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Originally Posted by nekokami
Oh, sure, I agree, the more of the book available before purchase, the better.
Maybe "ad hominem" isn't the right term when no names are given, but I think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and he's being pretty abusive toward anyone who doesn't currently agree with his position. It's fun to read if you already agree with him, but not likely to win converts among the skeptics.
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From time to time I have asked Mr. Flint several questions about his books in his Baen forum Mutter of Demons and he was quite gracious in answering, but I agree that he can be very combative in arguing various points as befits a former labour organizer who quit an academic career on political grounds (see also his extraordinary series 1632...).
Since unfortunately illusions about piracy and drm are well entrenched (always better have to blame someone concrete than just cold economic realities) I do not think than anything other than losing tons of money on drm, closure of drm companies, and making decent money on non-drm alternatives can bring converts.
Personally I do not believe that any drm scheme for e-books is going to succeed; however I think that the main issue is pricing - there is no way people are going to pay for e-books hc like prices on a large enough scale, outside of special circumstances like e-arcs, overseas books...
I do not believe that ads can support e-books either outside of narrow niches. I think that e-books can be very succesful in backlists, out-of-print books, e-arcs, and current "obscure" titles (95% of the market) as long as the price is low enough and they are drm free, but print will still be dominant for a while.
At some point I guess new business models will evolve but not for another 10-15 years at least since the external pressure is simply not that powerful, (whenever asked all publishers agree they HAVE to do something about e-books, but not that they MUST like studios say), digitization being such a cumbersome process for consumers as opposed to ripping a cd/dvd, the number of titles so vast as opposed to a limited number of movies and even albums each year, the way of "consuming" books quite different from on-the-go music listening, or social movie watching.