Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBlueSky
Just as you find the cheapening of the value of your time, effort and creativity very disheartening, I also find the money grubbing monopoly hoarders exploitation of MY time, MY effort and My bank balance absolutely disgusting.
Part of the experience of buying/reading a book is knowing the pleasure one of my friends is going to get from from the same book when I pass it on to them. To think that any DRM riddled, badly formatted and device crippled e-book is worth a even a quarter of a hardback priced physical edition simply because its a ‘first read release’ is sheer lunacy when the only thing you can do is trash it after finishing reading.
And of course, a part of deciding to buy a book does involve some consideration of the container its wrapped in — not just the content therein.
Arkham House luxury prints of H P Lovecraft for example, are beautiful objects in their own right, yet the contents are word for word exactly the same as their downmarket counterparts. The Library of Congress prints of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are super-bound on acid-free paper while the contents are no different to the 1940-1950’s pulps. Which versions represent better value is entirely in the eye of the purchaser — so persuade me again, what value does buying into DRM offer me?
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Haven't had time to read the *entire* thread, but don't believe this was about DRM at all. I agree with you about DRM-but it strikes me that this was about the pricing of *all* ebooks, not whether DRM-chained ebooks should be cheaper than non-DRM ebooks. FWIW I think that chaining an ebook via DRM is an attempt to ensure that it will be re-bought rather than being re-sold. (Actually more as, assuming the original buyer wants to keep it then DRM is an attempt to make him/her re-buy it when they change readers, even if it only forces this by locking the book into a specific format. Maybe when all readers support all formats this won't be true of some forms of DRM, but right now to the best of my knowledge, it's true of all DRM. Assuming stripping DRM is as illegal as the publishers claim, that is. A questionable assumption but one that we need to accept to justify DRM at all.)
So, back to my argument-if DRM is an attempt to ensure a book will be re-bought rather than re-sold, then the average number of re-buys should equal the average number of times a book is re-sold. I don't have any figures on this, but let's say it's three times. In that case, to be equitable, the price of a DRM-chained ebook should be one-third the price of a DRM-free ebook.
So we can agree that DRM-chained ebooks aren't worth $15. What about DRM-free ebooks? Those don't seem to represent the "exploitation of MY time, MY effort and My bank balance" by "money grubbing monopoly hoarders"-so are those worth $15? Or is your point that you don't think *any* ebook should sell for $15?