. With ebooks, there really does not need to be the wholesaler/jobber in the middle. Simple deals directly with online sellers should be enough. It might be tough for many publishers to venture into the direct sales market simply because of the overhead to develop the underlying technology to sell and deliver the content. so, resellers will be part of the deal for a long time. THOUGH with Google it might be possible to create them as a content aggregator for all the publishers via some sort of marketplace. And Google would make their money via selling targeted ads based on the books you search for. But as usual I digress...
Even some more device agnostic DRM would work fine though it would still have the per-sale or blanket license fees.
I have to believe the overall sales would be higher the more open access people have to ebooks. I have mentioned in other threads, lower cost ebooks combined with lower cost reader devices will capture a significant number of those who otherwise would by exclusively via the used market. Thus opening a whole new revenue stream which currently publishers have zero access to, much to their chagrin I am sure.
I actually do feel at least Amazon will move in this direction before Sony. Sony is as closed and proprietary a company as you might find. And that includes IBM. Their history does not lend itself to becoming a more open system.
I am also willing to bet that Amazon would be happy to embrace the Sony reader device and also add the Sony format to the Kindle, if Sony would agree to it. My money is on the idea that Amazon first tried to simply work out a deal with Sony themselves before going forward with their own reader. So now we have what is not really competition but rather a fracture in the ebook world all over formats.
Like some of the authors here have mentioned I guess there is momentum building toward a DRM ePub format that could easily be universal and device agnostic. I guess we can dream.
As for the idea of piracy vs. buying. To me the only motivation I might have for a darknet edition is lack of availability in any ebook format. Still I have yet to Darknet a single book. Thanks to Harry T., et. al., I have too many other books to read to really worry about any author/publisher who refuses my business.
That is what it comes down to, the current publishing cartels are telling us they simply do not want our business. Well, fine by me. I have 500+ years of books I can find and download completely free, legally. Heck, I could just get The Iliad & Odyssey and spend the next 1000 years reading that...hehehehe...
Wait I did bend the rules just a teeny bit...I found a copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia for the unfamiliar) on a site in Australia where it's in whatever they call the public domain. Somehow I missed any of the pages explaining I was a bad person for living in the US and d/l'ing the book...oh, well, come and take away my birthday for it...
Otherwise when I buy it's from Baen (Wescriptions are GREAT!!), indy authors, Fictionwise (as a rule only the 100% micropay rebate stuff) and anyone else who is reasonable about pricing for .mobi format as I now use my Nokia N800 as my front line reader over my nx73v Clie. I suspect I will likely be adding Tor to that list soon enough.
EDIT:
Perhaps a universal DRM system could be developed around "keychain dongle" like used now by many places including PayPal/eBay. They works great, are pretty easy for anyone to use and could easily address setting up a book for a device if the reading software folks are allowed access to add the system into their existing software. ????