|
Yup. It only takes one person to scan a paper book, or circumvent a DRM scheme - nearly all of currently used DRM schemes can be circumvented with one-click programs, to have an ebook on the darknet. If you release paper books, you can't prevent it, the only option available is competing with the darknet version. You need to make the product people pay money for more easily available, better quality and more convenient to use.
There are many long threads on this forum about the advantages of producing DRM-free books, on the fact that in such a dynamic place as Internet obscurity is worse problem for authors than stealing. Recently someone asked a question why some DRM schemes that are easily circumvented for years now have never been patched - we haven't found a better answer than that it doesn't influence sales for authors of DRM scheme. But it generally means the only thing they sell is a false security publishers and authors feel.
People usually turn to most convenient way to get another volume by the same author after reading one they liked. It doesn't matter whether the first one they read was stolen or not - it might generate many sales if your store is the most convenient way of getting the next book ready-to-read. Getting a book off darknet requires knowledge of how darknet operates, and not everything in there is available at the same time - usually you get just a trickle, 20 books a day, no more. So people who want to get all their books from darknet have to hoard everything they download for months before they can get collection large enough to have most of what they want to read on disk when they want it. With your store, they can go to a webpage, see a large collection of titles, read reviews, click to buy - and from that point on it has to go as smoothly as possible. Every problem the user has with getting a book to where he wants to read it means potentially lost future sales for you. It's all about instant gratification nowadays.
And people who turn to darknet only for money reasons aren't lost sales for you - they'd never buy the books anyway. But if they ever get more money, you need to be able to convert them, to make them stop spending time on getting books from darknet and get them from you - much more easily.
So everything DRM is doing right now is losing you sales.
I quite understand most authors don't know how things stand, and don't have time or inclination to read such forums as this one. What I wrote here is a summary of what I read on this forum over a last year, and to the best of my knowledge this is how it is with ebook business. I hope it helps.
|