Hi,
Personally I think that this the crux of the matter. How to price digital content. DRM is (outside of the desire to control) just the reflex answer to emulate the physical world and the relative high prices there. There have been posted many articles about the big difference in profit margin between the physically distributed content (on a DVD the studio makes 15-20$, on a rental/digital download 3-5$, on a hardcover the publishers makes 10$ or so, on a pb/ebook priced like it, 2-4$ and so on - the numbers are approximations but the proportions are correct as far as I know)
So I still think that today there is no viable digital model outside of advertising; everything else piggybacks on physical; there may be profitable digital models, but the profits are slim and probably unsustainable with the current structure.
You price digital close to physical, you automatically have a lot of piracy, so you need drm though it does not really help. You price cheap, how do you make money?
Personally I think that universal pricing (content tax...) will be very hard to implement and I do not think it will work, but at least for books I can see succesful models based on serialization (on the type, I cut the book in 4-5, I charge 1.5$ per part, I post the first part in open format reachable with user password, I reach 20-25k, the second part comes up...)
Liviu
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Originally Posted by rlauzon
The issue, I believe, is value.
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