As expected, the third Author Earnings report is out.
http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-...rnings-report/
Among the expected focus on publishing path data, this time they looked at the prevalence and effect of DRM on Kindle ebooks:
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DRM – A Bad Idea
In addition to our standard pie charts on sales and earnings, we always like to bring something new and interesting to each report. Last time, we looked at rates of churn on the bestseller lists. We have also previously looked at the vast income difference between tenured and debuting authors. This time, we pulled data for DRM, and what we found was very interesting.
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the encryption lock applied to electronic entertainment. The film, music, video game, and book industries all employ DRM. With ebooks, DRM poses little challenge to pirates, who can crack these locks with a few clicks. Meanwhile, for the paying customer, DRM makes it difficult to move ebooks between devices and traps readers into a single retail channel.
DRM is entirely optional on Amazon. Major publishers and self-published authors can opt out of DRM. We pulled DRM info on the 120,000 ebooks currently ranked on Amazon to see how often it was applied and if DRM had any effect on sales.
It wasn’t surprising to see that most Big 5 books employ DRM, but we were shocked to see that it is practically 100% of them. Indies, on the other hand, locked down roughly 50% of their titles. Since there isn’t any variation in the Big 5 books, we are forced to look at the self-published titles for any effect on sales, and indeed there is one. The 50% of non-DRM ebooks account for 64% of total unit sales.
Indie titles without DRM sell twice as many copies each, on average, as those with DRM.
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At almost every price point, we see the thousands of titles without DRM significantly out-earning the thousands of titles with DRM. In fact, at the only two price points that appear to buck the general trend and which show DRM titles outselling non-DRM ones, we found that the reversal was due to 3 outlier DRM titles published by only two authors.
What our data strongly suggests is that DRM harms ebook sales at any price point. And it backs up a report from Tor, one of the few major publishers that gave up DRM two years ago. It also reinforces this report on DRM’s effect on music sales. Interestingly, one of the Big 5 publishers urged authors to push back on Tor’s decision to get rid of DRM.
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For those with short memories, this two year old column discusses the "pushback" campaign referenced in the extract:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...wn-on-drm.html
There is way, way more at the source, highlighting how BPH ebooks constitute only 16% of Kindle's top 120K sellers, and how it turns out indie publishing works fine for less popular genres like litfic and non-fiction.
Reach for the muchies; plenty of fireworks incoming in the next few days.