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Old 08-14-2013, 03:40 AM   #1
Alexander Turcic
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Kindle store: Indies avoid DRM to reach wider audience

Bufo Calvin from the I Love My Kindle blog analyzed the currently top 100 selling e-books in the Kindle store and made an interesting observation:

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Nineteen of the most popular books in the Kindle store have been released without DRM.

Just based on my quick survey in putting this together, it tended to be independents (of course…only Tor, among the big publishers, is publishing without DRM), and they tended to be “progressive” in other ways (allowing lending, not blocking text-to-speech access). [...]

Indies may be using this to give themselves a competitive advantage over tradpubs (traditional publishers)…and they may simply be trying to extend their reach by selling in the Kindle store to people who don’t use Kindles (but do need to be somewhat sophisticated in terms of technology).
An increasing number of e-book vendors have discovered the added value in selling books DRM-free. Perhaps all it would take is one big vendor - Amazon perhaps? - to decide to go DRM-free to make DRM go away for all and forever.

Last edited by Alexander Turcic; 08-14-2013 at 03:44 AM.
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Old 08-14-2013, 04:23 AM   #2
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DRM is no big deal for me. I have a Kindle and get most of my books from the Kindle store. I'm quite happy with this arrangement and see no need to change.
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:00 AM   #3
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DRM is no big deal for me. I have a Kindle and get most of my books from the Kindle store. I'm quite happy with this arrangement and see no need to change.
DRM implies that you are a criminal, that you cannot be trusted to own a piece of electronica without sharing it, without depriving Amazon of money. They do not care about their workers, they do not care about their customers, they do not care about anything - except their profit.

Be a sheep. When copyrighted items are removed from your Kindle by Amazon, with or without cause, may you be happy then.
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:23 AM   #4
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For publishers (of books, video games, etc.) it still seems to be counter-intuitive to release their products without copy protections and DRM, because there is that belief that if it can easily be copied, it will be. The video games industry has been making that claim for many years, but it never stopped piracy, nor did it drive companies into bankruptcy, and there is the credible theory that the majority of people who pirate games wouldn't pay for them anyway: they'd just pirate something else that is pirate-able.

It's pretty simple, though. The best protection is the fact that someone paid money for something. Most people who hand over cash for e-books just aren't like to distribute their books, precisely because they paid for them ("and so can others"). More importantly, though, DRM doesn't even help. Those who have multiple devices liberate their books anyway, and those who use only one device don't care either way because DRM or not makes no difference to them. Plus, those who don't want to pay for books find ways around it, either by reading classics or reading in the shadows.

The shadows will always exist unless we get a privacy-void Big Brother situation where we can't read books without connecting to an authorization server, and even then someone would probably find ways to extract the text of a book and make it available outside of the controlled environment (especially then). A resource-intense struggle that wastes money and effort.

What DRM is good at, though, is discouraging customers from spending money. For example, I spent several hundreds on the iBooks store when I mostly read on the iPad. DRM wasn't a problem, I only used that one device. Then I picked up an e-ink reader, and now suddenly I couldn't read the books I had paid for on an alternate device. The person who provided the means to tackle that problem had retired the project, and suddenly I found myself with enslaved books. My solution? I re-bought some of the e-books that I found essential and I haven't spent another cent on iBooks since, and I won't. (I guess for the publishers of those re-bought books this was a good deal. For the vendor, here: Apple, not so much.)

There is also the danger of people developing the mindset of "if I have to do something illegal [circumventing DRM], I may as well do it properly", in which case they then don't spend any money. The more effort it requires to do something that you feel you shouldn't have to do in the first place (here: enabling your books to be read on all your devices) the more likely that is to happen. Luckily for publishers, Alf needs little food and attention.

Rambling summarized: Selling e-books without DRM is a plus and probably increases sales, just like the blogger claims.
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:30 AM   #5
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Originally Posted by bookmole View Post
DRM implies that you are a criminal, that you cannot be trusted to own a piece of electronica without sharing it, without depriving Amazon of money. They do not care about their workers, they do not care about their customers, they do not care about anything - except their profit.

Be a sheep. When copyrighted items are removed from your Kindle by Amazon, with or without cause, may you be happy then.
Lol, Amazon cares about their customers most of all --- and that is how it should be. Employees should be treated fairly, but work hard. Nothing wrong with that. For those who want a companies employees to make more money, be don't go bargain hunting. Be willing to spend more, you the customer must pay for it. And publishers request DRM, not Amazon. I would love to see DRM be dead and burried, but as long as I can easily remove it I don't get excited about it.
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:44 AM   #6
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I would love to see DRM be dead and burried, but as long as I can easily remove it I don't get excited about it.
Removing it requires you to break the law, though. Does that matter on a practical level? No, not really, and that is why it's a farce. But circumventing copy protection essentially makes you (collective "you": us) a criminal. That's my issue with DRM, that it "forces" me to break the law in order to do something that I "should" be able to do: reading my purchased books on any of my reading devices, if I hypothetically wanted to do that. ()

BM's point was that DRM means that you don't really "own" an e-book you buy, only a license to read it, and with specific conditions that could be changed. Amazon can remove the book from your device. Will they? Extremely unlikely. But should they be able to do that after you paid money?
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:47 AM   #7
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From an author's point of view, I don't see any advantages to DRM. People who will pirate my books are intent on not spending money on supporting artists. That's how they are and one might as well get over it altogether. If a book is published with DRM, they're just going to wait until the protection is cracked, and even if it were possible to ward off hackers, there would still be the option to take screenshots and run them through OCR. Supposing no geek could find a way to automate the process, it still wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to have a shareable copy available. I also don't want to reduce my readers' option to read books on any of their devices they want. Like reading mainly on a dedicated ereader and being able to have a copy on their smartphone for when they're stuck in their dentist's waiting room.

As a music lover, I wouldn't buy albums in any other form than DRM-free mp3 for the same grounds that I can archive and play them wherever I want; one reason I'll never by an Apple product as long as they maintain their current policy.

I can tolerate DRM in video games but it's still a major hassle when I delete a Steam game and then have to re-download several Go's if I want to play it again several month later. I'm a lot more supportive of studios who choose to go DRM free, like CD Projekt RED. They tried fighting piracy at first when they released Witcher 2 but ended up having what seem like a sincere change of heart when they released it without protection on GOG. It's also worth pointing out that like in the book industry, protection can be applied by distributors.
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Old 08-14-2013, 05:59 AM   #8
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Removing it requires you to break the law, though. Does that matter on a practical level? No, not really, and that is why it's a farce. But circumventing copy protection essentially makes you (collective "you": us) a criminal. That's my issue with DRM, that it "forces" me to break the law in order to do something that I "should" be able to do: reading my purchased books on any of my reading devices, if I hypothetically wanted to do that. ()

BM's point was that DRM means that you don't really "own" an e-book you buy, only a license to read it, and with specific conditions that could be changed. Amazon can remove the book from your device. Will they? Extremely unlikely. But should they be able to do that after you paid money?
You are breaking the law if you are driving 51 in a 50 km/h zone. Breaking DRM (which isn't even illegal in many places for personal use) is a similarly "evil" offense. I understand what you are saying and generally agree with it. But since I can read what I want on the device I want and archive my ebooks I prefer this option to not getting the books I want just to take a stand. Call me pragmatic, I wouldn't buy ebooks if I couldn't remove DRM. Amazon can remove the books from a Kindle (if you sync with the server!), not from my Kobo. But even if I had a Kindle I could just reload the books I have removed the DRM from.

Now those that actually had the "1984" book removed from their Kindles got a pretty sweet deal. Anyway, blame the publishers, not Amazon for DRM.

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Old 08-14-2013, 06:11 AM   #9
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You are breaking the law if you are driving 51 in a 50 km/h zone. Breaking DRM (which isn't even illegal in many places for personal use) is a similarly "evil" offense. I understand what you are saying and generally agree with it. But since I can read what I want on the device I want and archive my ebooks I prefer this option to not getting the books I want just to take a stand. Call me pragmatic, I wouldn't buy ebooks if I couldn't remove DRM. Amazon can remove the books from a Kindle (if you sync with the server!), not from my Kobo. But even if I had a Kindle I could just reload the books I have removed the DRM from.
Pragmatic in the same sense when you download a book illegally that you cannot buy. I think that is exactly the same as driving 51 km/h in your example.
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Old 08-14-2013, 06:28 AM   #10
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Be a sheep.
...I'm a monkey

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When copyrighted items are removed from your Kindle by Amazon, with or without cause, may you be happy then.
They can't reach into my hard drive
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Old 08-14-2013, 06:54 AM   #11
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They can't reach into my hard drive
Yet. The day will come when the publishers insist that being able to examine the content of hard drives is necessary to enforce their copyright and some lawyer will create a compelling enough case that a technologically-ignorant judge will grant it.

If the government can already examine many aspects of your life without your permission and without a legitimate court order (kangaroo courts need not apply), what makes you think your hard drive is sacred?
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Old 08-14-2013, 06:58 AM   #12
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As the article clearly states, it is not up to Amazon whether a book is DRM'ED or not; it is up to the publisher. So they can't choose to abolish DRM.
And as the article points out, indie publishers correctly see DRM-free as added value. So do readers, even those without Pavlovian reactions to the very mention of the term.
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Old 08-14-2013, 07:21 AM   #13
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As the article clearly states, it is not up to Amazon whether a book is DRM'ED or not; it is up to the publisher. So they can't choose to abolish DRM.
Well they can. If Amazon does not allow DRM then publishers will not stop selling books through Amazon.
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Old 08-14-2013, 07:27 AM   #14
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Well they can. If Amazon does not allow DRM then publishers will not stop selling books through Amazon.
Perhaps. But obviouly DRM doens't worry Amazon enough for them to risk it.
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Old 08-14-2013, 07:32 AM   #15
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If Amazon does not allow DRM then publishers will not stop selling books through Amazon.
Yes they can.
(That is how the BPHs forced them to submit to the conspiracy and how they forced them to make TTS optional, at publishers' discretion.)

They can also lodge a "valid" antitrust complaint with the Feds.
Keep an eye on Apple to see why Amazon is careful to steer clear of annoying *them*.

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