Quote:
Originally Posted by junkyardwillie
Also publishers have a chance to produce a better product than what is available illegally in most cases (poor OCR'd docs, PDFs, etc.) so if books are available at a reasonable price (around the $10 mark is what I think) people are more likely to buy an eBook than to download it illegally because its not worth the time and effort to find a good illegal download version. There's a big opportunity here for them that they need to capitalize on. The music industry had it much rougher because the illegal music downloads were of the same quality and were actually better because they didn't have DRM, books on the other hand are not as popular therefore do not have the same infrastructure as MP3s did in their bootlegged form.
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Even though the music industry had to compete with the same quality in illegal downloads, they still moved to a DRM-free model. While the current ebook community is into scanning and OCR-ing books, I think as ebooks get more popular, folks will tend more to just remove the DRM and post. There aren't many DRM schemes left that aren't broken: tpz, lrx. Any others? DRM is a losing battle for the publishers just like it was for the music industry. I think they can make a profitable market here but DRM is not the way to do it. If people think they're being cheated, they're less likely to care about cheating you back. For now, publishers can offer a cleaner copy but I don't think that advantage will last. So it is, as you say, a time of great opportunity. If they get people in the habit of buying their ebooks and develop an ebook publishing culture we want to support, where author and customer get a fair shake, they could keep people buying despite the ability to get stuff for free.
The other advantage purchased ebooks offer is safety. After all, aside from the ethical question of the illegal download, you can end up getting stuff on your computer you don't want. If they keep the price low enough, then the risk seems less worthwhile. If they charge $50 for their next new release by a big author, they can expect to see it cracked and on the interwebs in minutes and they'll lose a lot of the customers that would have bought it for $10. Beyond that, ebook stores could get creative like offering you access to other sorts of merchandise, events, etc., or monthly services as the music vendors are starting to do.