

Cutting their own throats - ible
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throats.html

======
patio11
_It's good for customers in the short term, but it's not good for anyone in
the long run: they're sweating their suppliers, all the way back down the
supply chain (read: to authors like me) and sooner or later they'll put their
suppliers out of business._

As a reader, this does not strike me as against my interests in the long run.
I get books teleported to my Kindle instantly -- what isn't to like? (They're
cheap, too, but that isn't a huge win for me. I'd pay twice as much as I do
currently without thinking twice.) A shame about Charlie's publisher. They've
sold me minimally $200 worth of product in the last year, I could not tell you
their name if my life depended on it, and they bring precisely zero value to
me relative to any other publisher aside from having signed Charlie. If Amazon
signs Charlie instead, it will be literally impossible for me to identify any
way in which my life changes at a consequence.

~~~
nikatwork
The problem for you as a reader: a monopoly would allow Amazon to jack up
retail prices as high as it feels like.

Amazon could also eg set very unfavourable terms for authors, so only
mainstream literature becomes commercially viable.

Of course, other channels would open up in this event, but there would be a
massive time lag. And if Amazon didn't squeeze _too_ hard, they could maintain
the status quo for a long time.

Monopolies are bad for everyone.

~~~
patio11
_only mainstream literature becomes commercially viable._

Only mainstream literature is commercially viable _in the status quo_.

~~~
wging
Stross seems to make it work. In what world is he mainstream? I'm presuming
you know that Stross was the one who wrote the blog post above.

~~~
barry-cotter
One of my brother's Creative Writing lecturers was fond of the following fact

 _There are more professional concert pianists in the UK than full-time
authors of fiction._

------
m0nastic
I definitely think there's a potential issue with buying into an e-book
platform where there's a high barrier to switch.

About two years ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted an e-book reader. At the
time, you could only get a Kindle online, and she didn't want to buy one
without seeing the device first; so we bought a Nook reader (after she played
with it in the store).

Over the next year, we probably bought about $2000 of books on it, when she
finally got tired of being envious of my Kindle (which I had recently
purchased) and I gave it to her.

She ended up spending like three weeks cracking the DRM on all the Barnes and
Noble e-pub books she had purchased, so that she'd be able to read them on the
Kindle.

Most people wouldn't have done that, I suspect. They'd have just stuck with
whatever platform they initially decided on (and had amassed a collection of
DRM-laden files with).

~~~
caf
My girlfriend got on to the ebook train early, before the Kindle was available
in our region, paying ~$500 for a Cybook that reads Mobipocket format files.

A few years later, after amassing a couple of grand worth of DRMed books, the
reader failed - and this presented two problems.

The first was that a replacement e-ink ebook reader that would read DRMd
Mobipocket files was now impossible to come across, EPUB having mostly won out
in the non-Kindle market. The second was that all those DRMd books she "owned"
were locked to a broken device ID.

The only solution was the same as in the parent comment - spend a decent chunk
of time breaking the DRM and changing their format.

~~~
fpgeek
Ironically, this is an advantage of Kindle. The last time I checked, Kindle
DRM was relatively easy to get rid of. I didn't research as exhaustively
because I wasn't very interested, but it seemed like non-Kindle formats were
harder to deal with.

~~~
caf
The Kindle format actually is Mobipocket underneath, but with an algorithm
layered on top that converts a Kindle serial number into a Mobipocket ID.
Needless to say that algorithm has been leaked.

The DRM in EPUB is quite easy to get rid of too.

------
palebluedot
The problem for me, is that so long as there is DRM attached, I don't feel
like I've purchased something I own. Therefore, that erodes significantly the
price I am willing to pay for Kindle ebooks; I enjoy reading on the Kindle
more, so I like having the ebook, but I don't want to spend money to be
locked-in. My threshold right now for an ebook is at least a 40% discount
relative to the price I could purchase the physical book, to offset the DRM
risk.

Ideally, what I would like would be to be able to buy a paper book, and get
the ebook bundled for $X more (say, $2-$5 more). I would have the satisfaction
of a book on the shelf, actually _owning_ the book, and then the convenience
of an ebook. I would also be less bothered by the presence of DRM. If I could
buy DRM-free ebooks from Amazon, I would be willing to pay closer to price
parity of the corresponding paper book.

------
flatline
This made me think that we can expect to see ebook wars like we are currently
witnessing with other media, e.g. iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu. If, say,
three of the big six publishers end up creating their own marketplaces with
their own formats and DRM, and possibly even their own devices, while pulling
their ebook titles from Amazon and B&N, I can't help but think it will be a
net loss for customers and of dubious advantage to the publishers. I wonder if
Amazon's dominance would make this too little, too late. Something tells me
there's still room to maneuver, but perhaps not for long.

~~~
jerf
As I've said in other contexts, I simply will not purchase a _subscription_ to
each of ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, Showtime, etc etc and those guys can
just forget that dream.

Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are
something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or
author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by
the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of
something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not _mandatory_ that every
company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements),
it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It
isn't _harmless_ , but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any
industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a
$9.95/month subscription fee _each_ out of me.

Where I feel like video _needs_ something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a
subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions
to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google
(as a search engine, not some new service) _might_ be sufficient for ebooks.

If the book publishers get their act together.

...

So never mind, I guess.

------
gamble
There are a lot of books that are only available through piracy. You can
download 1 GB torrents containing more books than anyone will ever read in a
year, and yet there are still major books like Dune that aren't available to
Kindle users. The selection for older, out-of-print titles is even worse.

~~~
icebraining
Isn't this Dune for Kindle? [http://www.amazon.com/Dune-Sf-Masterworks-
ebook/dp/B004KA9UX...](http://www.amazon.com/Dune-Sf-Masterworks-
ebook/dp/B004KA9UXO/)

~~~
larsberg
I think the author is pointing out that the Kindle version of Dune is
terrible. Horrible typos, bad formatting, etc.

Unfortunately, many middle-aged books have this problem, and unless you can
wade through the Amazon reviews (which are not format-specific) and find out,
you don't know whether the publisher just copy/pasted a text file and hit
PublishNow! or actually had an editor sit down with it, mark chapters, fix
typos introduced, un-break words if it was scanned, etc.

~~~
corin_
Just to chime in with a little more strength than an invisible upvote, this is
one of those things that doesn't sound to annoying until you're experiencing
it yourself.

I used to read reviews complaining about it and think "stop whining" to
myself, but now that I'm ready books that I paid for and which clearly went
straight through OCR software with no human supervision... Really, really
frustrating.

~~~
rmc
1 agrec its very distracting and ma|<es it hard to fol1ow thc words.

 _These are examples of OCR errors I've seen on ebooks I've paid for_

------
ssebro
Amazon's ability to forgo short-term profits and look towards the long term is
their biggest weapon. Very few companies are able to act on threats far enough
into the future to fight against Amazon's strategies at a time when defeating
those strategies still possible.

------
akkartik
I _love_ my kindle, but I've been reluctant to buy books for it. I don't want
to support a medium that causes the average reads per copy to tend to be 1.
After reading this I'm conflicted: will buying more DRM books cause paper
publishers to see the light sooner?

~~~
sudonim
Does that mean you're pirating books for it rather than buying them?

I buy lots of books on the kindle. However, I wanted to read "Atlas Shrugged"
and there was no kindle book for sale so I found it online.

I take the customer is always right approach. I am the customer. I consume
content in the way I find most convenient. If you make it difficult for me to
pay you to do what's most convenient for me, I don't.

~~~
akkartik
No, just good old-fashioned hardcopies. From amazon, secondhand stores,
libraries. Wherever they begin, they end up back at the library. But I can't
do that with ebooks.

------
dlitz
I can't believe it's not yet obvious to some people that DRM isn't an anti-
piracy measure, it's a vendor lock-in measure. How many times is this fact
going to have to be demonstrated until people take notice?

------
tomjen3
I have no idea where he gets his data on price. I am tempted to say that he
made it up, but I have no evidence for that.

But the last two books I looked up were _more expensive as a kindle edition
than as a physically printed book_. Not the same price -- that would have been
bad enough -- but not having it printed was more expensive.

Since I am not interested in more dead wood I didn't buy either.

------
TomOfTTB
I really don't think history bears this out. The lesson of Apple seems to be
people will accept DRM if you make it easy for them to buy. There were plenty
of places to buy DRM-free music (including Amazon) yet people still went to
iTunes because of its ease of use.

Of course Apple later proved DRM doesn't matter and people will pay for a DRM-
free product if it's easy to purchase. But that's an entirely different point.
As far as I can see the historical precedent is that DRM isn't enough of a
deterrent for most people.

~~~
neutronicus
The author's point was not that DRM deters people from buying; rather, that it
deters them from using multiple competing services.

I think iTunes actually supports the author's point - how many people were
there using iTunes _and_ Rhapsody? DRM seems to have kept the iTunes customer
well and truly locked in, at least for long enough for Apple to make a pile of
money off their monopoly before Spotify et al. started moving in.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I understand that but I think the inferred point was "drop DRM and people will
buy from multiple sources" which I don't think is true. My point is people
don't want to use multiple services. If Amazon makes it easy to purchase books
people will stay with Amazon regardless of DRM.

I'll give you an example. I was tempted to buy books from Apress today (they
have a all e-books are $15 special). But I weighed the pros and cons and
decided to buy them from Amazon instead for an average of $7 more per book
because I like having books in my Kindle library that are automatically
accessible.

So DRM is irrelevant but it isn't the main deterrent.

~~~
lucasjung
I have a kindle, and I very much like the convenience of being able to manage
my library by easily moving books on and off of the kindle wherever I am.
However, any time I buy a book from Amazon I first check if a DRM-free
alternative is available elsewhere. I don't do this because of principled
opposition to DRM (I am opposed to DRM on principle, but it's not why I do
this); I do it because I want my books to be as portable as possible, not
locked in to any one merchant, platform, or device. Unfortunately, in most
cases the only option is a file with some other form of DRM that won't work on
my kindle. If the big publishers stopped using DRM, I would stop buying ebooks
from Amazon and buy all of them directly from the publishers.

If such were to happen, I'm sure that other people would offer cloud services
that would allow you to upload your eBooks from wherever you buy them and then
access them from your device over your choice of wireless carrier. If they
lost enough market share, I'm sure that even Amazon would start offering such
a service.

------
bprater
I can read my Kindle books in nearly every device I own.

~~~
caf
This is othogonal to Charlie's point; the pertitent question is "how many
ebooks do you buy from places other than Amazon?".

------
rpt
If you're going offer an introduction to the concept of the Big Six, why tease
with half of them and omit the other three by 'etc.'?

A rundown of the Big Six and their and their more prominent imprints:
[http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who...](http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who-
are-they.aspx)

------
billpatrianakos
The biggest problem with DRM is that it often punishes legit customers. I
always thought DRM was no big deal until I signed up for Google Music. I have
a net book running Linux so I decided that having my iTunes library on Google
music would be a awesome way to have my iTunes library everywhere )I don't
want to pay for iCloud sync). I was excited to save hard drive space (I have
less than 100gb on the netbook) and still have my library but I was
disappointed when I couldn't upload about 20 songs to the service. Sure, 20
songs out of 3,000 isn't much but they were damn good songs and they were
_mine_ so why shouldn't I be able to do this?

Up till then I thought people were just whining but now I see the folly in my
ways. I'm definitely for _some_ sort of protection for content authors but
there must be another way. Maybe they could have a DR,-like system that allows
you to use it on X devices the same way you can authorize a number of devices
to sync in iTunes. Still, we can do even better. What about a system that
somehow measures ownership differently. Like maybe somehow make it so you have
to use a password if you want to transfer a protected file to some other
device?

Is that naive? Has it been done? I just recently changed my position on DRM so
I still have much to learn. Does anyone know of something like I'm describing
and is this feasible technically?

~~~
fpgeek
As a side note, presuming that the DRMed tracks are from iTunes there is away
around the problem. If you are a US user, you can sign up for iTunes Match,
match the DRMed tracks, download DRM-free versions of the matched DRMed tracks
and then cancel your subscription.

I think Apple would charge you for a whole month, so it probably isn't worth
it for 20 tracks, but in case anyone else is in the same boat with a larger
amount of music...

~~~
mitchty
As another option, you always had the itunes plus option of "upgrading" your
tracks to the non-drm versions. I upgraded my last drm purchase about 2 years
ago according to the timestamp.

Itunes has been drm free for some time now, drm on music is quite... quaint by
now.

