People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[toddos]

Originally Posted by MartinC

Traditional publishers have another function besides making their shareholders rich. When a publisher (I mean of course a "real" one) offers you a contract he is saying I value your work enough to invest in it. This is an objective confirmation of the quality of your work which is entirely missing from the self-publishing model. Something of the sort is very necessary, and it's hard to see where it's going to come from if you puiblish directly.

Why is it necessary? From the publisher's perspective, they're not saying, "I value your work enough to invest in it." What they're really saying is, "We believe your work will sell enough to justify the cost of a printing run of size X, which you would never be able to afford on your own."

Traditional publishers do provide copy editing, typesetting, and marketing that the average author can't or doesn't want to do himself, and those have value. But the perceived value of, "This company thinks this author's work is good," is unimportant. Reviews, word of mouth, etc will very quickly separate the wheat from the unedited, typo-ridden chaff.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by toddos

Stonetools, do you happen to work in the publishing industry, perhaps in an area that is fast becoming obsolete, like managing print runs?

DING DING DING!
I was kind of waiting for people to personally insult me /accuse me of benefitting financially from holding an unpopular position.
Is this going to happen EVERY TIME I disagree with the MobileRead Scriptures?

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I don't know--have you actually done the experiment and stood by to watch what people do? My bet is that most people won't have a moral decision because they won't even really see the money--they'll think it's a flyer or a parking ticket or something. Others will notice it and pass by. If one person does take it, what have you proved?

Should the money be elaborately booby-trapped because one person might reach out and try to take it? Suppose the person who left it there just wants to take it back and put it on another vehicle?

actually US paper money IS DRM protected. Only it's called counterfeiting measures. Each bill has many levels of this DRM protection.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by stonetools

DING DING DING!
I was kind of waiting for people to personally insult me /accuse me of benefitting financially from holding an unpopular position.
Is this going to happen EVERY TIME I disagree with the MobileRead Scriptures?

You're welcome to see that as an insult if you like, but it was really just a question about why you're so keen on seeing the publishing industry survive. Authors can and do survive (and thrive!) in the ebook market without the traditional publishing industry backing them. Why, then, does it matter if the folks trying to hang on to the remaining scraps of a dead business model continue to have jobs going forward?

[pholy]

Originally Posted by toddos

Stonetools, do you happen to work in the publishing industry, perhaps in an area that is fast becoming obsolete, like managing print runs?

Originally Posted by stonetools

DING DING DING!
I was kind of waiting for people to personally insult me /accuse me of benefitting financially from holding an unpopular position.
Is this going to happen EVERY TIME I disagree with the MobileRead Scriptures?

No accusations - he was asking a legitimate question. Are you? Do you have any vested interest in keeping DRM on books?

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by toddos

Traditional publishers do provide copy editing, typesetting, and marketing that the average author can't or doesn't want to do himself, and those have value. But the perceived value of, "This company thinks this author's work is good," is unimportant. Reviews, word of mouth, etc will very quickly separate the wheat from the unedited, typo-ridden chaff.

I'm talking existential angst here. A writer never knows. If you think you do, you're quite likely sadly wrong. So... Your wife likes it? Your best friend's sister's boyfriend couldn't put it down? I would rather put my faith in the opinion of someone who is going to lose a wad of cash if they make the wrong call.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by MartinC

I'm talking existential angst here. A writer never knows. If you think you do, you're quite likely sadly wrong. So... Your wife likes it? Your best friend's sister's boyfriend couldn't put it down? I would rather put my faith in the opinion of someone who is going to lose a wad of cash if they make the wrong call.

What's stopping you from tossing it up on the Kindle store for a couple of bucks and seeing what people do? Isn't it much more validating to know that the general public actually likes your book (as measured by sales), rather than some smarmy suit who'll ignore your phone calls and pretend you don't exist once the sales dry up?

If only there were things called "reviews", where authors could read what people have to say about their works ...

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

We are not discussing whether ebooks in general are good or bad for the publishing industry. That's irrelevant. Ebooks are going to become the dominant form of book no matter what the publishing industry does.

We are discussing whether having DRM on ebooks will be better or worse for the publishing industry. In other words, will having DRM on ebooks cause more ebooks to be sold or fewer ebooks to be sold.
.....

This.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by stonetools

WEll, THEY think they won't. Then there is the cautionary example of the music business.

You're mixing up the effect of digital files on a business, and the effect of DRM on digital files on a business.

Digital files, for music or books, aren't going away. So the question is, will having DRM help or hinder?

The experience of the music industry (as I have shown above) is that DRM doesn't help, and DRM-free doesn't seem to hinder.

Since adding DRM to digital files is a cost (both directly and in customer support issues), it seems foolish to continue with it in the publishing industry.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

DING DING DING!
I was kind of waiting for people to personally insult me /accuse me of benefitting financially from holding an unpopular position.
Is this going to happen EVERY TIME I disagree with the MobileRead Scriptures?

No, but we expect good behavior and full disclosure.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by toddos

You're welcome to see that as an insult if you like, but it was really just a question about why you're so keen on seeing the publishing industry survive. Authors can and do survive (and thrive!) in the ebook market without the traditional publishing industry backing them. Why, then, does it matter if the folks trying to hang on to the remaining scraps of a dead business model continue to have jobs going forward?

Yes.

,

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

It depends where you are. Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment, performed an earlier deviance test:



If you read The Lucifer Effect, he goes on to state that one nice old gentleman actually closed the hood on the Palo Alto car when it was raining.

really neat, thanks for the info. I sort of suspected this would be the case. It just depends.

I remember a thread here on MR in the Kindle section if I recall. Some dolt boasted of "finding" a Kindle at the airport and if it was OK for him to keep it given a set of circumstance and actions the poster claimed to have attempted to return the device.

Ultimately the answer should be no as it was never the property of the poster, it simply should have been handed over to the authorities to do with it what they will. If this results in the finder not getting the back if it's unclaimed, then tough luck. The poster whined about it being fine to keep it as due to "finding" the device it now belonged to the poster. It was appaling the number of long time members here who agreed. it never belonged to the OP of that thread and nobody ever acknowledged that fact. Many, including that poster, acted as if the act of finding an item was akin to buying or the transfer of ownership. It's not, well in an ethical society anyway. You find it, you turn it in and you lose nothing because you never owned it to begin with.

DRM is a lot like this. It's one thing to strip DRM for our own uses, maybe. And for now it seems to be OK in some countries. What the issue seems to be is the retailer and publishers have never made sure the buyer of the book is aware the transaction is not the same as buying a physical book. From there comes the confusion. We all are conditioned to understand any software we buy to run on computer brand-X will run on our next computer brand-Y as long as the operating system is the same. In some cases the software comes with a license for both Windows AND OSX (Adobe is good about this one...somehow I feel dirty in writing those words!! )

Now buy an ebook and suddenly it may or may not work on other readers. For Amazon who really does make a great effort in letting their books be used on almost any platform. Still the issue comes to a head if the unsuspecting consumer decides they like a different brand dedicated reader. Suddenly that consumer finds none of their books can be read on the new reader because it does not support then and there is no Kindle Reader app for the device. I believe this sort of situation is where Amazon and other bookstore branded readers are vulnerable to more general purpose devices.

Still even with DRM there are options. Those options have compromises and the consumer needs to refine what they are willing to live with over time. I still feel most people, especially those who have been long time Amazon customers, genuinely do not care.

What it will take to resolve these issues is some level of cooperation between either the various bookstore branded readers or the publishers come up with a "standard" format they all use. This would then pretty much require companies like B&N, Amazon, Sony and whoever to support that format and DRM it uses. This, I suspect will be the final solution used by the publishers. They have already done the "goose step" for pricing next is going to be a "standard" publisher determined format used by the whole industry. Mind also that a standard file format will reduce publisher overhead as well. Odds are this will be ePub but Amazon could easily make a compelling case for their format as well by offering some sort of extra perks to those publishers.

Time will tell and when all is said and done, our discussions here won't mean squat on the issue.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by toddos

Reviews, word of mouth, etc will very quickly separate the wheat from the unedited, typo-ridden chaff.

I'm not sure about that. That used to be the case, when there were relatively few digital texts available. Now, while it's easy to spot typo-ridden dreck, it's not so easy to spot poorly-developed characters and bad plotting; someone has to read the book to figure that out.

Smashwords gets over a hundred new ebooks a day. That's over 3,000 per month. (My quick one-day count of Mar 16 has 130 ebooks; that'd be over 3750 month, even when rounding down a bit.) I think new Kindlebooks are even more numerous; a lot more people know about Amazon as a book publisher than Smashwords.

When there's over 4000 new ebooks available every month, how do you decide which ones are even worth reading the descriptions for? It'd take hours just to wade through the listings of what's available.

I think we're going to need filters--people who tell us what's worth looking at--for a long time. I don't trust traditional Big 6 publishers to be those filters; they've failed to find me many authors I enjoy. But I can see a future for a company whose sole job is reviewing ebooks and putting a stamp of approval on the ones they like, where they're paid by customer subscriptions: for $10/month, you get a list of 100 books that are worth reading. For $15/month, a list of 50 in the genre of your choice.

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I think we're going to need filters--people who tell us what's worth looking at--for a long time. I don't trust traditional Big 6 publishers to be those filters; they've failed to find me many authors I enjoy. But I can see a future for a company whose sole job is reviewing ebooks and putting a stamp of approval on the ones they like, where they're paid by customer subscriptions: for $10/month, you get a list of 100 books that are worth reading. For $15/month, a list of 50 in the genre of your choice.

Yes. Getting a bit off topic here, but eventually we will stumble into a new approach to buying and selling books - perhaps this one. DRM is part of the journey, not the destination.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by toddos

Why do I care if people in the publishing industry are undermined? It's not my job to prop up their bad business model. Should we still be forced to buy buggy whips to go with our horseless cars? Should I be forced to buy an analog telephone modem with my PC?

If people in the publishing industry want to maintain their livelihood, they need to evolve. When there are no printing or paper costs in publishing an ebook, should I feel bad that an ebook-only publisher doesn't pay money to printing presses?

You do not have a right to a business model. What worked 20, 10, or even 5 years ago may not work today. Just because it was a good model yesterday doesn't mean it's a good model today or forever.