Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Now I imagine our group is probably not representative of all e book readers... but it does show, I think that DRM really doesn't do much for publishers. It hurts their sales because of those who will not buy DRM and at the same time, a significant fraction of buyers is just going to strip DRM anyway.
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As you (and others) have pointed out, these results only apply to us, the generally more savvy of e-book readers... and we (unfortunately) are in the minority. I doubt those of us who buy, or even those who strip DRM from books, can be considered a "significant" number, against overall sales.
Most readers do not strip DRM, nor do they use the darknet to track down pirated books, so publishers know what the bulk of their market is doing. Most readers simply do not think about the consequences of an e-bookseller going belly-up and locking them out of their books in the future. (And if it happens, it angers them possibly more than it does us.) And the publishers and general consumers simply aren't looking much further forward than that.
DRM may hurt publishers as far as their selling to
us, but as to the rest of the e-book reading world, I'm sure DRM isn't impacting them greatly, and it does serve to mitigate loss through sharing to some extent, so I doubt the addition of DRM really "hurts" publishers overall. As far as impact, DRM mainly just serves to insult more tech-savvy users, while the insult goes over the head of everyone else.