Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
I am sure Amazon could get a discount, given the fact that they are the biggest sellers. Besides, perhaps the DRM fee is paid by the publisher? That would make sense if DRM is demanded by publishers.
And if Amazon believed that switching to ADE would help them sell a lot more books, they would jump ship in a flash. But they like the situation just the way it is.
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It doesn't matter who pays the DRM fee, it's money that goes away from the reseller and publisher.
But in practice, it's the reseller/distributor that pays it. (One of my ebooks sells through Lightning Source as an ePub
with DRM*. Lightning Source takes 25% of the RRP, I get 75%. The $0.22 to Adobe gets paid by Lightning Source or the reseller.)
Even if Amazon had a team of ten working full-time on their DRM scheme, that's still no more than $2 million per year.
One of my ebooks in the kindle store sells around 100 copies a month. It's sales rank is around 18,000. Therefore I
know that Amazon are currently selling far more than 20 million ebooks a year.
Even skewing the figures greatly (suppose Amazon get a discount from Adobe down to $0.10 per ebook), I think you can see that there's no way it would make financial sense for Amazon to adopt Adobe's DRM scheme.
*Yes, it's sad. For this title, that includes some specific fonts, I'm required by the font licence to apply DRM. If IDPF and Adobe had got together on font mangling a bit sooner, I could have just done the font mangling, but currently that's not possible with LS distribution. I do offer a non-DRM version with font mangling applied to anyone who's bought the DRMed version.