Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
Which brings me to my alternate proposal. Why not use the Web for what it's good for (disintermediation, that is) and wipe out the distributors (mostly) and the retailers (to some degree).
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<Applause>
Absolutely. Web retailers - useful. Most people don't want to have to visit 50 sites to see what new books are out this month.
Web distributors - completely unnecessary. Except for DRM. DRM makes the distributor necessary - you can't give DRM keys to all the (potentially) hundreds of retailers. DRM requires a monopoly or near monopoly of supply.
One more reason why DRM is bad for publishers. It costs them lots of money.