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Originally Posted by conan50
Also possible that ebook formats could shift quickly enough to leave some people and their devices ebooks behind.
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I can see a future where the cheapest way to buy a book is to purchase it pre-loaded onto a thin, portless, no-WiFi, eReader having only that book in memory. Such titles might be internally protected by DRM, but, with such a device, it's hardly necessary.
Then, what happens to eBooks that can be loaded onto any device? Well, maybe the market stays divided into two, like today. Branded/genre/indie stays cheap and DRM-free. But well-reviewed professionally edited books, that can go on any device, will be both rather expensive, and protected by DRM schemes. They
should be more expensive, because of greater flexibility and not having to carry around multiple devices.
All by 2018? No.
Quote:
Originally Posted by conan50
DRM could be dropped tomorrow, and if publishers had half of a brain and wished to stop being Amazon's slave they would drop DRM.
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Then the problem is short-term only. Non-DRM publishers will outbid the big five on advances, while making more money than the allegedly less-than-half-a-brain English major dodo birds at Hachette and friends.
Quote:
Originally Posted by conan50
When books are less expensive, and easy to use on any ereader, piracy will end.
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If books become cheaper, that means lower advances. And that means the kind of authors I tend to read will not be able to spend years of international traveling to research their books. So they will have to write worse books, or stick to their day job. Which in turn means I won't have any incentive to pirate non-fiction, and I can't see there ever being a shortage of legitimately free and good fiction.
Of course, in the real world,
most of the books people take without authorization are fiction. And yet, guess what! Fiction is, by and large, cheaper!
Book piracy, and other forms of obtaining books without compensating producers, have been going on for centuries. This will never end, or at least will not end until we have evolved into what amounts to a new species.
P.S. I'd feel a bit of a fake if I didn't mention that, right now, I am reading a, gulp,
current international bestselling novel. No recommendation implied, as at 74 percent through I haven't yet decided what I think. And of course, I wouldn't and didn't pirate it, despite not being able to easily afford it. Thank you, Harper Collins, for selling to libraries through Axis360.