A few factual clarifcations first...
Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
On top of all this, DRM-free e-book experiments have not gone all that well. Consider what happened with Stephen King's The Plant. And that was Stephen King, who doesn't usually have problems getting people to pay for his books.
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Stephen King started writing a novel,
The Plant, a chapter at a time, release as an e-book with no DRM by suscription. Half way through, he decided he was not getting enough suscribers for the next chapter, so he stopped. Please note, he made $440,000 US dollars from his subscribers for the half written book by the time he quit. Gone all that well, therefore is a matter of perspective. Many authors would beg, borrow, or steal for those sort of numbers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
Ebooks will be able to circumvent some of that experimentation (e.g., there's no need to copy-protect paper books, since the barrier to copying is so high in the first place), but some vendor is going to have to be the first DRM-free vendor to really make a success of it, before things start moving in the DRM-free direction. That won't happen until ebook readers are more than a niche product, which they still are, at this point.
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Some vendor has, for a number of years. Baen books. Science fiction and Fantasy specialist, admittedly, but they have not been cutting back, dropping all new publishing, ect. that has been occurring at the top 6 publishers. I highly recommend reading Eric Flint's "Salvos Against Big Brother" colums in Baen's Universe magazine. Eric Flint is a sucessful professional niche writer, and has explicit sales numbers to back up (from his own published works!) why e-books without DRM have made him more successful.