Quote:
Originally Posted by Sgt.Stubby
Indeed. DRM is a negligible inconvenience for free-loaders, and a very real inconvenience to the paying masses.
That's no accident. The real money to be creamed by publishers comes from the willful paying customers, who will have to buy multiple copies in the event of device/media loss, or device migration.
Publishers hope consumers will naively think DRM is a tool against free-loading. The fools who pay for DRM'd content pay for their ignorance. In principal we could say "so what? Let them." The problem is-- smart consumers will lose their non-DRM options because they are vastly outnumbered by naive consumers.
So dumb consumers who buy DRM media will ruin the market for wise consumers.
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Back before the ebook explosion, one could get most of the major books as ebooks from scans. Whole newsgroups were dedicated to it. For many people it was a hobby. A large group of people would get together and split up a book, with each person scanning X pages, convert them to text then hand that text off to the next person to be proofed.
I think you see conspiracy where there is none. I once heard Jerry Pournelle refer to his backlist as his 401K. The old model was to re-release backlist books on a regular schedule which would bring in enough money to help make ends meet. A lot of authors were very worried that piracy would destroy that revenue stream. Some still are.
For authors, the real question with ebooks is will the monthly revenue from new readers finding backlist books provide enough of a revenue stream. That is still an ongoing experiment.