Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
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.
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Okay, fair enough; I see your point now and agree. I was just as bad there.
I don't see DRM in itself as evil, I see limiting portability of ebooks across devices because of DRM as evil. If one can't break DRM, one can't convert an ebook for a new reader. That's not a problem if you stick with one brand of reader, just like for those music consumers who stick with iPods are never going to have a problem buying their music from iTunes, and certainly sticking with iPods is an attractive proposition as Apple does a great job updating the hardware regularly. A combination of light DRM with ePub might be the answer. If each reader can take a DRMed ePub document and convert it for that reader, then consumers can switch devices with confidence that their electronic library won't become useless overnight. I'm assuming that's the idea of ePub--someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
And yes, we're back into a DRM thread. To bring it back to the original topic:
The rhetoric coming from a writer of the stature of David Pogue is one thing. He has a day job. I really don't think his kids will end up flipping burgers at the truck stop because a few readers downloaded his book on the Internet instead of ignoring it entirely (and hey, somebody has to flip the burgers, after all). On the other side we have Cory Doctorow. I appreciate Cory's position on ebooks and DRM but at the same time, giving away free electronic versions of all your books as a loss-leader to get people to purchase the hard copy books essentially devalues the electronic edition. I don't think that's quite the right approach, either. Making electronic editions of books worthless certainly will put an end to piracy--technically--since you can't pirate what is yours to freely trade, but it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater IMO. Ebooks should be on a par with at least MMPBs, I think.
I suspect the solution--as it usually does--lies somewhere in the middle, but we have to get the extremists to give up their position a little bit. There's the rub, I think.