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Originally Posted by taustin
Because if you do, by your logic, you are accusing all your neighbors of being thieves, aren't you?
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Same when the bookstore locks its doors, and I have to wait until the place opens to get in.
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Originally Posted by taustin
That reducing piracy isn't the same thing as increasing sales is a point missed by a lot of publishers, but their logic is internally consistent, even if it is beside the point.
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Whether it is beside the point must turn on data.
This next link gives some data for takedown notices. That's not the same as DRM, but it is another method to slow down piracy a bit, and so may be relevant:
The Effect of Piracy Protection in Book Publishing
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I compare sales of similar book titles with and without piracy protection, before and after titles have been added by the piracy protection company, in a difference-in-differences setting. I find that the effect of piracy protection varies across formats and titles. E-books, the closest substitute for online piracy, benefit from piracy protection by selling 15.4% more units, while there is no significant effect on other formats. The effect is more pronounced for titles that have been successful prior to piracy protection, indicating that book piracy has a promotional effect for lesser known works.
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Lack of copy protection was arguably essential to Microsoft's earliest (pre-MSDOS) success in making their version of the BASIC programming language a microcomputer standard. Only once piracy made it quite popular did it make sense to protect it.* For the same reason, it could be that low-selling indie Kindle Direct Publishing authors, and new ones, should avoid DRM. But a Random House work of literary fiction selling thousands of copies might be helped by DRM.
Such considerations make the OP question hard to answer.
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* I am now reading
The Innovators, from which I adopt the point above. Author Walter Isaacson doesn't tie it to DRM, but does say that people who stole Microsoft BASIC, by making the product popular, actually helped Microsoft make later sales -- especially to hardware makers like Apple who bundled that software with their hardware. This again isn't an exact analogy to eBooks, but it does suggest that whether or not DRM helps depends on the book.