Quote:
Originally Posted by Crash500
I would think it would be more likely that Amazon would push for DRM free first. They have readers on multiple devices where Apple would prefer to lock everybody into their platform.
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DRM, let us remember, is required (or not) by the publishers -- specifically the big five. Many of whom are headed by old folks who are not comfortable with this new-fangled technology, and who are deeply wary of doing anything that might impact shareholder value -- notably the spectre of piracy.
DRM
helps Amazon, by locking non-tech-savvy consumers into their walled garden (the Kindle platform). I see no obvious commercial motive for Amazon to want to make it
easier for customers to transcode the books they've bought, with the risk that they'll move to a rival platform.
Apple are a minority platform (less than 20% of the market). They've less at stake if publishers drop DRM than Amazon. Nevertheless, they've got little incentive to push for DRM to go.
However the smarter publishers are very wary of Amazon, and they're beginning to eye up the trade-off between DRM (reduces piracy, they think) and walled gardens (gives Amazon a stick to beat them with). Macmillan dropped DRM on some imprints last year -- notably Tor -- and their one year report is that piracy has
not suddenly shot up. This message has not gone un-noticed. (Macmillan were able to do this because they're the English-language arm of Holtzbrinck, who are a family firm. The buck at Macmillan doesn't stop at a committee table, it stops with John Sargent. And if John wants backing, he phones Fritz, and Fritz von Holtzbrinck, who
owns the company, gets to give a straight up/down order. Ergo, they have rather less bureaucracy than their larger rivals, and are able to move faster on policy issues like DRM.)
Upshot: as and when the elderly boardroom seat-warmers retire, a younger generation of executives who are less scared by new technology will probably choose to drop DRM, purely as a defensive measure against Amazon's near-monopoly.