Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
When I purchase a book, I get one copy and that's it. I can't make an unlimited number of duplicates at no cost; in fact, if I want to duplicate a book, its "analog" nature means I'm going expend a lot of resources (time, effort, money) for what is likely an inferior copy (photocopy, OCR'd copy). I can loan the book out indefinitely, but the physical nature of the book ensures I can't read it when I do so, nor can I share it instantaneously and at no cost to millions of my best new Internet pals. I can sell the book, but selling that physical object guarantees I can't access it after it's sold (assuming I haven't made a low-fi or exceptionally arduous digital copy first). And while paper book piracy is possible, it's more difficult and less common than the digital varieties (both with and without profit motives), as a pirated paper book is going to take resources to make, and will be hard to distribute (whereas digital is cheap and easy).
In other words, the physical book has plenty of restrictions. The sets of "physical restrictions" and "digital restrictions" are not identical, so we are profoundly jarred by what we lose, and in typical human fashion notice the losses far more than (even with DRM) the gains. And we are just so used to a paper book's restrictions that we don't even think of the situation that way.
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I would fine with restrictions that would let me read it on even any one device of my choosing, assuming I could change the device as long as I only had one copy of the ebook. The problem is the restrictions also restrict my choice of devices and could in future keep me from accessing my book. I feel a book is a book -- once I buy a pbook it's mine forever, so once I buy an ebook it should be mine forever too.
This is why I only ever bought 4 kindle books from amazon.com. Once I figured out they couldn't be read on any other reader and if amazon ever went belly-up I would be SOL with them, I stopped buying. Now that I've learned to de-DRM I've bought a couple more books from amazon to read on my Sony reader, but I try to avoid them unless they are the only choice.
If Baen can make money simultaneously releasing drm-free ebooks at more than cheap prices concomitantly with the pbook releases, other publishers should be able to do it too.
Granted I won't ever post my de-drm'ed ebooks on Pirate Bay or any other site and only download books from such places if they aren't offered for sale as ebooks, while others seem to have no problems with it. However I don't think most pirated books take away from sales. The people who pirate things often weren't going to buy them anyway. And if you make your product available at a reasonable price in a reasonable format most people will happily pay for it. Just look at Baen -- Eric Flint wrote a series of interesting essays about DRM and how his stuff is never pirated.
-Marcy