

One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free - sofperseus
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later

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MichaelGG
I remember someone pointing out that the DRM on books was massively, hugely
successful to one party: Amazon. Imagine if all publishers had jumped in on
distributing mobi and epub from the start - Amazon would have far less hold.

It was trivial for me to move from Amazon MP3 to Google Music (and back, if I
want). It'd be far more work to get off Kindle. Even if tomorrow another
company came out with a far superior device than the Kindle Paperwhite, how
many users could just jump ship? Ripping the DRM off is a pain, even if it
just requires some googling and downloading into another program.

Publishers getting off DRM is a good thing. Just remember that the real reason
is they're terrified that Amazon holds the keys and are regretting their
decision to willing hand things over to Amazon.

~~~
pja
Almost certainly Charlie Stross. (cstross here, and elsewhere)

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2012/04/understa...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html)

------
ars
And yet, because of DRM when I think about buying an electronic version of
something, I still feel in my gut "It's not really mine", and I hesitate to
buy.

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tspiteri
True, I would not buy anything which is DRM-protected unless I knew how to
remove the DRM restrictions. I buy quite a few Kindle books, but only because
it's easy to remove their restrictions. I don't share the DRM-free books over
the internet, but I still keep a copy of each book which does not suffer from
present or future seller restrictions.

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malloreon
Title is misleading; the article contains no results.

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Falkon1313
"we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles" [...] "The
move has been a hugely positive one for us" [...] "we’re still pleased that we
took this step"

~~~
corin_
Possibly "result" (synonym of "impact") would be more accurate than "results"
which could imply facts and figures?

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ChuckMcM
Another great piece of hard data to try to put a stake in the DRM myth. (which
is only partially myth, since it's true that if the good is priced way too
high DRM is the only way to get even some people to pay that price).

Reminds me a bit of when Lotus took DRM off Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80s. Prior to
that you had to have the disk that Lotus installed from in the floppy drive at
all times. Totally sucked. They dropped DRM, sales went up, and their support
costs went down (paying customers affected by DRM make support calls, pirates
dealing with DRM do not usually :-)

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ricardobeat
No numbers?

