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Originally Posted by stonetools
You think $80 for a dinner for two is a budget buster for someone living in the Bay area?
I find that a bit much.Also, I notice you have THREE devices, two of which are the (premium priced)Sony.
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If my job continues to improve, I may reach "middle class" in another few years. Plenty of us living in the Bay area consider $45 our limit for "couple's night on the town."
I have three devices because I'm an ebook fanatic. (Two of them were purchased used. The Sony was a gift from my husband.) I don't have a smartphone, any real estate, a second pair of glasses, nor a formal dress. Budgeting for a single luxury that makes life more bearable is not a sign of affluence. (I say single because I bought each one as the previous was dying. My Clie is still usable--sort of--but the connector pins are corroded enough to make charging it difficult. The Sony has a damaged spot on the screen, and the battery doesn't last as long as it should.)
And while I live in the Bay Area, and am aware how much I'm paying for good climate and access to public transportation, many of my friends don't. $80 per bookstore to be able to access all their books is a ridiculous expectation.
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My point is that since DRM is not all that much of a lock-in anymore, ( because of falling prices and increasing options) , its not going to either help or hurt Amazon and its competitors going forward. That might be controversial round these parts, but there you are.
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DRM is not that much of a lock-in because googling "remove DRM" will get plenty of sets of instructions. As more people get burned by DRM (book removed from the store, account locked, server authentication shut down, bought book & moved to a country where it can't be downloaded, whatever), they'll look for DRM-stripping options in the future.
I've heard of a lot more people who strip the DRM from their ebooks than who buy DRM'd books from several stores and leave the DRM on them all. Do you have any evidence that the "general public" is more likely to have multiple dedicated devices, with different books available to each, than they are to get Calibre with the third-party plugins that remove the DRM?