It's hard to see why authors should act irrationally. If poor royalty, not DRM, are the major reason for poor earnings, authors should complain about royalties,

It's hard to see why authors should act irrationally. If poor royalty, not DRM, are the major reason for poor earnings, authors should complain about royalties, not DRM. It seems to me that today the best way to make money on technical books is to put the whole book for free in html on the web (for marketing and SEO) and sell digital version (PDF/ePub/kindle), where the author gets 70% (kindle) or ~95% (selling PDF/ePub via paypal). If you don't believe in free html version as a marketing tool, don't do it - just build a nice web page for the book with TOC, a free chapter etc. The point is: I'm mystified that authors of technical books (especially those in the programming field) still work with publishers given that self-publishing is potentially so much more lucrative and an author can probably market his own book better than Apress markets an average book they publish.