[mogui]

Originally Posted by BruceW

mogui does this mean that you want a system that makes me pay for the same "book" every time I read it. I have a number of "comfort" books that I have read multiple/dozens of times. Do you want me to pay for reading the same "beat up, dog eared paperback" (or the electronic version) everytime I want to revisit a story?

Yes. It would reward the author in proportion to your interest, I grant you there us a lot of comfort in a wall of pBooks. But I have sort of gotten over that so I can travel lightly. In the world of eBooks, we might need a different model so we can continue to encourage the creative act. I have personally bought the same books many times, so I don't mind paying again and again. If the royalty bite was light each time, it wouldn't hurt very much. If you consider the cost of re-reads spread out over books we own, books we loan, library books and used books, the cost per word would be vanishingly small. Remember, this fee goes to the author, not some big company.

Oh, BruceW, I will probably keep my "comfort" books too as long as I can keep my Canadian condo. But over time . . .

Originally Posted by rlauzon

It's already been proven that this cannot exist.

DRM must be closed and proprietary in order to work.

Huh?

Originally Posted by rlauzon

But that's not the purpose of DRM. DRM cannot protect content. We've already proven that.

Huh again?

Originally Posted by rlauzon

The purpose of DRM is to lock users into a company - and lock out competition. The whole DRM issue has nothing do to with "IP" (an oxymoron, IHMO) and piracy.

I want to be clear that I am advocating changing the purpose of DRM. It would be a universal standard available to authors to use to gain compensation for their works. An author would use a public key while the reader would use a private key tied to an account on a server. Some open-source genius could write this protection mechanism in a week. All books under this system would be freely available peer-to-peer.

rlauzon, your concerns are valid when applied to the current system, but I am wondering if your statistical references can be applied to a new standard.

Try looking at this from the point of view of the writer. I like to write so I see this issue from the inside. Not to the extent of the folks like Steve Jordan and Eric Flint who self-market, but I share their hopes and dreams and I have looked into many of the issues they have to deal with.

First, if you like to write and feel you have a talent for it, you may be fortunately compelled to write. This compulsion is a great gift. But if, like so many, you have to force yourself to begin writing each day, you will naturally ask yourself, "Why would I try to write for a living?" The answers are not easy and the odds are poor. The publishing industry presents many obstacles from the slush pile to remainders. All of these obstacles can choke off a new author before the public has a chance to respond one way or the other. Some exceptions are the phenomena of blogging and fan-fiction. But the pay is not there.

What if the new author could self-encrypt his work and put it on one or more peer-to-peer networks? He could allow a free read of the first X pages (he decides) to help his marketing. The eReader would show a meter of the costs incurred so the reader could decide when or whether to stop reading, or to continue. The server that collects the money could be run by a bankish sort of company like Paypal (shudder!) and would make statistics available on how many continued to read the book past the free pages. This would give an indication of acceptability. Users of p2p networks can currently attach comments to a download, so that provides a built-in review mechanism. Authors would always have a choice about whether to go the DRMp2p route or the pBook conventional route, or both. Readers would have the same choice.