People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[Worldwalker]

As far as recommendations, how about something like Amazon's recommendation engine? I've found that very accurate (it should be; I spent ages training it) but it tends to hit books I've already read, since there aren't a whole lot of books that fit my requirements that I haven't read yet. It would be great if something like Smashwords had that, geared to indie ebooks -- with quality as one of the parameters. Actually, I'd pay for that. Let's say it added 50 cents to the price of an ebook, that going to pay for the recommendation engine -- I'd pay that without a second thought, if it was as good as Amazon's system, which is basically dead on. It's worth that to me to find good ebooks I want to read. Of course, this would require having someone actually read the book in question, which might be an issue with a lot of ebooks that only sell a few dozen copies ... but then again, if something was rated high quality (the higher the quality, the more reading would be required; you can spot suck pretty quickly) its sales would probably skyrocket, which could be a win all around -- not least in encouraging authors to produce higher-quality ebooks.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by stonetools

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

Hrumph. I didn't just pick an opinion out of the air, and I have backed it up with hard data. I have yet to see any data from you.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

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.

We can look at the music industry's digital sales since DRM was removed in 2008. Oh — sales have continued to increase in much the same way as before.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

The standard response by the pro-DRM people is "anyone who opposes DRM is just one of those 'entitled' people who wants everything for free." They're missing something critical: we can already get it for free.

+1

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm an individual reader who'd like to be able to say he hated DRM, but it really doesn't affect me. Removing DRM has become second nature.

+1. But it's still an irritation. And it will still be bad for the industry when a large number of people get burned by it. Anyone remember Microsoft's "PlaysForSure"?

Originally Posted by stonetools

The average user doesn't give a damn about DRM. If they did, we would see rapidly falling sales of ebook sales and ereader devices. Instead we see rapidly RISING sales of ebooks and ereaders.
[SNIP]
It seems clear that there is no definitive answer to my question. Whats also clear is that the digerati wants the publishing industry to take a leap of faith into the dark, based on the digerati's earnest assurances that ending DRM would have no effect on revenue. Its not surprising that the publishing industry won't be taking that leap.

On the first paragraph, you are making a basic error. eBooks are just moving out of the early adopter stage. It would be astounding if sales were not rising fast. Perhaps, without DRM, sales would be rising faster. And also, perhaps, if there were not DRM-removal tools, sales would not be rising as fast as they are.

As to the second, I think I've given a definitive answer, and you have simply ignored it, not replying to the data I provided, and then dismissing my views as just an opinion.

Originally Posted by Catlady

The average user is NOT OK with DRM, because he or she doesn't yet even know about it.

+1

[wyndslash]

giving consumers more choices is a win-win situation for all. while you may have a group of dedicated pirates, you will have a larger base of honest customers who just want to read and be able to also read on their other devices. the dedicated pirates will always be pirates, no matter what you do. you cannot satisfy them because they just want to get it for free. however, trying to be the "good" guy and giving consumers more choices through DRM-free books keeps them happy and they will buy more. well, that is my opinion, anyway plus, i'd think there'd be more sympathizers with the so-called book industry being plagued by pirates

[kaleissin]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Yet you (and im sure , most people on the forum) still lock your doors

I have lived in places where nobody locked their doors. Nothing was ever stolen.

[Worldwalker]

I'm not going to go dig through pages of posts to find the exact one to quote unless I need to, just respond to it. Specifically, to the publisher's spokesman who said that their DRM-locked ebooks did not appear on the darknet, only scans of their pbooks. Aside from questions of how he knows -- he's trying to prove a negative there -- that leads to two possibilities:

1. Pirates can't share DRM-locked ebooks.

2. Pirates won't share DRM-locked ebooks.

We can dispose of #1 in a matter of seconds. DRM removal is not only easy, it's trivially easy for a technically competent person -- and in this case, "technically competent" is "capable of finding and running a script". There are many people on MobileRead who buy DRM-locked ebooks and simply strip the DRM. There is no technical reason why a DRM'd ebook would not be copied. It's not even hard.

So we now have #2, the idea that pirates choose not to share DRM-locked ebooks. That is equally unlikely. If it was true, the DRM would be functioning as a "keep off the grass" sign, respected by each and every possible pirate. The people, remember, with that sense of entitlement, the people who want everything for free. Have you stopped laughing yet? Okay, good. Now where was I? Oh, yes. The idea that pirates would choose not to share DRM-locked ebooks, and dismissing that concept in gales of laughter.

So we've dismissed both possible ways in which DRM would be preventing sharing of that company's books. "Can't" clearly doesn't work*, and "don't" is just silly. Since either interpretation of what that fellow said is impossible, that leads to the only alternative: if your premise leads logically to impossible conclusions, your premise is broken.

In other words, he's not telling the truth. His company's ebooks do appear among shared files. Maybe he doesn't know this. Maybe he doesn't know how to find them. Maybe he has some ulterior motive for wanting to pretend DRM is preventing file sharing in the face of clear evidence that it isn't. But when he says that DRM prevents pirates -- that "10%" -- from copying and redistributing his company's ebooks, he's wrong.


*If it really becomes necessary to prove this to publishers' reps, I can rummage up some old story, set up an Amazon account, post the story with Amazon's DRM, and authorize MobileRead members to share it with the world and with the torrents. Does anyone here really believe that if I linked something I'd written and said "here, go ahead and strip the DRM and spread that file around", MR members would be incapable of doing so?

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I must say, that this and many other posts seem to be saying "DRM is an annoyance to me.

That's only part of it but certainly an important aspect, yes.

They should get rid of it and if it means that the livelihods of people in the publishing industry are undermined, well, f**k 'em. "

No, that's not the argument at all. It's more like "I am not going to buy this crap, and just so you know why". I believe it's called "voting with your wallet".

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The average user doesn't give a damn about DRM. If they did, we would see rapidly falling sales of ebook sales and ereader devices. Instead we see rapidly RISING sales of ebooks and ereaders. And the most popular device? The Amazon Kindle, which has a proprietary format AND the most restrictive DRM. So all of the digerati who profess solicitude for the average user, relax: the average user is OK with DRM.

As long as you buy from the website you are supposed to buy from, DRM is invisible. So if you have a Kindle and only want to buy from Amazon you won't even notice it unless you want to fix the hundreds of spelling mistakes for the next time you want to read it.

It would only be a problem if you wanted to buy from another website because they were cheaper or they had a better formatted ebook (like the Leisure series which are available as properly formatted epubs elsewhere, but only in crappy Topaz format on Amazon).

DRM would stop you from doing that, but nothing else. Even then it's often easier to find and download a DRM-removed-and-converted version than to buy it and do it yourself.

I can understand why Amazon would want DRM to stop people from buying from the wrong websites, but I don't really see what's in it for the publishers when it means they have to refuse a sale. Once someone finds out how easy it is to get free books how likely are they to return to paying for them?

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by kaleissin

I have lived in places where nobody locked their doors. Nothing was ever stolen.

This varies highly by area. If you lived in a high-crime area, it would be foolish to leave your doors unlocked. The Internet can be thought of as a high-crime area, in the sense that if you leave your e-books unlocked, you know they're going to be pirated.

DRM obviously doesn't stop all piracy from happening. But it does stop the casual person from giving an e-book to 500 of their closest friends. You can never stop all piracy. All you can do is make it a little harder.

Having said that, what we have right now is a broken system. Not because of the DRM, necessarily, but because the different players involved can't agree on the formats and DRM. If I could transfer an e-book to whichever device I wanted, regardless of the vendor, why would I give a rip about DRM? What should actually happen is that the e-book and reader devices should both have licenses that identify me as the owner. As long as those licenses match, the e-book should be displayed. Such a system would allow people to transfer e-books to different devices, negating one of the arguments against DRM. (See previous paragraph.)

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

So we now have #2, the idea that pirates choose not to share DRM-locked ebooks. That is equally unlikely. If it was true, the DRM would be functioning as a "keep off the grass" sign, respected by each and every possible pirate. The people, remember, with that sense of entitlement, the people who want everything for free. Have you stopped laughing yet? Okay, good. Now where was I? Oh, yes. The idea that pirates would choose not to share DRM-locked ebooks, and dismissing that concept in gales of laughter.

There are people, mostly old-timers, who still refuse to (re-)post DRM-liberated books. Just as there are people who won't post any comic scans from something published less than a year ago, or music that is still commercially available, or fansubs for anything that has had an official translation.

Not so many these days, but there are still a few. They used to be the majority. Which isn't as daft as it sounds, because only a real fan would spend hours making digital versions of real-world items. And no real fan would want to destroy the industry they love so much by doing it.

I'm not sure when all that changed. Probably with cable modems came file collectors who would just download everything in sight. Then some of those became unauthorised content producers and it all turned into a race to see who would be the first to "release" something.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

What should actually happen is that the e-book and reader devices should both have licenses that identify me as the owner. As long as those licenses match, the e-book should be displayed. Such a system would allow people to transfer e-books to different devices, negating one of the arguments against DRM. (See previous paragraph.)

Be careful what you wish for. That's the basic idea behind moving everything to online storage and charging people to stream it to one of their devices. In a lot of ways, when that happens it will be much worse than DRM.

[sufue]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

But it does stop the casual person from giving an e-book to 500 of their closest friends.

But this assumes the casual person WANTS to give it to 500 of their closest friends...once again treating customers more like potential criminals.

Although I'm honest now, treat me like a criminal long/bad enough, and I might just decide that I might as well become one...

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Be careful what you wish for. That's the basic idea behind moving everything to online storage and charging people to stream it to one of their devices. In a lot of ways, when that happens it will be much worse than DRM.

You've got a point there. I should've specified local storage.

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by sufue

But this assumes the casual person WANTS to give it to 500 of their closest friends...once again treating customers more like potential criminals.

Although I'm honest now, treat me like a criminal long/bad enough, and I might just decide that I might as well become one...

I don't think that argument makes any sense. It's like arguing that security cameras encourage theft. The reason I stated the idea the way I did was because it should be invisible to the user unless they tried to give a file to their friends. Absent that act, they wouldn't notice the mechanism, just like the DRM on an Kindle book you bought is invisible if all you try to read them on is Kindle devices that you own.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I care that the content is within my range of interest, which is why I started branching out from traditional publishers. And most of the fanfic I read is better edited than a lot of published books; I've given up on the belief that "professional publisher" means "quality editing."

And yet they fail to provide me with 80,000 words of funny RPG anecodotes. The M/M erotica in the Big 6 is also sparse, and the selection in the indie houses is of random quality levels; they haven't all sorted out editorial standards, and the market is so niche that they don't know how to advertise to people who're selective within it.

It didn't used to be; that's changing. A lot of newer authors are noticing that there's not a whole lot of incentive for (1) signing over 70-90% of the cover price to someone else, for the entire sales life of the book, and (2) waiting three years between an agreement of "this is good" and income starting to get to the author.

By going the trad publishing route, the author has a chance of catching you as a customer. By skipping it and self-pubbing, the author has a chance of catching me as a customer. As things currently stand, no author is going to get both of us as paying readers. (I dunno... do you buy self-published books that were reclaimed by the authors after the initial print run expired?)

Since the big publishing houses are never going to cover the range of books I'm interested in--at least, not anytime soon, because the print market for them is too tiny--I'm looking for ways to find good content.

I could just skip paid books altogether and read fanfic. That genre, I know how to find the good stuff for, and it's practically infinite. It'd probably keep me happy for many many years, but I wouldn't be supporting any authors by paying them. Well, except for the handful of fanfic authors who go pro.

You originally seemed to be advocating the extinction of the major publishers in favor of self-publishing-with-filters; now you're talking about niche publishing that can coexist with major publishers.

Fine, if the self-publishers want to attempt to create some order and meet certain standards to tap their potential markets. They would, in effect, be banding together create an entity that would act like a clearinghouse.

But that is not a replacement for mainstream publishers, only an adjunct to them.

[sufue]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Be careful what you wish for. That's the basic idea behind moving everything to online storage and charging people to stream it to one of their devices. In a lot of ways, when that happens it will be much worse than DRM.

That's for sure....