[RobbieClarken]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

That's a very good point.

It's a shame prices for ebooks don't reflect the cost to people of purchasing them - so those in poor countries are continually disadvantaged.

How about a model where I buy a book at European prices, and part of that money goes into a pot to subsidise the purchases of customers in developing countries?

I'd get a buzz out of knowing some of my money was helping someone out, promoting ebooks globally, and making the system fairer.

A nice idea but what is to stop European customers from importing from developing countries? Especially with ebooks, this would require laws enforcing geographic market segmentation which is most commonly used to reduce competition and hike prices and has the even worse consequence that some countries are denied access to certain books entirely. Your idea also ignores the fact that there is a large discrepancy of incomes within a nation. Why should poor people in wealthy countries pay more than wealthy people in poor countries? I think a more sensible option is just to give money directly to charities.

DRM doesn't matter. The people who will take eBooks and share them on the net already know how to strip the DRM or have a source of DRM stripped eBooks. So in that case, only the people trying to do things right are getting hurt.

I don't entirely agree with this argument. Most people I know would have no qualms about sharing ebooks with friends if it took little effort and no technical knowledge. I was recently surprised to learn my grandparents who struggle with most new technology are copying their VHS's to DVDs for all their friends. DRM would stop people like them sharing ebooks. A case can be made that the level of "piracy" by your average user is pretty negligible compared to the mass sharing done by people with the technological knowledge and determination to circumvent DRM. However with P2P systems it only takes one person to share a book on LimeWire (or whatever the kids are using these days) and it is accessible to the world. I suspect that if Amazon went DRM-free there would be a lot more books popping up on the 'darknet' than there are now.