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to: PKFFW
> The industry is moving that way. I think it is a
> good thing and support it.
The industry just slapped geo-restrictions on Fictionwise. The shiny new B&N e-book shop has US-only on everything I checked. And everything I saw there had DRM on it.
Until the industry actually gets somewhere, I buy my books DRM free.
> I think it is the only significant reason and all
> the rest is just window dressing to justify it.
It is possible that Im wrong in this as a generalisation but I feel certain the price point beyond which someone would prefer darknet is actually higher than amazon's $10. I know for a fact that Ive never looked for a pirate copy because of pricing.
A'll in all, books are a pretty damn inexpensive form of enterteinment.
This might be because where I live, books are actually quite a bit more expensive. We only have slightly more than 1 million people speaking the language. A friend of mine is a publisher specializing in SF/F. The print runs are 1000 tops. And those runs take years to sell through. Yet she manages to feed herself and her two kids on this.
> when someone disagrees with the idea of "every digital book is
> valueless and should therefore be free"
Don't think this is what they are disagreeing with. Why would anyone thinking content (not copies!) should be free actually write on this forum? If free content was what we wanted - good for us - we have that already. There would be no further reason to debate on this topic. Those who do debate, obviously want something that differs from the current state. The desirable difference should also include ways for authors to make decent money with their creations. Is anyone here actually holding position contrary to this?
As I have said several times before - but it still doesnt seem to register - today we already have companies who are doing this - selling non-crippled e-books and paying authors for their work. This "future" is already here. In case of Baen, it has been here for 10 years.
If this "future" will not be here 10 years from now, I will piss on the grave of the publishing industry, amazon and the likes, for "educating" the young and impressionable gen-Y crowd to the point they will never ever buy a book again in their life.
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