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Publishers are right to fear Amazon, but a much better solution for mitigating it seems obvious to me: Sell DRM-free books. Amazon is getting an unassailable lo

Publishers are right to fear Amazon, but a much better solution for mitigating it seems obvious to me: Sell DRM-free books. Amazon is getting an unassailable lockin on avid readers because they can never again use a device that amazon doesn't approve. If the books are DRM-free, then the distributor is the one who gets commoditized, rather than the publisher. That said, I'm not entirely confident that DRM is as unnecessary for books as it is for music. Starting to read a book is much more of an investment, and also much more likely to be based on a recommendation from a friend who certainly has the book (and there's a long social history of legal lending.) So I guess it comes down to which they are more scared of, being disintermediated by Amazon, or disintermediated by their customers.

bad_user 15y ago
I don't represent the normal user, but I want to provide a datapoint. I pirate music and movies a lot. I also go to the movies and buy the CDs of my favorite bands, but I only do so for content which is worth it. The biggest problem with movies is that you can't tell much about their quality from a trailer. And I also find the music industry to be disgusting lately, so I'm grateful to a couple of bands that kept their genre and that aren't subject to the latest trends. For books I have a different behavior. The thing with my Kindle is that I can always download a couple of chapters to see if I actually like the author's style and if it's what I really want. Also I don't read more than 2-3 books per month, so I don't go on buying sprees, this reading habit of mine being actually cheap. Therefore I only pirated one or two books for my Kindle at first, before I discovered the convenience of buying them straight from Amazon. It takes less time and reading the reviews of other people makes it valuable to visit the store first, then from there downloading a sample or buying it is just one click away. So I do not believe that DRM-free books will be bad for authors. It's in fact quite the opposite for me, because when reading a book I end up being really grateful in case I like it, so I have this extreme urge to reward the author. And this happens for every book I read, because the selection process is extremely efficient, as I said, which makes paying for books a no-brainer.

bad_user 15y ago

I don't represent the normal user, but I want to provide a datapoint. I pirate music and movies a lot. I also go to the movies and buy the CDs of my favorite bands, but I only do so for content which is worth it. The biggest problem with movies is that you can't tell much about their quality from a trailer. And I also find the music industry to be disgusting lately, so I'm grateful to a couple of bands that kept their genre and that aren't subject to the latest trends. For books I have a different behavior. The thing with my Kindle is that I can always download a couple of chapters to see if I actually like the author's style and if it's what I really want. Also I don't read more than 2-3 books per month, so I don't go on buying sprees, this reading habit of mine being actually cheap. Therefore I only pirated one or two books for my Kindle at first, before I discovered the convenience of buying them straight from Amazon. It takes less time and reading the reviews of other people makes it valuable to visit the store first, then from there downloading a sample or buying it is just one click away. So I do not believe that DRM-free books will be bad for authors. It's in fact quite the opposite for me, because when reading a book I end up being really grateful in case I like it, so I have this extreme urge to reward the author. And this happens for every book I read, because the selection process is extremely efficient, as I said, which makes paying for books a no-brainer.