Conversations about ebook piracy being the death of the industry should be prefaced by the fact that many big players in the industry saw their best years ever

Conversations about ebook piracy being the death of the industry should be prefaced by the fact that many big players in the industry saw their best years ever this year. Random House gave every single employee, from editors to janitors, a $5,000 bonus this year because the company made so much money. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/12/50-shades-success-yields-5000-bonuses-at-random-house/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/12/50-shades-succe... Just like the music and film industries, the publishing industry is gripped by an irrational fear so great that thinking goes out the window. Indie authors are railing that piracy is taking their sales, when the truth is that often their books or marketing efforts are so bad that they wouldn't have had any sales anyway. Believe me, I know--I run a web site for writers! "Piracy" is the giant slobbering boogeyman that everyone can blame their problems on, but that doesn't really exist. Personally I never buy ebooks for three reasons: 1. DRM. I've bought a handful of DRM'd ebooks in my life and I never will again, not even for a penny. DRM is crime against freedom of information and consumer rights. 2. The quality of many ebooks is just atrocious. Any ebook version of a book written before, say, 2000 is guaranteed to be riddled with typos and errors so bad as to be unreadable. And publishers still ask north of $10 for such an ebook. They OCR a dog-eared paperback from the CEO's personal library, don't bother to proofread it, and slap it on Amazon for $10 and pray for the money to roll in. Such practices are disgusting to a bibliophile like me and I refuse to support that. 3. Price. Paying $10 for a perfect ebook is really stretching it, considering it's often cheaper to have a paper copy shipped to your door by Amazon. Throw in the shameful quality of many ebooks I mentioned above and it becomes an outright scam. If you want a good example of both #2 and #3, check out Amazon's Kindle edition of Frank Herbert's Dune. Use the preview feature and try reading through the first few pages. The ebook is unreadably bad--embarrasingly so for the publisher--and the Kindle edition costs $14.99 (!!!), 3x the price of a new paperback! How outrageous is that?