Quote:
Originally Posted by tibiafry
You see music and film industry that is really (excuse me for this word) fucked up, and you just don't want to end without job. My tought is, I have to protect my business, because why would somebody pay for something that can be downloaded from free? (P2P, rapidshare, megaupload,... you know the thing, I'm sure). I'd like you to think from this point of view a little.
Thanks again for your valuable help
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not sure if this response is too late or not but as someone that regularly downloads ebooks via other sources that don't cost money I can best answer why I do occasionally break out of the mold of downloading "free" ebooks.
1) I do buy from Baen because their prices are reasonable (4-8 dollar range) and I can download the ebooks in whatever format I like and as many times I as I like. This has value to me.
2) I'm a grad student that works full time so my time is actually rather valuable. I'm assuming you've never tried to find a well formatted ebook via IRC? If so you'd know it could take 30 minutes to an hour going through various downloaded copies checking to make sure there are no OCR errors, italics and bolded text are in place, indents...I can't really complain about "free" ebooks but some of them have serious qualilty issues...which is why if the book is from Baen I'll go spend 6 dollars and buy and load onto my reader in less than 10 minutes.
For a book that costs over 10 dollars...I figured it's worth the extra 10 or 20 minutes to find a "free copy" because well I don't have that kind of money to buy ebooks that cost more than the paperback copy I can get on Amazon.com for .20 cents used..
3) I've yet to run across anything that hasn't been "cracked" whether it be music, software, or ebooks. Once the format has been out awhile someone will eventually get fed up and find a work around. The pirates are very determined to use the content they paid for and are incredibly intelligent. I can't help but think DRM is a losing war. no matter what format comes out I do believe in time the format will have a work around.
So basically, I think it's really smart for publishers to make buying their ebooks more attractive and convenient than the alternatives, which are FREE and becoming increasingly easy to use as well.
Adding DRM makes buying ebooks way too complicated.