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Hi,
I think that piracy is too small a problem for ebooks right now too force the necessary kicking and screaming move that the publishers need to make. Look at the currently aborted Tor non drmed books at Baen/Webscriptions. Tor was willing, the prices while still somewhat high, better than usual, demand high at least in terms of sf books, the immediate response of people aware of the project when Tor books were up was quite good considering the selection/prices, and the project gets canned by Tor's parent publisher after a week or two.
Luckily I bought the books that interested me in time to have them, but it is a pity since that could have been a very good experiment for the larger market.
Baen's experience with non drmed cheap ebooks is very positive, but they are a small, relatively niche sf publisher, while Tor is as big as it gets into the sf field. Now people computed the amount Tor is potentially losing considering only the books available in pirated form and it came to quite a decent chunk, and the answer seems to be " so what".
What will bring the ebooks explosion that we all anticipate is Google/Amazon or some other online company, or a university consortium scanning enough backlist titles, making them available to people in a way or another, combined to a good, cheap ebook reader (say an Irex priced at 150-200$). I think that when it will happen, it will happen fast, "overnight like", but that we are 2-3 years away (my estimate is based on the tablet experience, which 2-3 years back were selling in the 2-3 k range, while now they dropped to even under 1k, so Irex sells now at 600, in 2-3 years it should sell at 1/3 if the ebooks are there)
Liviu
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