Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
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I'm having a background conversation with him in email, and have suggested he pay a visit here.
Part of his problem is "Once bitten, twice shy." He provided PDF copies of a couple of his books to folks who claimed to be visually impaired and would use screen readers to deal with them, and then discovered the books uploaded to a Russian crack site. He felt violated.
My question was "What sales did you actually lose, and how do you know?" My feeling is that he not only doesn't know, he
can't know. How do you measure sales lost because people downloaded a free copy from a crack site rather than buying a legitimate copy? I told him if he can come up with a validated way of
making such a measurement, he has a whole new source of income from interested content providers.
I also asked whether he had ever actually
read an ebook, given his illustration of why a technical book might be nice for a computer person who wanted the book in a window on screen as they worked on the stuff the book covered, but didn't see people being interested in reading the stuff the Baen Free Library offered on screen, and thinking it might well make them buy a paper copy.
I saw two deeper questions underlying his post. The first was "Why ebooks at all?", and what would make them an attractive purchase. The second was "Why DRM?", which is a facet of an even deeper question: "What do you assume about the market?" Do you assume they are basically honest folks who are willing to pay for value, and actually buy electronic editions, or do you assume they are a bunch of no-good so-and-sos who will cheerfully rip you off given a chance, and will require measures to prevent it? Why do you make the assumption you do? What hard evidence do you have to back it up?
My personal feeling is that piracy certainly exists, but enough of the market are honest and willing to pay for value that you can sell ebooks and make money despite piracy. I also feel that DRM is ultimately counter-productive. DRM is no sooner implemented than someone comes up with a crack. You may delay a pirate, but you won't stop them. You probably
will annoy buyers who are offended by the presumption that they are thieves.
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Dennis