Many folks look at the “publisher” and figure so what if I download that pdf file of Lynn’s new book and then stick it out on a file sharing site (pirate site to us authors), where it’s then downloaded hundreds to thousands of times? (most in pdf format)

Well, small publishers care, and so do I. Each one of those stolen books is money that I don’t recieve for my work.

You can equate pirated ebooks with library books, but trust me, that won’t get you far. One copy shared one at a time vs one copy shared thousands of times. Nope.
That dog won’t hunt.

On one site alone, one of my ebooks was downloaded, without my or my publishers consent or a single dime paid to us, over 400 times. And I’m not even one of the big name authors who have thousands of copies of one book downloaded.

These sites are “free”. No one pays a dime to download, but there are advertisers on every page, giving ad money to the hosts of these massive sites.
Trust me, someone is getting paid, but it isn’t me, my publisher, my cover artist, my editor or my line editors.

I have no idea what the solution is, but “honest” people seem to have no qualms about stealing my books, yet they’d never go into B&N and steal books off the shelf there.

Placing files on your personal equipment is one thing, sharing them with the world another.
How do we stop that?

While DRM might not be the optimal solution, it’s one way to slow down the illegal downloading and sharing of copywrited materials, such as music and ebooks.

On a DRM’d book, the lock protects the manufacturer, not me. I can’t back up the lock, or the book, and am dependent on the good will (and continued existence) of the manufacturer to ensure that I can continue to get access to the book. So the lock puts my investment at risk (and to carry the analogy forward, I the customer, am assumed to take the place of the thief in the car example). What’s to like, from the customer’s standpoint?

(I’m being facetious, of course. Anti-theft protections don’t need to be perfect to be useful.)

jd/adobe

One point you left out is that DRM also allows publishers to shut out something they hate, the resale market.

By using DRM, their buyers can no longer resell their books once they finish reading, allowing them to prop up the price of the eBook edition as there is no competition from used copies as there is for paper books.

And the point about “keeping Honest people Honest” is the most galling part. It can be very irritating for someone who paid for a book, music, move etc in digital format to see that they can do LESS with their purchase then if they just pirated it.

While most people are honest, throwing roadblocks in their way is not going to endear them them to you. It only chips away at their desire to do business with you. And once the customer has to find ways to crack DRM to use their purchased content in perfectly legal ways (i.e. format shift boos or DVD’s), next time they might wonder why they should bother buying the legal version in the first space.

A good example is the Videogame industry, where PC gamers have found that it is often easier to just Buy the Game and install a crack to get around “Security Features” then try to get it them to install properly. Many of those people then decide why should they bother buying the game in the first place.

Thanks,
David