Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
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.
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Your figures are obviously convincing. But they don't take the original premise into account that Amazon could sell a lot more books if they used ADE, because users of other devices could buy at the Kindle store. (This was brought up by others, I don't necessarily subscribe to that, even though I personally would not buy from them at this point if I couldn't format shift).
Still I see some strength in my argument that Amazon actually prefers to have an "Amazon only" DRM (and uses it to make sure their books are read on their devices or software only), given the fact that they are the only ones that continuously try to make cracking their DRM more difficult. So there is a financial incentive AND a strategic plan involved.