

More on DRM and ebooks - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/more-on-drm-and-ebooks.html

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gamble
I'm surprised that he doesn't address the effect of DRM on Amazon's infamous
$9.99 pricing strategy.

Part of the reason the government went after the publishers and Apple rather
than Amazon, even though Amazon has a near-monopoly on ebook sales, is the
they tend to believe that predatory pricing is inherently self-limiting,
whereas cartels directly and immediately harm consumers. No one in the
physical book retailing world would mark every hardcover in their store down
to $9.99. Sure, it would drive a lot of customers into the store, but there
would be no lasting value. Eventually they would be forced to raise prices and
customers would go elsewhere.

Amazon is only interested in selling ebooks at a loss because it establishes a
Kindle monopoly. Kindle can only have a monopoly because DRM represents a huge
barrier to entry. When they eventually raise retail prices to a sustainable
level, DRM ensures that anyone with an existing Kindle library won't be as
price-sensitive as someone who can easily decamp to a competing platform. If
the publishers drop DRM now they remove the incentive for Amazon to engage in
predatory pricing.

~~~
fpgeek
Not entirely. There's still plenty of path-dependence in a DRM-free world. For
instance, iTunes still dominates digital music despite many things Amazon has
tried (exclusive sales, Cloud Player, free credit, ...). Aggressive pricing
may still be worth it to entrench Kindle as the default, even if customers can
easily leave.

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acabal
I've been saying it for a while: the publishing industry right now is where
the music industry was ~3 years ago. The cycle is going to be exactly the
same. At one point big music figured out that removing DRM let them sell more
songs, and they finally dropped it. It looks like publishers are starting to
realize the same thing. About time, too--I have an ereader that I like to use
but I refuse to buy DRM ebooks on principle, and the selection of unread
Gutenberg books is growing rather slim :)

Eventually publishers will also bring down the prices of their books ($10-$15
for an ebook? Really?) and discover that they can bring in even more profit.
But that discovery is a year or two down the line still.

Thanks Charlie for giving them an eloquent and firm nudge in the right
direction!

~~~
yuhong
So what led MPAA to create and lobby for SOPA?

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cstross
MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America.

(Films, in other words.)

RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America.

(Music.)

There's no equivalent that I know of for publishers.

These are all separate industries and organizations, not some kind of multi-
headed hydra that acts and thinks in unison. So, in this context, your
question makes no sense.

~~~
yuhong
Referring to this:

"I've been saying it for a while: the publishing industry right now is where
the music industry was ~3 years ago. The cycle is going to be exactly the
same. At one point big music figured out that removing DRM let them sell more
songs, and they finally dropped it. It looks like publishers are starting to
realize the same thing. "

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sheff
This will definitely make me buy more Tor books.

I'm one of the "voracious" readers that Charlie mentions and while I really
like the Kindle DX hardware, I'm increasingly concerned at being tied into an
Amazon ecosystem long term.

Baen, O'Reilly , Pragmatic Programmers and Fictionwise are some of the places
I look for new books for my Kindle before Amazon these days, as they have DRM
free titles.

~~~
so_says
I went with a Nook Touch instead of a Kindle, because it is very easy to get
your hands on standard epub and load them at will. Loading e-books from
outside the Amazon ecosystem can be done, but it is a cumbersome process at
best. The Nook feels less tied to the B&N ecosystem than the Kindle is to
Amazon. This is true for Sony and possibly Kobo as well, but I prefer the Nook
as a device.

~~~
StavrosK
Cumbersome? I just select the epub in Calibre and press D. It could hardly be
easier, in my opinion. Hell, the kindle doesn't even need to be plugged in...

~~~
so_says
I think needing software for conversion is a barrier to the common user.

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throwaway64
I hope publishers have begun to realize that proprietary DRM only furthers the
lock-in of parties like Apple and Amazon, and makes it even harder to resist
their bargaining power, because now millions of your customers have huge
libraries that only are readable on $COMPANY_DEVICE, therefore they are much
more likely to buy that device in the future, and you will be forced to sell
through them.

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aristus
As a publisher I am able to opt out of DRM with all the majors like Amazon and
Apple, but there is no indication that my book is DRM-free, nor a way to
search for DRM-free books on their stores. I wish there were.

I can imagine a scene in the next book about that kind of stuff...

"Here you go," said Count Modulo, "That is the lock, and that is the key."

"So the key opens the lock?" Lauren asked.

"Oh yes, but you can't open it."

"Why not?"

"Because it's locked, dear child. See?" [demonstrates.]

"But you also gave me the key!"

"Well, yes, _technically_ you could use the key, but you mustn't do anything
that silly..."

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runevault
Be very interesting to see if this spreads to the rest of Macmillan after a
trial period, as well as if the other publishers will react similarly.

No matter what, though, this is a good sign and motivates me to make sure I
pick up more Tor books.

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whatusername
Of course -- in the comments on the tor.com article: "Worldwide distribution
is a much harder problem. Most of our contracts with authors grant us rights
only in certain territories; we can't just unilaterally rewrite existing
agreements."

I'm really interested to see what they do with a Memory of Light (the final
wheel of time book). Brandon Sanderson has been pushing for things like
getting a free ebook when you purchase the hardcover, but when I saw him in
melb a few weeks ago he was saying those kind of solutions where more for his
own books. WoT was too big a deal for TOR to play around with.

------
veidr
Wow, that is a terriffic post, from the perspective of explaining the issue to
a person who doesn't just intuitively _get it_ why DRM encumberance is
obviously bad for both consumer and publisher (e.g. 99% of readers here).

I wondered how long it would take the industry to get it that the only thing
allowing Amazon to achieve its Herculean e-book dominance over book publishers
was the DRM. The DRM obviously serves Amazon much more than the publishers --
and that would be the case even if the publishers' naive belief that DRM
effectively prevents piracy were true.

Probably more publishers will start to get it after seeing the results of
Tor's experiment.

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fpgeek
Has anyone from Tor / Macmillan said anything about what will happen to past
purchases? Ideally it would be as simple as re-downloading from
Kindle/Nook/etc to get a DRM-free copy, but I worry it won't be.

~~~
ghshephard
That's not the publisher's responsibility, but the distributor
(Amazon/Apple/B&N). This is how the distributors will win our business - by
offering us great services in addition to the actual content.

Think of how Apple will now let you re-download every TV Show you ever
purchased from them onto your iPad. Likewise, Amazon will hopefully do a deal
with the publishers that will let their customers re-download all the books
they've purchased (in DRM-free format)

~~~
fpgeek
In theory, you're right and this is the distributor's responsibility. However,
as we've seen with the agency model, even Amazon ends up taking the
distribution terms large publishers give them. Most publishers (and, in
particular, all of the large publishers) are the ones who insisted on DRM in
the first place. They're the ones who are going to end up handling the
aftermath.

Speaking of Apple, so far as I know, no one got their DRMed music officially
unlocked for free. You either had to pay for an iTunes Plus upgrade or, more
recently, subscribe to iTunes Match. That's the sort of thing that I would
like to see avoided in the ebook space.

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nollidge
I figure this is inevitable, since music downloads have largely gone DRM-free
as well.

~~~
lukifer
And yet, DRM-free movie downloads elude us (other than standup comedy). I find
this deeply ironic, since eBooks and MP3s can both be trivially shared via
email, and video files cannot.

