3 ms·

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors. it's just too easy to share the books. you can get tens of thousands of books for what, a gigabyte? without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it. here's one moderately popular author's take: https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/flowers-and-questions/ https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/flowers-and-questions/

AlotOfReading 2y ago
Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  They also refused to make their e-books available to libraries because they said it hurt sales. Which at least is a new wrinkle on the endless DRM debates. Hell, if I ran a publishing company I'd remove DRM just so I wouldn't have to listen to Cory Doctorow rant about it. Having to proofread his books is punishment enough.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    I hadn't heard that they limited availability, only that it was on a 4 month delay after consumer publication. All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.
  - Mindwipe 2y ago
    No publisher has done anything other than laugh at Cory for years now.
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  pretty hard to do any rigorous analysis without public sales info of all publishers, but yes I have heard that as well. their main competitor, baen also doesn't have drm
didntcheck 2y ago
Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd probably be right, but we're now in the "cloud consuming" era. Hence the trajectory of music piracy. When people were used to managing their CDs and MP3s, ordinary consumers absolutely did engage in opportunistic (often friend-to-friend) piracy, but then streaming came and made both legal and illegal MP3s almost a footnote [1] Of course you can upload your own "personal documents" to your Kindle library via send-to-Kindle, but few people know that outside of tech/enthusiast circles. Even knowing what an EPUB or AZW3 is almost puts you in that bubble Errata: rephrased the first sentence from "several hundred megabytes" to "a high-quality movie", to better explain the point that download size is rarely a barrier for piracy
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  > Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book signing. most people who have ebooks don't even ever deal with the files in any respect.
  - gcr 2y ago
    Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device. We exist! There might even be dozens of us!
  - didntcheck 2y ago
    Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?
cyberax 2y ago
> looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors. Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well. > without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it. Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users. I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.
agnishom 2y ago
> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time
internet_points 2y ago
It's easier to just pirate a book than to buy it from amazon and open a windows vm and strip drm in order to read it where I want. DRM doesn't stop people copying. (And https://www.bloomsbury.com https://www.bloomsbury.com sells quite major "hits" like Sarah Maas, Madeline Miller and Ann Patchett, without DRM – doesn't seem to have hurt their sales.)

AlotOfReading 2y ago

Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.

badlibrarian 2y ago
They also refused to make their e-books available to libraries because they said it hurt sales. Which at least is a new wrinkle on the endless DRM debates. Hell, if I ran a publishing company I'd remove DRM just so I wouldn't have to listen to Cory Doctorow rant about it. Having to proofread his books is punishment enough.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  I hadn't heard that they limited availability, only that it was on a 4 month delay after consumer publication. All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.
- Mindwipe 2y ago
  No publisher has done anything other than laugh at Cory for years now.
amazingamazing 2y ago
pretty hard to do any rigorous analysis without public sales info of all publishers, but yes I have heard that as well. their main competitor, baen also doesn't have drm

didntcheck 2y ago

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd probably be right, but we're now in the "cloud consuming" era. Hence the trajectory of music piracy. When people were used to managing their CDs and MP3s, ordinary consumers absolutely did engage in opportunistic (often friend-to-friend) piracy, but then streaming came and made both legal and illegal MP3s almost a footnote [1] Of course you can upload your own "personal documents" to your Kindle library via send-to-Kindle, but few people know that outside of tech/enthusiast circles. Even knowing what an EPUB or AZW3 is almost puts you in that bubble Errata: rephrased the first sentence from "several hundred megabytes" to "a high-quality movie", to better explain the point that download size is rarely a barrier for piracy

amazingamazing 2y ago
> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book signing. most people who have ebooks don't even ever deal with the files in any respect.
- gcr 2y ago
  Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device. We exist! There might even be dozens of us!
- didntcheck 2y ago
  Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?

cyberax 2y ago

> looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors. Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well. > without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it. Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users. I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.

agnishom 2y ago

> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time

internet_points 2y ago

It's easier to just pirate a book than to buy it from amazon and open a windows vm and strip drm in order to read it where I want. DRM doesn't stop people copying. (And https://www.bloomsbury.com https://www.bloomsbury.com sells quite major "hits" like Sarah Maas, Madeline Miller and Ann Patchett, without DRM – doesn't seem to have hurt their sales.)