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Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
I wish the publishers would allow their "deep backlist" on my ereader at all - in any form. There are loads of books that I'd like electronically, which are not yet published as ebooks - not sure why there isn't a market for it when so many have been privately scanned by people and could be had from the Dark Side. If this acted as an encouragement to make more backlist available, it would be great news. Perhaps a large pool of material that currently earns them next to nothing would be worth digitising as a pool of content for subscribers, without hitting their revenue for new titles.
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That will no doubt be an argument Amazon will be making. They'll also fervently argue the anti-piracy implications. Streaming ebooks means much less worry about piracy and casual sharing. Mike Shatzkin, the publishing consultant, has quoted one publishing consultant who specifically endorses a cloud/streaming model on that ground.
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“There isn’t really a piracy problem but there isn’t really an alternative to DRM except for the cloud. The cloud means that you buy a product (NB: I personally would say you “license some content”, not you “buy a product”) and you get to access it on every device that you own — so long as you provide your ownership credentials. The cloud effectively means that you work only within a platform and that platform requires your credentials to access your works — so it is, in effect, DRM — but it really isn’t. That said, in order for this to work, it does need to protect files when they are downloaded — and that is true DRM.
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SHATZKIN ON THE CLOUD