Quote:
|
Originally Posted by KDawg
There seem to be a lot of opinions that DRM has been a major stumbling block for ebooks. DRM hasn't stopped Apple from quickly becoming the fifth (fourth?) largest music vendor in the US. Most consumers don't know what DRM is and don't care. Unfortunate, but true.
It's hard for me to believe at this point that somebody will have to do for ebooks what Apple did for emusic, make it cheap and easy. People don't seem to mind paying an arm and a leg for an iPod if the songs are only $0.99.
I am a new Sony Reader owner so I'm interested in the growth of Sony Connect. I'd like to see a plot of the books sold on Sony Connect as a fraction of all books sold in the same markets over time. I'd also like to see the same plot for iTunes music.
|
Comparisons between e-music and e-books are flawed because of the fact that for music it is very easy to put your cd's on a device like an Ipod, while for books it is very hard to put your p-books on a device like Sony. Were it to exist a magic box to take a p-book and digitize in 10 minutes in the format of your choice, that would be different and you would see more dedicated devices available.
Look at the statistics of itunes bought music/songs per ipod
And of course drm iTunes songs cost 99c, you can export to cd and reimport as drm free. Can you do this for Sony in a reasonable easy way?
And of course iTunes is moving away from drm...
But for e-books the main stumbling thing is still price/availablity in my opinion, with drm coming second and most likely dissapear sooner than later. The pricing thing though is not going away, since after all despite iTunes the music industry is suffering major revenue decline because acceptable digital pricing needs far more volume of sales than available right now (think it this way: when you buy a cd, you pay xx$ for essentially 1-2 songs, rarely more- you buy the songs directly you pay 2-3$...)