Massive wave of ebook piracy?

[NVash]

Guess they like killing trees.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

Not so long ago they raised them from 6.99 to 7.99, though?

A pretty hefty 14% increase or so.

Yes, and still at the low end of CPI if starting from 1980.

Use a 33% off Border's coupon and at $5.60 you are well below 1980 prices and close to 1970's.

[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Unlikely. If that were the case people would be flocking to Smashwords too, but most of the ebook sales are still on Amazon.

You're arguing about the wrong thing. I never said anything about the universality of the "no DRM" demand, merely that the people who DO shop at Baen do so primarily for the unencumbered formats and the variety of the formats available and only secondly (but a close second to be sure) for the low prices. That doesn't easily extrapolate to Smashwords and Amazon (and by the way, do we actually know the numbers for the two? Do we also know that after allowing for relative sizes and market penetration, there actually IS an imbalance between Smashwords and Amazon sales?) You do realize that Amazon is a retailing giant - very few online retailers (or offline for that matter) can compete with it. Smashwords is relatively new and rather small (Baen has been around for a long time as a publisher and as a retailer), all things considered - it will be a while yet before they can start matching the resident retailing Goliath.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

DRM is transparent to most people, and they neither know nor care about it.

Yes to the first part, but a resounding NO to the second part. I was going to say why but then noticed that you did it for me in your next statement -

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

The only reason it was (reluctantly) removed from mp3 files was because people were upgrading their players and finding out they could no longer play their music.

You see? You don't have to know whose crap you stepped in to know that your foot smells. As you said yourself, people don't care about DRM and the ethics and the principles and so on. Ironically, the less people know about DRM, the more they run up against that invisible wall and complain about it LOUDLY (I've been on the B&N forums - I know the seven stages of grief for non-techy people when it comes to DRM. People who don't know about it end up knowing a LOT about it and hating it with a passion AFTER they buy their first ereader.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

With so few manufacturers in the ebook reader market, and all the main ones aiming to tie users to their own hardware forever, that won't be a problem for most people.

So few manufacturers? This is the most competitive market for consumer products in the world today . Just look at the huuuge list of devices in the MR forum list. You forget that non-techy sites (again B&N is a prime example and I have been observing it ever since the original nook came out) are rife with complaints about books not being available for their particular brand of device.

In any case, if all books are available in all the (closed) markets -there's really no problem is there? Right now, the device-centric markets are (ironically) driving people against DRM in a way that was totally preventable. It was dead easy to keep people in a state of apathy when it comes to DRM - provide a method that did the job without inconveniencing the legal users. Oh wait, that's sort of ... um ... impossible .

The point (of the linked article) is not to rehash the same old matters of principle against DRM, just to show why as a matter of sheer pragmatism and business strategy, DRM simply doesn't work as it's intended and why it alienates people who might not even understand what it is on their shoes that smells so bad .

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Yes, and still at the low end of CPI if starting from 1980.

Use a 33% off Border's coupon and at $5.60 you are well below 1980 prices and close to 1970's.

Not if you used a 33% off sale in the 1980s and 1970s, too - you are not comparing the same thing.

And Australian prices in 1980s, paperbacks less than 5.00. Now $23. No coupons.

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

Does anyone happen to think that since the publishers don't really like the e-book they are driving the prices up on purpose to piss everyone off making the eReader obsolete and go back to paper books?

Not sure there are any that are that delusional. Wishful, perhaps.

Wanting to slow it down is possible.

E.g. if you are a selfish bastard CEO who is 65 or something and planning on retiring in a year who wants to see if they can prop up a share price so their shareholder-robbing options package is worth more when they cash out....?

[Seanette]

Originally Posted by NVash

I wouldnt know a thing about Smashwords or Baen if I hadnt come to this site. I knew there were other sites to get ebooks but I had no idea what they were.

This is a very good point. If we really want consumer pressure on the big guys (a good thing, IMO, being the free-market type), consumers need to know that alternatives to the big guys do in fact exist.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Barcey

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
Can$ 18.80 for the e-book at Amazon
Can$ 7.89 for a new paperback copy

LOL!

Originally Posted by thrawn_aj

I agree with your specific example (that pricing is not what the ebook industry is doing wrong - for the most part at least). I disagree with your opening sentence that "they have *not* made the mistakes that music publishers made".

The DRM fiasco is the single greatest mistake the music industry made. Wonder of wonders, they actually fixed it. Yes, they had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming and they only did it because it was pretty much provide unDRM'd mp3s and make money or let Napster do it for them. Still, they fixed it, which is no mean feat for an industry with all the grace and inertia of a minor star cluster. THIS is the mistake that the ebook industry has adopted. Customers flock to Baen primarily because they don't infect their books with DRM and make several formats available and you can download all the formats if you so wish (at no extra cost). The low book prices is an added bonus and a show of faith on the part of Baen that they are actually taking advantage of all that this medium has to offer and passing on some of the savings to the customer.

I like Amazon's pricing (and B&N, since they both seem to have observers matching each others' prices ) just fine, but to me, it was once the epitome of retailing. Prior to the release of Kindle, Amazon was the source of everything you'd ever want to buy. They still are, but with the notable exception of ebooks. As far as ebooks are concerned, most of the big names are device shills. Baen isn't - it's as simple as that.

The ebook industry has fallen for the marketing hacks' insistence on calling ebooks "content" to be "managed" and "licensed". That's their major mistake. Georestriction (this time, an MPAA blunder) is yet another mistake adopted from the RIAA/MPAA cabal.

Yes. Sure, I admit, as someone said above, people don't notice the DRM (at least, not for now). But they'll come running to their family techie (if they have one) as soon as they try to switch devices, or the DRM malfunctions. Heck I can't use the Kindle app on my ipod touch because the wife used Kindle on it before...I'm supposed to "call customer service". :S

Even when it is supposed to work, eventually it fails. This is computers we're talking about. Google "kindle won't work register or registered" or some variant thereof. Plenty of people have issues, even with 'good' or 'transparent' DRM. DRM does nothing to stop piracy, and only hurts legitimate buyers. And it goes against free-market concepts of open markets and competition - locking people into certain stores with certain devices is anti- free markets.

I'm enjoying the article someone posted above from Cory Doctorow:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html

Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a "copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics -- think of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures?

Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" -- copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *property* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through tort law for centuries.

But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."

This is the kind of ridiculousness that I hate the most about DRM. Right here. Being able to buy and sell things is PART OF CAPITALISM. It's part of what drives free markets. Not an enemy. What they are selling instead is pro-corporate capitalism - not free-market capitalism.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

People keep saying this, but it's not true. E-book publishers may have made their own mistakes but they have *not* made the mistakes that music publishers made.

The mistake music publishers made was that they *did not provide a convenient, legal way to buy digital music*. Not that they charged too much money, or set monopoly prices. They simply did not make the music available at all. Music publishing's problems were *never* about how much they charged for digital downloads, no matter how much people who don't like the cost of e-books would like for it to be.

I agree with what you say but for this;

ebook publishers have not made it a totally convenient experience to buy ebooks. It may appear they have, but in reality the impost of geographic restrictions means a buyer can buy a book via a webstore or locally, but cannot buy the same book in ebook form due to the antiquated distribution system that publishers are most reluctant to change.

These stupid and un-necessary restrictions do contribute to piracy.

The comparison I drew is that the publishing industry, like the music and entertainment industry, are still bumbling along with the same distribution system that served them well enough pre digital age. There was several years of stumbling around before those industries got part way to a solution.

With such prime examples of what not to do, it does seem the publishers (agency 5) are moving down that same path.

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

LOL!

This is the kind of ridiculousness that I hate the most about DRM. Right here. Being able to buy and sell things is PART OF CAPITALISM. It's part of what drives free markets. Not an enemy. What they are selling instead is pro-corporate capitalism - not free-market capitalism.

Yes, media companies are big ol' pinko socialists, always asking for more government handouts, help and protectionism.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

And Australian prices in 1980s, paperbacks less than 5.00. Now $23. No coupons.

Absolutely. My 16 year old daughter is not interested in ebooks just yet, rather paperbacks and browsing through Dymocks with her on Saturday, I was amazed to see prices of new editions of older novels. Novels I purchased 30 years ago for $4.99 at the time. Inflation....

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by jhempel24

Does anyone happen to think that since the publishers don't really like the e-book they are driving the prices up on purpose to piss everyone off making the eReader obsolete and go back to paper books?

Ebooks have the potential to be the best thing for publishers ever. No more lost sales through people buying second hand books.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by thrawn_aj

You're arguing about the wrong thing. I never said anything about the universality of the "no DRM" demand, merely that the people who DO shop at Baen do so primarily for the unencumbered formats and the variety of the formats available and only secondly (but a close second to be sure) for the low prices. That doesn't easily extrapolate to Smashwords and Amazon (and by the way, do we actually know the numbers for the two? Do we also know that after allowing for relative sizes and market penetration, there actually IS an imbalance between Smashwords and Amazon sales?) You do realize that Amazon is a retailing giant - very few online retailers (or offline for that matter) can compete with it. Smashwords is relatively new and rather small (Baen has been around for a long time as a publisher and as a retailer), all things considered - it will be a while yet before they can start matching the resident retailing Goliath.

.

I don't think they ever will, and neither will Smashwords. I've seen people who have posted about their SW versus Amazon sales and Amazon outsells at a factor of 10. If/when ebooks become mainstream, the masses will turn to a company they recognise for their content. Most will never even stray from the company they bought their reader from.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

Not sure there are any that are that delusional. Wishful, perhaps.

Wanting to slow it down is possible.

E.g. if you are a selfish bastard CEO who is 65 or something and planning on retiring in a year who wants to see if they can prop up a share price so their shareholder-robbing options package is worth more when they cash out....?

The boss of DC comics said a couple of years ago that he would resist any pressure to go digital so that he could protect the independent comic shops and distribution systems that were in place. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same sort of reason here.

[Blue Tyson]

Not really, because large publishers deliberately give bigger discounts to large publishing chains - which means they really want to get rid of independent bookshops, or actually don't give a rat's arse if they survive.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

Not if you used a 33% off sale in the 1980s and 1970s, too - you are not comparing the same thing.

And Australian prices in 1980s, paperbacks less than 5.00. Now $23. No coupons.

There were no coupons offered back in 1980 in US. We paid full MSRP.

Using Australian inflation calculator a $5.00 book in 1980 would be over $17.73 today. The calculator stops at 2009. Using 10-20% online discount codes brings that $23 down to $18.40 - $20.70. Yes, you're paying more but Australia's inflation is running 2-3% this year and needs to be added to the $17.73.

The problem is when comparing prices with other countries and currency exchange rates get added in the mix. Confuses things.