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Originally Posted by stonetools
We shall see. IMO, Macmillan is doing this as a trial balloon to see exactly what the effects on the bottom line are before trying DRM free with it's more lucrative imprints.
Color me skeptical that many people are going to buy very many more Tor.com books simply because they go DRM free. Again , among technologists this is a Big Thing but the average reader doesn't know or care that Tor.com books were DRMed.
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Just to add to Tompe's point, Tor also specializes in the science fiction genre, so its reasonable to assume that the average Tor reader is more sensitive to and knowledgeable about DRM than the average reader. So for Tor, their could be an uptick in sales. Certainly a number of people on this site have said they won't buy a book with DRM.
Raising prices wouldn't be without precedent though, iTunes did that when the went DRM free. On the other hand, the game retailer site Good Old Games offers PC games that are DRM free, and doesn't price higher than its competitors for the same games that the competitors offer only with DRM.
For Apple, the real justification for raising prices was that they were offering a more valuable product (music files without the annoying restrictions) so people were willing to pay more. I doubt they did anything but profit from that move, even though "sharing" of music files must be at least as prevalent as sharing of book files.