I’d be interested to hear who pro-DRM people honestly think they’re advocating for. Neil Gaiman said that the problem of most writers is obscurity, not piracy. I can’t imagine many writers being upset that more people would read their books without DRM.

It’s certainly not good for readers, despite what Daniels says: “DRM facilitates the inclusion of feature sets and functionalities that otherwise wouldn’t be there.”

I guess it must be publishers and distributors. It seems disingenuous to me to disguise DRM as an attempt to help consumers.

How in the world would he know? It’s not like the lost sales are visible. Maybe everybody who passes on a DRM’d ebook needs to email the publisher so they can “see” the lost sales.

And the reality is that it’s not just public domain titles. I primarily read science fiction and non-fiction. There is more scifi released eacfor free on the web each month, most of it CCed rather than PD, than I could possibly read in a year.

That’s what they’re really competing against. But oddly, I spend quite a bit each month buying science fiction from Baen. The main reason is I know that it will always be DRM-free and Baen actually provides an awesome service — stuff I bought 5 years ago from them I can go and download in the correct format for the ebook reader that just came out a few months ago.

OTOH, I imagine the profits aren’t quite what publishing houses want on a per-sale basis. I was looking at an interesting book on Fictionwise, and they wanted $27 for the DRMed version (which doesn’t work on my ebook reader). Are they insane? At that price and with those restrictions, it suddenly becomes worth my time to find a pirated version and do the proper conversion myself.

I don’t know what it is like on the inside, but from the outside publishers seem to be stuck in a VHS mindset when the rest of us are in a DVD world.

Frank Daniels is probably wrong — he most certainly has lost a sale or two to DRM. But that’s the wrong metric. The right metric is whether or not DRM is the best way for him to publishers to expand their market in a world where most print media is already taking it on the chin due to a collapse in business models and people having far more options for their free time.

Publishers need to keep in mind that, in the ebook arena, the freebies are a major competitor.

Really? I’m a customer…and it’s a barrier to me. Yesterday, I had a choice of buying a book, hardcover or e-version, same price (no, no, I won’t go down that rat hole) and guess what? I chose to own the hardcover, rather than take a chance that DRM would cause my e-book to evaporate because the publisher went under and how likely is that, these days, Frank? Treating your every customer like a potential thief does not breed trust. Pay attention, Frank. This massive insult called DRM didn’t work for the music industry, why on earth would you think it a viable tool for the print industry?