People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by toddos

It's interesting to note that Amazon didn't really have a dog in the hunt when it came to music. Without their own player, there was no reason to enforce any lock-in, and so going DRM-free was an obvious choice from a store perspective.

Hang on a second. Amazon did have a dog in the hunt, didn't they? IIRC, one of the big disadvantages a DRM-free outfit like eMusic had was that the labels wouldn't make deals with them. It was those deals (and still is, to the best of my knowledge) that determined what music an online music store had to sell. Amazon might not have had a device to sell, but if they wanted to branch into the digital music space, they had to make a deal with the labels to get it done. From re-reading old news from 2007, it seems that the music industry at the time was eager to get out from under Jobs' yoke, and was willing to abandon DRM to do it. It's entirely possible, I think, that the publishing industry goes the same way, eventually.

Am I wrong to be concerned about the opposite end, though? What I mean is this: If you really wanted to have an open format that everyone could read on any device, the simplest thing in the world would be to release books in DOC or even TXT format. But then you've got another potential problem: People releasing modified versions of their favorite books and calling them their own (or at least heavily copying and pasting to plagiarize). Is that a reasonable fear, or am I just up way too late?

[OtterBooks]

I haven't seen anything really convincing from either point of view, to be honest. Both arguments utilize a combination of numbers-prognostication, comparisons to different markets where a 1-to-1 comparison of products and their respective issues is problematic, and the citing of examples from a bygone stage in the ebook market that bears little resemblance to the current one. I don't think there's any conclusive precedent or comparison useful for either side of this debate.

Either way, ebook sales are rising. Fast. Any anti-DRM argument that takes up the "Publishers are just hurting themselves" angle better be accompanied by a crystal ball, Mayan calendar, or the Book of Revelations, because the current reality doesn't support it.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

Either way, ebook sales are rising. Fast. Any anti-DRM argument that takes up the "Publishers are just hurting themselves" angle better be accompanied by a crystal ball, Mayan calendar, or the Book of Revelations, because the current reality doesn't support it.

It's not the anti-DRM crowd that insists publishers are hurting themselves. (Well, okay, we kinda do, but it's not a "oh noes! publishers must fix!" but closer to "well, if that's the kind of stupid they want to be, they're welcome to it.") It's the publishers who insist that DRM isn't working well enough for them.

One firm says ebook piracy has cost publishers $3 billion. (They counted a cluster of popular books' downloads, assumed every download was a lost sale, and multiplied it by the number of books currently available, or something like that.)

An older article estimates the damage at $600,000, and mentions Dan Brown a lot. Author David Carnoy also falls prey to the fallacy that every download is a missed royalty payment. Another bemoans the amount of time spent sending C&D and DMCA takedowns to pirate sites.

If the DRM method is working, why do they need a piracy awareness drive?

That sounds like the DRM model is failing. If the business model requires the active, consenting participation of the customers, it's got problems. If it simultaneously involves insulting the customers and accusing them of being criminals just waiting for their opportunity, it's got even bigger problems.

Ebook sales are indeed up. Plenty of small indie publishers are gleefully taking advantage of that. Superselling authors are coming out of nowhere--and non-supersellers are happily noting their 20 sales/month, hoping for a wave to catch them, but otherwise content to actually be making money they can see from their writing. (Some are, of course, less content than others.) But with all this booming sales activity, why all the panic--unless the main business model the large publishing houses have chosen doesn't work?

People don't mention Amazon & iTunes because the music industry is so similar; it's not. They mention those because every digital industry that relies on DRM, has been shot down: the only way to make DRM work is to provide an ongoing service that uses the DRM. Provide something static, and many people will insist on the right to use it on their own terms.

We--the anti-DRM crowd--are not saying, "Random House must provide me DRM-free ebooks!" We're saying, "we won't put up with DRM;" we'll either strip it or go without; in either case, Random House doesn't get whatever they thought they were paying for when they bought the DRM software.

[OtterBooks]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

One firm says ebook piracy has cost publishers $3 billion. (They counted a cluster of popular books' downloads, assumed every download was a lost sale, and multiplied it by the number of books currently available, or something like that.)

An older article estimates the damage at $600,000, and mentions Dan Brown a lot. Author David Carnoy also falls prey to the fallacy that every download is a missed royalty payment. Another bemoans the amount of time spent sending C&D and DMCA takedowns to pirate sites.

The first claim does seem rather silly. Looks like everyone is looking for evidence to support their (often pre-existing) opinion, and lo and behold, everyone is finding it.

What ultimately will matter is whether or not people care, and I don't think many do. That isn't an argument for it, because maybe they should care, but they don't appear to. Not a single person I've broached the subject with has ever even heard the term "agency pricing." They don't think about the industry; they don't boycott publishers (most people I know couldn't even tell you who published the last book they read) or worry about the finer points of intellectual property; they just buy books and read them.

I personally do not care about DRM on my ebooks or feel restricted by it in any way. I differ from most DRM-apathetic folks in that I'm aware of it and the arguments against it, and I've made an informed decision to not give a crap. I appreciate that others have a different experience. Then again, I mostly use my ereader for public domain material (with the occasional purchase here and there), and any book I truly value I buy in hardcover. I still <3 physical books.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

Hang on a second. Amazon did have a dog in the hunt, didn't they? IIRC, one of the big disadvantages a DRM-free outfit like eMusic had was that the labels wouldn't make deals with them. It was those deals (and still is, to the best of my knowledge) that determined what music an online music store had to sell. Amazon might not have had a device to sell, but if they wanted to branch into the digital music space, they had to make a deal with the labels to get it done. From re-reading old news from 2007, it seems that the music industry at the time was eager to get out from under Jobs' yoke, and was willing to abandon DRM to do it. It's entirely possible, I think, that the publishing industry goes the same way, eventually.

Yeah, I meant that Amazon didn't have their own digital music player, so they had no interest in lock-in. Since from a store perspective DRM and closed formats are only useful if you're trying to get people to buy your own device (for example, a Kindle ...), I don't think that was really a priority for them. In fact, from their perspective as a store selling to any and all mp3 players, the more standard and open the format the better. If anybody could buy music from Amazon and play it not only on an iPod or Zune but also a Sansa, iRiver, Creative Zen, Windows PC, Mac, Linux PC, etc, that broadens their target market. When you add in the fact that the record labels really, really wanted to get away from Apple and Steve Jobs (the way movie and tv companies are trying to get away from Netflix right now), they were in an obviously weak negotiating position. Still, given that the main anti-music-DRM manifesto came from Jobs, I'm sure if things worked out differently and Amazon didn't get into the game Apple still would've gone DRM-free eventually. Once Amazon and Apple did it, everybody else followed suit.

The problem right now is that everybody has their own device and wants to lock in the customers. Amazon isn't going to be helpful this time around because they want closed, locked down formats to keep people buying Kindles, and they're expanding their market not by opening up their ebooks and letting anybody use them but instead by making Kindle apps available virtually everywhere (iOS, Android, and WP7 smartphones and tablets, PCs, Macs, etc). Ironically, Apple might be our best hope for ebooks because their iBooks store is not doing so well. If they realize they could sell iBooks to Nook users, Kobo users, Sony users, Aldiko/Stanza/FBReader/BlueFire/etc users as well as iBooks users, they might come around. They already have the open format (epub), they just need to kick the DRM. And preferably the agency pricing model, but Apple got us into that mess in the first place.

Originally Posted by bhartman36

Am I wrong to be concerned about the opposite end, though? What I mean is this: If you really wanted to have an open format that everyone could read on any device, the simplest thing in the world would be to release books in DOC or even TXT format. But then you've got another potential problem: People releasing modified versions of their favorite books and calling them their own (or at least heavily copying and pasting to plagiarize). Is that a reasonable fear, or am I just up way too late?

DOC is certainly not an open format, and TXT has limited formatting capabilities. Epub is already a standardized, open format based on standardized, open technology that anyone can easily implement, so that's step one.

I'm not sure I'd worry too much about derivative works any more than I'd worry about people remixing or sampling mp3s. It happens (videos get pulled from youtube all the time for music-based copyright violation), but it's certainly not big business.

99.995% of the people just want to consume, not create. Those that do want to create generally want to create on their own, not steal. There will always be the odd bootleggers and counterfeiters (China is notorious for this), but dropping DRM from ebooks is not going to increase that type of theft, just as DRM doesn't diminish it today.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Look you said that the success of Itunes proves that offering non DRM content doesn't depress digital sales. I said that the revenue of the recording industry halved during that period, proving that offering Non DRM content didn't really do anything for the financial health of industry. You said that was irrelevant. I guess the treatment is successful, even if the patient dies. What more is there to say?

Let me try to explain my point again.

There are two issues here.

(1) Whether the existence of digital versions of traditionally physical objects will have a negative impact on an industry

(2) Whether applying DRM to the digital products will increase or decrease or have no effect on the sales of those digital products

The publishing and music industry cannot affect (1). The digital versions exist whether they like it or not. It seems that the existence of easily copied digital versions of music may have had a negative impact on music industry sales. There's a particularly good look at the US music business here: http://www.businessinsider.com/these...ndustry-2011-2
It will be interesting to see what the 2010 figures are, when the RIAA release them.

Whether the decline in the music industry CD sales is down to the availability of digital music is anyone's guess.

But all this is irrelevant to the second issue, which is what your question was about: whether DRM will help or hinder digital sales.

Here the available data is clear. Dropping DRM in 2008/9 did no harm at all to digital music sales. Here's a chart made from the RIAA's own data:



In 2009 digital single and album download continued their steep rise uninterrupted.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Er, my point was never that inhibited sales: my point was that large scale casual sharing would happen in the absence of DRM and make it unprofitable for publishers and authors.
So far I have seen no convincing argument that it won't happen, and plenty of evidence from the music industry that it will.

If dropping DRM doesn't inhibit sales, who cares about casual sharing?

with DRM: I sell 100 copies, 100 people read it
without DRM: I sell 100 copies, 1,000 people read it

I see the same income either way, but I have a potentially larger audience for my next book without DRM.

Your argument can only make sense if you are arguing that dropping DRM will inhibit sales.

The evidence from the music industry is that dropping DRM did not inhibit sales.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

If you really wanted to have an open format that everyone could read on any device, the simplest thing in the world would be to release books in DOC or even TXT format. But then you've got another potential problem: People releasing modified versions of their favorite books and calling them their own (or at least heavily copying and pasting to plagiarize). Is that a reasonable fear, or am I just up way too late?

It's not a reasonable fear. And in any case, DRM doesn't prevent it. And DC and TXT are terrible formats for an ebook. ePub without DRM is an easily-editable format.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

I personally do not care about DRM on my ebooks or feel restricted by it in any way. I differ from most DRM-apathetic folks in that I'm aware of it and the arguments against it, and I've made an informed decision to not give a crap. I appreciate that others have a different experience. Then again, I mostly use my ereader for public domain material (with the occasional purchase here and there), and any book I truly value I buy in hardcover. I still <3 physical books.

You are aware the the potential problems with DRM, but you are not worried about them because you have no significant investment in DRMed ebooks.

I am not personally worried about DRM problems because I don't buy DRMed ebooks if I can't strip the DRM, and I do that as soon as I've bought them.

(I do have personal experience of DRM problems. Without DRM stripping, I would have lost access to a few tens of ebooks. Most in the Overdrive withdrawal from Fictionwise, some from the HarperCollins and CyberRead shutdowns.)

I am worried about DRM for naïve customers, and even for the publishers and retailers. It's an accident just waiting to happen.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

the Big 6 publishers, and the DRM-heavy ebookstores, absolutely refuse to release any hard data about sales.

That's a shame, because it would give us a good idea about the percentage of unauthorised downloads compared to authorised ones. Judging by figures I looked at on one of the more famous pirate sites, and that book being in the top 100 chart for all Kindle books for 230 days, I would guess it at a very low single figure percentage.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

Looks like everyone is looking for evidence to support their (often pre-existing) opinion, and lo and behold, everyone is finding it.

Most of the research that has been carried out on piracy has been funded by one or more branch of the entertainment industry. There hasn't been much in the way of independent research, but it came as no surprise to me to find that what little independent research there was completely contradicted the findings of the entertainment industry funded research.

That research has been completely ignored by the mainstream news media, who still regularly trot out the "$6billion in lost income every second" idea as if it would even be possible for that much extra money to be floating around the economy.

[John F]

People who start a thread with "people are impractical dreamers" in the title are impractical dreamers.

Discuss.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I still get that now when I'm in my biker gear. I hate to imagine how many suit-wearing shoplifters they will be missing while they're following me around.

A lot.

Shoplifters are not stupid. Not the good ones. Years ago, in a store I managed, I had a couple of guys come in who seemed to me to be together, but entered separately and acted as if they didn't know, or even see, each other. One was a scruffy hispanic guy who acted suspiciously; the other was a clean-cut anglo guy who didn't. So I watched the anglo guy ... and nailed him when he tried to pocket something pricey. They were trying to play on my prejudice, or what they assumed was my prejudice, so I would watch the "bait" guy, and it didn't work.

Stupid shoplifters are like any other sort of stupid criminal, easy to catch. Smart shoplifters don't look like shoplifters, and they can empty a place out while the staff are looking for the stupid kind, and seeing them even when they're not there.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I just put Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo into a Google search box and went 5 pages down without finding aan illegal book site.

You know what the problem with declaring as fact things which are not actually facts? Anyone here can call you on it. See the post after yours.

My Google-fu is clearly better than yours. I put "girl with the dragon tattoo" ebook download into Google and my first hit was an illegal download site. So were several others on the first page of hits, all loudly proclaiming they were free. I think our hypothetical pirate can manage to type "ebook" and "download" if needed to get to the illegal ones.

[DiapDealer]

I think our hypothetical pirate can manage to type "ebook" and "download" if needed to get to the illegal ones.

Who's this Don Load of which you speak?