People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Because being able to say "Look at me a publisher thinks my book is good enough to make them a wad of cash" is really the only thing you are getting for your 90% reduction in income.

Well, of course. Published by Penguin, published by Hodder - that's got to be worth 90% of anyone's income. Mind you, I would worry more if I had an income.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I'm really damned sorry about this, but I'm going to restrict my responses to the data and to the arguments, and not personally attack anyone or disclose personal data. Possibly we should take this up with the moderators and ask whether we need to disclose personal informatiopn whenver we contest the preferred position on these forums. I don't recall Babi Yuga (sp? ) being asked whether he/she was in the pocket of the publishers when he defended agency pricing.

I think we know the answer now.

Thank you.

And I think we can pretty much ignore any more of your ramblings.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by kennyc

The fact that it is digital is (once more) not the issue. It's the business model that is at fault.

This! Numbers reported from the RIAA are only useful in proving that the RIAA's business model is failing. It has no bearing on how individual artists are doing. It only shows that the corporate "music industry" is becoming obsolete now the cost of distribution has dropped to effectively nothing.

[stonetools]

IMO, going DRM-free will be best for publishers, authors and readers.

Well, at least you admit its an opinion. Earlier, you kind of asserted it as if it was revealed fact

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by MartinC

Well, of course. Published by Penguin, published by Hodder - that's got to be worth 90% of anyone's income. Mind you, I would worry more if I had an income.

Says you with your income 5 times higher than mine

[Catlady]

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.

That's horrifying. You're talking about taking a huge industry with thousands upon thousands of people of all different tastes who decide to publish thousands of books on thousands of topics, in competition with one another, and you want to whittle it down to ONE mammoth company to be the arbiter of what's "good"? Sorry, but this is just scary.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I think we know the answer now.

Thank you.

And I think we can pretty much ignore any more of your ramblings.

Buddy, you do whatever you want to do. Two can play the ignore game

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Well, at least you admit its an opinion. Earlier, you kind of asserted it as if it was revealed fact

It is, as I said, it has already been proven in the video, music and computer game industries.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Buddy, you do whatever you want to do. Two can play the ignore game

I never ignore anyone, I deal with them.

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by kennyc

And I think we can pretty much ignore any more of your ramblings.

C'mon, lighten up guys. 90% of books are still published on paper (see today's news thread).

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Harmon

The geo restrictions are indeed annoying. I went looking for At Swim-Two-Birds a couple of days ago. I have a pbook copy but want it for my EBR. One seller, in England. So I went to buy a copy. No can do, being outside the geo.

Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to the darknet we go. I was willing to pay for this book twice over, but the publisher evidently doesn't want any more of my money.

So...I should be concerned about the "morality" of the darknet? If a publisher has the book, but won't sell it to me, he is misusing and has therefore morally abandoned the protection of copyright.

Eh, the publisher do not have the right to sell to you so the publisher do not have the book.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

THank you for your serious, fact based response. At least you didn't stoop to personal attacks like some .
THere is a lot of really good data about the music business. Unforetunately , there is data that sharply contradicts your position.

While the RIAA's income has been dropping, indie musician income has been picking up. There's no way to tell how much difference there is between those, and especially no way to compare income to the musicians as opposed to income to the various producers & distributors that have traditionally taken a slice of the revenue.

One of the factors people don't talk about (in music, books, and so on) is how much revenue is "lost" to people enjoying what they already have instead of buying new content. Music, especially, is prone to this... if I buy secondhand CDs of my favorite 100 songs from my high school years, I won't be spending that money on new music. If my old favorites weren't available, I might.

Publishers don't talk about how much Project Gutenberg eats into their income, how many people aren't buying new mystery authors because now they've got easy access to all of Sherlock Holmes, which they'd always intended to read and never got around to.

There is more free ebook content available today than I can read in the rest of my life. There is more free ebook content in genres I like, by authors I like reading (although I haven't found them all), than I could finish in a lifetime. Buying *anything* is a matter of deciding to support the industry; I could read 50,000 words/day for free instead.

I didn't say I know where all that free content is. And I'd rather pay $3 for an ebook right now, than spend two hours looking for a comparably-enjoyable one for free.

The industry insiders blame digital music for the collapse in revenue. This is substantial evidence that offering DRM free music hasn't helped things.

The music industry dragged its feet about offering DRM-free music for sale, allowing a solid bootleg network to be established. It also dragged its feet on allowing sales of some songs at all (which I expect was mostly a matter of rights negotiations--not quite their fault, except failing to recognize & meet a market demand is never a good idea).

The print industry is working at following exactly in their footsteps, only slower and at a smaller scale. Which is a disaster for the publishing industry; it doesn't have the merchandising & performance aspects to cover for lost direct content sales.

Faced with such data, it is far from clear that going DRM free will lead to a healthy publishing industry. You would have to explain why a similiar collapse in revenue would not happen in the publishing industry, as people got in the habit of sharing bestsellers with all their Facebook friends. Thanks in advance for your response.

There is NO EVIDENCE that DRM-free availability leads to lost sales. There's no hard numbers (or even fuzzy soft numbers) that show that "piracy" causes any notable loss of income. Tobias Buckell has a long article about digital piracy, which more-or-less concludes, "all the studies I’ve seen demonstrate a neutral effect. I don’t buy that it helps me either, as the individual case studies also show that what you get is a neutral effect."

Originally Posted by kennyc

We're still waiting on the answer as to your motivation here.

Please answer that before we proceed further. Otherwise you are just tolling.

He's not trolling. He's been politely discussing the topic here & in the Kindle blog. If it gets a bit heated at times, well, we're all talking about subjects we care deeply about, and using loaded words to push our points.

I don't believe he works for the publishing industry. Even if he does, I don't care; the publishing industry has just as much right as I do to encourage people to believe its economic model of choice is the best one.

He's not blindly expecting people to be convinced because he keeps repeating his points; he keeps repeating them because he sees flaws in the answers he's gotten. And he's at least somewhat right--if everyone hands their favorite books around to all their friends on Facebook, those authors won't sell enough to be able to write more books.

He thinks this is likely to happen if non-DRM becomes the standard. I don't. Neither of us has solid numbers to support our claims; there's no way to track the casual sharing that does happen and relate it to sales to find out if it helps or hurts, much less speculate on how much more there would be if the locks were removed.

Doesn't mean it's pointless to discuss; maybe we'll find ways to get those numbers in the future. Recognizing the maybe-problems lets us speculate on maybe-solutions. But we should all be aware that we're discussing possibilities, not facts; we don't have enough data to discuss facts.

[stonetools]

Er, thanks, Elfwreck :-).

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Catlady

That's horrifying. You're talking about taking a huge industry with thousands upon thousands of people of all different tastes who decide to publish thousands of books on thousands of topics, in competition with one another, and you want to whittle it down to ONE mammoth company to be the arbiter of what's "good"? Sorry, but this is just scary.

No, I want to whittle it down to dozens of competing companies, who have different standards of "good," that they pitch to their target demographic customers.

One company focuses on science fiction only... for $10/month, you get a list of 100 sci-fi ebooks published in the last month that fit their standards of quality sci-fi. For an extra $5/month, you get less books, but more filtering: you only get space opera, or romantic sci-fi, or mysteries in sci-fi settings, or horror-esque stories, or so on.

Another company does romances. Another does YA novels. Another does "novels from 1st person POV." Another does nonfiction, with subgenres politics, health, technology, and self-help. And so on.

I'm not thinking of a single company; I'm pondering an industry in recommendations to replace the current publisher's name-stamp on the side of a book.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

He's not trolling. He's been politely discussing the topic here & in the Kindle blog. If it gets a bit heated at times, well, we're all talking about subjects we care deeply about, and using loaded words to push our points.

I don't believe he works for the publishing industry. Even if he does, I don't care; the publishing industry has just as much right as I do to encourage people to believe its economic model of choice is the best one.

He's not blindly expecting people to be convinced because he keeps repeating his points; he keeps repeating them because he sees flaws in the answers he's gotten. And he's at least somewhat right--if everyone hands their favorite books around to all their friends on Facebook, those authors won't sell enough to be able to write more books.

He d this is likely to happen if non-DRM becomes the standard. I don't. Neither of us has solid numbers to support our claims; there's no way to track the casual sharing that does happen and relate it to sales to find out if it helps or hurts, much less speculate on how much more there would be if the locks were removed.

Doesn't mean it's pointless to discuss; maybe we'll find ways to get those numbers in the future. Recognizing the maybe-problems lets us speculate on maybe-solutions. But we should all be aware that we're discussing possibilities, not facts; we don't have enough data to discuss facts.

Well I am not the only one asking,but I am pressing the point. As I said...I pretty sure we now know the answer. :-)

He also continues to discuss off topic and ignore the topic of discussion DRM.