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I've sold books both with and without DRM--for YEARS at a time both directions. I've never noticed a difference in sales and in 7 or 8 years of selling books, I have had ONE person write me and say, "Did you know this story has DRM on it?" Yes, I knew. I sell non-drm'd versions of many of my books from my blog. I thought that would mean that mostly fans who would be protective of my work would buy from there. Turns out at least one of them happily mailed the file to a friend and thought nothing of it. I know this because I received the nicest email from the person who got the file telling me what a wonderful book it was and how her friend had mailed it to her...
Had the original purchaser bought on Amazon, DRM or not, she would have had a more difficult time figuring out how to mail the file. But the thing is, when a file is easily mailed or "given" away, there is a certain percentage of the population that thinks nothing of giving that file away if it is easy. They not only don't know about DRM, they don't even care that it exists. They certainly aren't buying based on whether a file contains it or not.
If readers really don't buy a file simply because it has DRM on it, well the publishers would go out of business because according to the article 100 percent of them use it (minus tor? and Baen?) Or is this article trying to say that there's a double standard? It's okay for large publishers to force DRM on the public, but they are going to sort and punish indies who use DRM?
Really? That implies there are a HUGE number of readers who are parsing what to read based on DRM and based on whether the book is indie ... and that seems to be a pretty large stretch to me.
I am quite sure a large number of readers are technically savvy. I'm equally certain a large number aren't. And while I can believe a small subset of either of those groups might base their purchase on DRM, the color of a book cover, the number of pages, etc I find the correlation in the report entirely lacking.
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