[Jaden]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

This confuses me. Who are these billions? As far as I know, only a tiny, tiny portion of people who are arrested are brought into custody for piracy.

Sorry if this was a little unclear (and a "have" was missing). I was not referring to pirates (or readers for that matter) but to "The point of course is that there are no perfect security measures that only inconvenience the guilty and NEVER, EVER inconvenience the innocent." which sounds a bit like it was okay to bind everyones hand to prevent them from shoplifting just because some people do shoplift.

Since the 1840's, most books have been read not by purchasers, but by borrowers. Therefore, the DRM issue should be looked at primarily for how it affects the majority of readers, not the minority with enough money to pay for books.

What percentage are we talking about here? There must be enough people who buy books or there would be no bookstores nor printed books that can be bought.

Edit: Just seen the link. Not sure if that's true for all around the world. But the "minority of people buying books" is not that small - or rather the amount of bought books, that is.

Also you have to take into account that it depends on what you read and how much you read. Most people are able to buy a few books a month, at least where I live. And I'm not talking about rich people with a fancy library of books they've never read...

Of course 1-5 books could be very little if you're one of the persons who reads a book of about 500 pages in a day or two...

And over here, books are way more overpriced than in the US, for example.

Anyway, we are talking about DRM for books people buy - or at least I am - and that it can't be in the publishers' best interest to annoy those willing to buy their stuff.

In your no-DRM world, I don't see how the Overdrive/library model could work.

You are confusing DRM for book buying (annoying and unnecessary) with DRM for book borrowing (useful and necessary).

The publishers are constantly experimenting in terms of price points. If any publishers are failing to pay attention to the data coming from that experimentation, they will go out of business.

Maybe so. Unless they are a) independent small publishers and people are willing to pay more to support them and their authors or b) they are large enough to stay in business.

And there are always publishers blaming piracy for the problems they encounter, not unreasonable pricing or DRM or geo restrictions...

ETA: Also my "offer discounts" was just trying to present an idea. I know there are already discount codes, for example, or the Kindle deal of the day. Which is good and is surely getting people to buy stuff.