|
For publishers (of books, video games, etc.) it still seems to be counter-intuitive to release their products without copy protections and DRM, because there is that belief that if it can easily be copied, it will be. The video games industry has been making that claim for many years, but it never stopped piracy, nor did it drive companies into bankruptcy, and there is the credible theory that the majority of people who pirate games wouldn't pay for them anyway: they'd just pirate something else that is pirate-able.
It's pretty simple, though. The best protection is the fact that someone paid money for something. Most people who hand over cash for e-books just aren't like to distribute their books, precisely because they paid for them ("and so can others"). More importantly, though, DRM doesn't even help. Those who have multiple devices liberate their books anyway, and those who use only one device don't care either way because DRM or not makes no difference to them. Plus, those who don't want to pay for books find ways around it, either by reading classics or reading in the shadows.
The shadows will always exist unless we get a privacy-void Big Brother situation where we can't read books without connecting to an authorization server, and even then someone would probably find ways to extract the text of a book and make it available outside of the controlled environment (especially then). A resource-intense struggle that wastes money and effort.
What DRM is good at, though, is discouraging customers from spending money. For example, I spent several hundreds on the iBooks store when I mostly read on the iPad. DRM wasn't a problem, I only used that one device. Then I picked up an e-ink reader, and now suddenly I couldn't read the books I had paid for on an alternate device. The person who provided the means to tackle that problem had retired the project, and suddenly I found myself with enslaved books. My solution? I re-bought some of the e-books that I found essential and I haven't spent another cent on iBooks since, and I won't. (I guess for the publishers of those re-bought books this was a good deal. For the vendor, here: Apple, not so much.)
There is also the danger of people developing the mindset of "if I have to do something illegal [circumventing DRM], I may as well do it properly", in which case they then don't spend any money. The more effort it requires to do something that you feel you shouldn't have to do in the first place (here: enabling your books to be read on all your devices) the more likely that is to happen. Luckily for publishers, Alf needs little food and attention.
Rambling summarized: Selling e-books without DRM is a plus and probably increases sales, just like the blogger claims.
|