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To be honest i cannot see how it is possible to attract new authors to a model which does not protect their work. Having it freely available and relying on peoples honesty is a huge risk and i believe that it will not provide enough security for a lot of authors to take the risk in investing a year of their life to write a book.
Conversely it may help some authors get noticed and go direct to their public thus cutting out editors and publishing houses, but i think in general it will be to the detriement of the industry. That saying it is not correct for a publisher to expect to charge the same price as a bound copy, digital media should always be much cheaper as the transport, production costs are not the same.
I am a firm beliver in the right of the consumer to have as flexible and open model as possible to consume digital media but i do not belive that a free and open model will work. For instance how many people download winzip but dont pay a penny for it even though they have a reminder screen telling them they have to pay every time they use it.
DRM and flexibility do not sit side by side at the moment , and i share some of the concerns echoed on this thread. Personally i am disgusted at some of the DRM stuff in Vista , to the point where i wont be using it. I believe that it may be Microsoft's worst mistake yet. I have been to Redmond and spent time with the dev teams so if they are losing the confidence of people like me, they must be doing something very wrong IMHO.
Anyway whilst we make the transition to the new world, we must embrace some form of protection for authors or they will refuse to allow their works to be published to digital media. For people who say DRM does not work, you only have to look at Sky Digital in the UK, they have the market well sewn up with DRM which works and has not been cracked, so its only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a solution that cannot be worked around.
Mark
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