Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcy
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
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Not quite true. Eric Flint is not pirated because he makes all his books available for free as e-books over time. He found that that led to more P-book sales over time, than not releasing his e-books for free. He tried that with one book as an experiment for Jim Baen back in the '90s. Economically, that model works. (at least currently). Some people (like me) still pitch in the 4 bucks anyway.... NYT's David Pouge is just figuring this out 10 years later. (Of course, he wouldn't be caught dead reading popular trash....)