Thread: interesting take on DRM
View Single Post
Old 10-16-2008, 02:19 PM   #74
bill_mchale
Wizard
bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,451
Karma: 1550000
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Maryland, USA
Device: Nook Simple Touch, HPC Evo 4G LTE
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
There is another problem besides DRM and it's in some ways worse then DRM. It's exclusivity. Amazon is the best one for that and unless you own a Kindle, you cannot get anything Amazon has that nobody else does. So you have to spend $360 (roughly) for a Kindle just to get access to a $10 (or so) eBook. Tor is giving Amazon exclusive rights to eBooks. This means that those of us who do not own a Kindle cannot read the rest of the series that we started because Tor gave away a lot of Book Ones. How does this help? it doesn't. What it does is take the larger group of people (non-Kindle eBook readers) and pisses them off so they won't buy Tor eBooks if they ever get released outside of Amazon. So basically, it's bad for business. It's bad for eBooks, it's worse then DRM.

Yes, I've seen Walmart & Target have exclusive CDs or versions on CD. That's ok. You can still go to Target or Walmart and get these or if you want, order online and get. You are not forced to buy some expensive device from either to be able to purchase these exclusive CDs. But Amazon forces you to get a Kindle to get their exclusive releases.

At least with DRM, I can read that book now. With exclusivity, chances are I'll not be one of the ones who can get it and that means I cannot read it. So yes, it's worse then DRM. It hurts sales, pisses off customers and denies consumers the choice to read what they want.
The exclusivity and the DRM go together. Without DRM, there is no practical way that a vendor can force you to read the book on their platform. If I buy a non-DRM'd book in most formats, it is relatively easy to convert it to another format. Even if there is only a single reader that supports the format, it almost certainly can and will be reversed engineered by the same sorts of people who gave us Stanza and FBreader and ultimately will at least be readable on a computer.

--
Bill
bill_mchale is offline   Reply With Quote