[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by slayda

On the flip side, Steve, how many people working for an employer have the possibility of becoming wealthy because their work was made into a movie that became a success thereby selling more books and more movies?

I realize that the number of authors that experience this is very small, but it is infinitely larger than zero which is the chance that it could happen to people working for an employer.

In fact, I'd argue that probability is about as small as someone who works as a cashier, gets discovered by an agent, and becomes the next supermodel. Nice dream, but not enough of a reason to make me work two jobs for such a slim possibility.

Originally Posted by MaggieScratch

Steve--the author will engender bad will when the reader, who paid good money to purchase a book, has to repurchase it or do without when s/he decides to switch to a different reading device...

Actually, I tend to blame the publisher for that, myself. But I get your point. My only point there was, it's too unquantifiable, much like the piracy debate. Without hard numbers, either on the extent of "piracy," or the losses due to "bad karma," nothing can be solved on that front. We need to move on to concrete solutions.

Originally Posted by MaggieScratch

Also my understanding is that there is a fairly easy workaround--burn the iTunes music to a CD and re-rip it as an mp3. A mild pain but doable for the average person. Breaking ebook DRM is possible but you have to be reasonably tech-savvy to do it and many people won't think it's worth the bother.

I (a non-iPod user) have an even easier workaround: My MP3 player includes SW that will record anything played on the PC... including something being played BY the PC. I just start the recorder, play the song from iTunes, and save it as a new MP3. It's not hard. My point here is that even with DRM, you can find a way to make it work for you that makes it worth the discomfort of some DRM.

Originally Posted by MaggieScratch

I think the answer is make ebooks affordable and worth the money (that is, have some kind of added value, like DVD extras) and readers will buy them and probably not share more than they do hard copy books.

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle... namely, an amount of value, an amount of DRM, and (this is the important part) an amount of customer cooperation to make it manageable. Yes, that means rules we'll have to abide, sacrifices we'll have to make, and DRM we'll have to accept. But they don't have to be horrible or insurmountable, or make us feel like criminals.

Who feels like a criminal when they look at the surveillance cameras at their grocery store? Who feels like a criminal because they have to put in their credit card before they pump their gas? How many of us have sworn off grocery stores and driving because of it? All of those are the equivalent of DRM, yet we've learned to live with them, because of the value we get from those products.

DRM can be simple, and workable for people who feel it is justified for the value they get out of it. Ask anyone who owns a Kindle... they bought into a DRM system to buy Amazon books, but if they consider it worth the value of the books they receive, they're okay with it. And they can still work around their DRM by buying non-Amazon Mobi books for their Kindle.

Bob, you're right... we're in another DRM thread. Should we kill it now, before the monster rises up and trashes the place, or do you think there's still room for discussion before it wakes up? (If you want, I'll willingly abandon ship right here...)