Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I would pay more for an e-book than a paper book because it is of greater value to me.
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How many people who expressed a similar sentiment would feel differently if they could not remove the DRM from the e-book?
We have all heard horror stories about people losing entire collections when a e-book "seller" (i.e., one that used DRM that wasn't broken at the time) shut down. It's unlikely that it would happen to a company as big as Amazon or Adobe, but it's also possible that they phase out support for old devices with new DRM.
For me, if I couldn't remove the DRM, the e-book would be worth far less than even the cheapest used book, as I would never know when my ability to access the book might be removed.
Even with easy DRM removal, e-books should be priced far less than physical books, because only the first copy costs very much to produce. If publishers ever wake to to the fact that much lower prices on zero marginal cost items results in far, far greater total profits, maybe this will happen.
But, as long as publishers live in the past where they keep suckering authors into signing contracts favorable to publishers (even though much of the reason—risk—for those contracts goes away with e-books), we'll never see e-books priced liked games or music. Even digitally delivered movies are cheaper per unit than e-books (less than $20/month for all you can watch, in many cases). Any industry that charges more than the thieves that run movie studios is truly ripping off the consumer, and publishers are doing just that with e-books.