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How Publishers Are Cutting Their Own Throats With eBook DRM
An anonymous reader writes "Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has written a post about how the Big Six book publishing companies have painted themselves into a corner in the rapidly growing ebook industry. Between user-unfriendly DRM and the Amazon juggernaut, they're slowly pushing themselves out of business. Quoting: 'Until 2008, ebooks were a tiny market segment, under 1% and easily overlooked; but in 2009 ebook sales began to rise exponentially, and ebooks now account for over 20% of all fiction sales. In some areas ebooks are up to 40% of the market and rising rapidly. (I am not making that last figure up: I'm speaking from my own sales figures.) And Amazon have got 80% of the ebook retail market. ... the Big Six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform.'"
It all ties together. Booksellers, whether retail outlets like Amazon or the publishers themselves, want to charge paper-book prices for e-books. They see DRM as a mechanism to enable them to do that. The alternative, which is to sell e-books for reasonable prices (i.e., prices which reflect the fact that printing and distribution costs for e-books are effectively zero) and thereby sell more books, is so far mostly the domain of the self-publishing and small-press world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
At least a lot of non-Big6 writers are publishing without DRM on Amazon (and other platforms).
There's a new thread almost weekly on places like Kindleboards.com about DRM and it still always goes the same way though, lots of arguing on either side. In the end at least, more and more writers are explicitly choosing NOT to DRM.
We have several books out under a few pen-names, none of them are DRM'd and we're not the only ones ( http://elitadaniels.com/ ).
I think you're looking at used book prices. People will let those go for absurdly cheap for some reason. Have you seen some popular top seller/NYT top books? They're $30-50! Printing material can't cost that much! In fact, I've done covers for books and I know what they cost to print and they're exaggerating it. The ebooks tend to be a lot cheaper for big titles.
Valve gets it because they've seen the data to back it up: 10% drop in price? Expect a 35% increase in revenue. Not sales, revenue. 25% discount, 245% increase. 50% discount, 320% increase. Crazy 75% discount? 1450% increase in revenue. Valve's own record, AFAIK, was when they dropped L4D by half and saw a THREE THOUSAND PERCENT increase in sales. And apparently the best sales bump ever was a third party game that went on discount and saw a 36,000% increase in sales over the weekend. These are numbers that bean counters would drag their dicks through a mile of broken glass just to LOOK at, much less claim. Yet out there in digital land the average product is priced equal to (if not more than) it's meatspace counterpart.
Insanity.
Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.
This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...
Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.
DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Seconding that.
I got onto the 1632/Ring of Fire series, and the Honor Harrington series through the Baen free library.
As validation of their model, I've since bought all of both series as ebooks from them (actually under the webscription model: 5-6 books, including the one I was looking for, for $15). I've also bought half of the Honor Harrington series as audio books through Audible, all through a couple of $5 loss-leaders.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In particular, about 80-90% of the cover price of a book has nothing to do with the paper and ink object you buy in a shop; indeed, using current production standards, ebook production requires nearly as much work as paper book production. (Paper and ink are dirt cheap; proofreaders and marketing teams aren't.)
Didn't the publishing industry nearly double paperback prices just a few years ago citing increases in paper costs?
You do realize that B&N uses the industry standard DRM, right? No lock involved, in fact you can open the books on any computer that supports Adobe Editions
In other words, they tie you into using one of the worst pieces of crap software since Adobe Flash Player.
I just don't buy e-books with DRM, it's much simpler.
And weren't they saying recently that profits are up despite a decline in sales because e-books are far more profitable than paper books?