Cutting their own throats

<i>It's good for customers in the short term, but it's not good for anyone in the long run: they're sweating their suppliers, all the way back down the supply chain (read: to authors like me) and sooner or later they'll put their suppliers out of business.</i><p>As a reader, this does not strike me as against my interests in the long run. I get books teleported to my Kindle instantly -- what isn't to like? (They're cheap, too, but that isn't a huge win for me. I'd pay twice as much as I do currently without thinking twice.) A shame about Charlie's publisher. They've sold me minimally $200 worth of product in the last year, I could not tell you their name if my life depended on it, and they bring precisely zero value to me relative to any other publisher aside from having signed Charlie. If Amazon signs Charlie instead, it will be literally impossible for me to identify any way in which my life changes at a consequence.

I definitely think there's a potential issue with buying into an e-book platform where there's a high barrier to switch.<p>About two years ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted an e-book reader. At the time, you could only get a Kindle online, and she didn't want to buy one without seeing the device first; so we bought a Nook reader (after she played with it in the store).<p>Over the next year, we probably bought about $2000 of books on it, when she finally got tired of being envious of my Kindle (which I had recently purchased) and I gave it to her.<p>She ended up spending like three weeks cracking the DRM on all the Barnes and Noble e-pub books she had purchased, so that she'd be able to read them on the Kindle.<p>Most people wouldn't have done that, I suspect. They'd have just stuck with whatever platform they initially decided on (and had amassed a collection of DRM-laden files with).

The problem for me, is that so long as there is DRM attached, I don't feel like I've purchased something I own. Therefore, that erodes significantly the price I am willing to pay for Kindle ebooks; I enjoy reading on the Kindle more, so I like having the ebook, but I don't want to spend money to be locked-in. My threshold right now for an ebook is at least a 40% discount relative to the price I could purchase the physical book, to offset the DRM risk.<p>Ideally, what I would like would be to be able to buy a paper book, and get the ebook bundled for $X more (say, $2-$5 more). I would have the satisfaction of a book on the shelf, actually <i>owning</i> the book, and then the convenience of an ebook. I would also be less bothered by the presence of DRM. If I could buy DRM-free ebooks from Amazon, I would be willing to pay closer to price parity of the corresponding paper book.

This made me think that we can expect to see ebook wars like we are currently witnessing with other media, e.g. iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu. If, say, three of the big six publishers end up creating their own marketplaces with their own formats and DRM, and possibly even their own devices, while pulling their ebook titles from Amazon and B&#38;N, I can't help but think it will be a net loss for customers and of dubious advantage to the publishers. I wonder if Amazon's dominance would make this too little, too late. Something tells me there's still room to maneuver, but perhaps not for long.

There are a lot of books that are only available through piracy. You can download 1 GB torrents containing more books than anyone will ever read in a year, and yet there are still major books like Dune that aren't available to Kindle users. The selection for older, out-of-print titles is even worse.

Amazon's ability to forgo short-term profits and look towards the long term is their biggest weapon. Very few companies are able to act on threats far enough into the future to fight against Amazon's strategies at a time when defeating those strategies still possible.

I <i>love</i> my kindle, but I've been reluctant to buy books for it. I don't want to support a medium that causes the average reads per copy to tend to be 1. After reading this I'm conflicted: will buying more DRM books cause paper publishers to see the light sooner?

I can't believe it's not yet obvious to some people that DRM isn't an anti-piracy measure, it's a vendor lock-in measure. How many times is this fact going to have to be demonstrated until people take notice?

I have no idea where he gets his data on price. I am tempted to say that he made it up, but I have no evidence for that.<p>But the last two books I looked up were <i>more expensive as a kindle edition than as a physically printed book</i>. Not the same price -- that would have been bad enough -- but not having it printed was more expensive.<p>Since I am not interested in more dead wood I didn't buy either.

I really don't think history bears this out. The lesson of Apple seems to be people will accept DRM if you make it easy for them to buy. There were plenty of places to buy DRM-free music (including Amazon) yet people still went to iTunes because of its ease of use.<p>Of course Apple later proved DRM doesn't matter and people will pay for a DRM-free product if it's easy to purchase. But that's an entirely different point. As far as I can see the historical precedent is that DRM isn't enough of a deterrent for most people.

I can read my Kindle books in nearly every device I own.

If you're going offer an introduction to the concept of the Big Six, why tease with half of them and omit the other three by 'etc.'?<p>A rundown of the Big Six and their and their more prominent imprints: <a href="http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who-are-they.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottmarlowe.com/post/Publishinge28099s-Big-6-Who...</a>

The biggest problem with DRM is that it often punishes legit customers. I always thought DRM was no big deal until I signed up for Google Music. I have a net book running Linux so I decided that having my iTunes library on Google music would be a awesome way to have my iTunes library everywhere )I don't want to pay for iCloud sync). I was excited to save hard drive space (I have less than 100gb on the netbook) and still have my library but I was disappointed when I couldn't upload about 20 songs to the service. Sure, 20 songs out of 3,000 isn't much but they were damn good songs and they were <i>mine</i> so why shouldn't I be able to do this?<p>Up till then I thought people were just whining but now I see the folly in my ways. I'm definitely for <i>some</i> sort of protection for content authors but there must be another way. Maybe they could have a DR,-like system that allows you to use it on X devices the same way you can authorize a number of devices to sync in iTunes. Still, we can do even better. What about a system that somehow measures ownership differently. Like maybe somehow make it so you have to use a password if you want to transfer a protected file to some other device?<p>Is that naive? Has it been done? I just recently changed my position on DRM so I still have much to learn. Does anyone know of something like I'm describing and is this feasible technically?