Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
DRM is per the publisher demand, rather than Amazon. When you buy a DRM-free book, they say "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."
So I don't see it going away any time soon.
The publishing industry is in more denial than the music industry was and the success of agency pricing allows them to be that way.
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If you remember, the music industry didn't like the fact that most digital music was sold via the iTunes store, so they allowed music to be sold DRM free from Amazon while forcing Apple to use DRM in the iTunes store. They also didn't like the tiered pricing scheme in the iTunes store. The ploy didn't work all that well, and after a year or so, Apple forced them to start selling music DRM free at the iTunes store as well. Eventually, it was subscription music and a change of whole business model in the music industry that challenged the iTunes market share.
The big difference is that Amazon, once they had built up their market share, stopped caring about pricing. Agency pricing was just fine with them. Of course, most readers don't really care about DRM. I don't know that the publishers are in denial. I suspect that it's more that the predicted revolution never came.
I can imagine a number of possible events that could cause a massive change in the publishing business model, but I doubt it will be DRM driven.