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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I agree. They are social AND THEY SHARE. It's part of their currency. And so why make it easy on them by not installing DRM? Yes, they can go to the torrent sites (those who know how.) But DRM isn't stopping those who "shop" there either. It's a conundrum.
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In the short run, DRM probably results in a few more sales, as those who tried to share but couldn't exhort their friends to just buy the ebook, and a few of them do so. However, in the long run, it's crippling word-of-mouth recommendations. It's possible that downloadable sample chapters mitigate this.
Almost none of us discovered our favorite authors by buying a new book. Removing the "I liked this; you read it and see if you like it" aspects of book culture is a drastic change.
What would probably work best is something like Kindle/Nook's lender ability--if it weren't deliberately kept from working well. One time, for two weeks only, is ridiculous. There's no reason it shouldn't be "as often and as long as desired"--with DRM that keeps it to one registered user at a time.
There's problems with that, too, but I don't think those will be as bad, five years from now, as the split between "buy full price" and "get it free from some bootleg site." Removing the option to legitimately read for other than full price means driving away potential fans, who *will* find something else to read. Or at least, something else to *do*... other than a handful of top selling authors, people don't bother buying books outside their leisure budget.
And if the book they pass up is the first one they've heard of by a given author, they're not likely to read the author's other works, either. Authors who limit their fanbase to royalty-paying customers are never going to be at the top of the sales charts.
Maybe they'll make enough anyway. And maybe they're not interested in having a readerbase larger than their sales counts. But it's a very different approach to an authorial career, the idea that the only readers should be those who paid the author.