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If authors are not paid the quantity and quality of works will likely go down. This has nothing to do with DRM, desire or anything other than the fact there are only 24 hours in a day, and 168 hours in a week. A normal work week takes about 55-60 of those hours when you factor in things like commuting, preparation and even unpaid lunch breaks. That slows down writing considerably.
Take the last two novels I wrote: The first one was written while I was working full time (and I had a second job for part of the time) and took about 2 years to write all told. The second was a ghostwriting job and took about three months.
Writers who cannot earn their living will not only produce less but they will also have less opportunity to polish their skills because they can't afford the time to write.
Steve is absolutely right in saying that removing commercial success from the system will do nothing but hurt every single reader among us.
Writers need to be paid, and a system of paying per title seems to be the most workable that's currently available. (I say per title rather than per copy because many merchants do allow you to re-download multiple copies over time.) It may not be the best possible system, but it's what we have and none of the alternatives seem to work any better.
So let's go with the idea that we will be working on a pay-per-title model for the immediate future.
This being said, we can also work within the standard principle of you hand over a set price and then get access to the title. Again, it seems to work better than the alternatives such as after the fact donations. Most people don't donate afterwards, and in many cases it can simply be ascribed to the fact it slips their mind.
The most important question regarding DRM (at least for the health of the industry) is whether the use of DRM has any effect on revenue, and if it does whether that effect is positive or negative. There's also the question of whether the effect of DRM is drowned out by the price, but for the moment we'll assume that price isn't a major factor.
We know that DRM does not keep books off pirate sites, as even books which have no electronic editions at all will end up there. I can go to any number of torrent sites, or to the binary newsgroups and find as many books as I wish in relatively short order without either DRM or having to pay for them.
The books are out there. The genie is out of the bottle.
The question that now comes up is what proportion of the populace would rather steal something than pay for it. I don't know what it is, but the percentage is higher than zero.
We also know that under normal circumstances many if not most people are perfectly willing to pay for things they could otherwise steal. Just visit any busy produce stand and you will see what I mean: people lining up to pay a busy salesclerk while the produce is there for the taking, and without the five minute wait.
Yes, some people do steal, but not enough to destroy the business model, which has functioned effectively for millennia.
It works because enough people want to pay, or at least feel they should pay that theft is kept low enough for the business to remain sustainable.
There is no evidence at all that e-books released without DRM are more prevalent on pirate sites than ones released with DRM.
What's really needed, rather than DRM is to make e-books easy to buy. If it's quicker and easier to buy a title than hunt it out on a pirate site and download it, many people will choose to buy it just because they can't be bothered to go through the hassle of downloading.
It's true that some won't pay; but this brings up another question. Which is more important, stamping out illicit downloads or increasing revenue? I submit that it should be increasing revenue because while the losses from illicit downloads are not quantifiable, the gains from increased revenue are.
Now there is one way in which DRM can increase revenue; but it does this at the cost of customer goodwill. I own an iPaq and a Palm T|X. I bought the iPaq first, and later the Palm. When I first bought the iPaq, I used MS Reader, which is not available for the Palm. So any DRM-protected e-books I bought for the iPaq cannot be read on the Palm.
(Yes I know all about format shifting .lit books-- and I could have used a Sony Reader and Cybook for my examples but I chose to go with the devices I actually own.)
This means that if we rule out format-shifting, the only way for me to get those titles onto my Palm is to buy them again. This is the only way DRM can increase revenue: by enforcing vendor lock-in. However it's just as likely to turn people to other alternatives, because many do not want to buy the same title twice if they don't have to. They can either format-shift the e-book for the new device, or turn to an illicit site and download it.
Once they're on the site, they may as well download more titles.
DRM is not preventing piracy or increasing revenue, so there's no reason to continue with it. It simply increases costs and annoys customers.
Eliminating vendor lock-in, and making reasonably priced books readily available will do far more to protect author's rights than imposing DRM restrictions.
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