Sci-Fi Publisher Tor Ditches DRM For E-Books

First time accepted submitter FBeans writes "'Science fiction publisher Tor UK is dropping digital rights management from its e-books alongside a similar move by its U.S. partners. ... Tor UK, Tor Books and Forge are divisions of Pan Macmillan, which said it viewed the move as an "experiment."' With experiments, come results. Now users can finally read their books across multiple devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo eReader and Apple's iBooks. Perhaps we will see the *increase* of sales, because the new unrestricted format outweighs the decrease caused by piracy?"

Comments

It's about time

[NabisOne]

Now we can hope the other publisher's will follow this trend.

Re:It's about time

[Junta]

No, I buy media that is not DRM protected. I refrain from purchasing DRM encumbered content for the most part. I've passed on many a movie or ebook simply because of DRM.

The DRM mechanisms are frequently useless anyway. ePub drm can be stripped away instantly (I used some promotional credit to acquire a DRM encumbered epub and stripped the DRM in short order).

Re:It's about time

[allcar]

That's not it at all. I'm not prepared to pay for content that is inconvenient to use. I am much more likely to buy content if it is DRM free. This is great publicity for Tor. More power to them.

Re:It's about time

[lxs]

Not really, but stripping the DRM from my Kindle ebooks just so I can convert them and put them on my epub reader is a hassle I could do without. Besides, DRM wouldn't stop me from getting pirated ebooks, if I were so inclined.

Re:It's about time

[Chris Burke]

Too stingy yo pay for your media?

What I find hilarious is that you apparently think people who are too stingy to pay for their media will grudgingly do so anyway when piracy is made slightly more inconvenient, rather than continuing to be stingy and finding a torrent, or just not acquiring the media in question in the first place.

This is like thinking you can cure a man of his heroin addiction by putting a "No Junkies!" sign on the front of your country club.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Too stingy yo pay for your media?

This is the beginning of the end of quality writing.

Hm.. I have to ask, do you know what DRM is?
I can only speak for myself, and I am a techie not a business/economics guy but FWIW; I have never bought an e-book as I dislike DRM, with more and more companies dropping DRM I actually consider purchasing a couple of books, mainly technical books so that I can access my books without having to carry around the entire library all the time.

This is not a situation that suddenly will turn everything to the wild west. It just means we will remove a defective "technology" (more of an defective idea really) from our e-books, this should then result in a lower price tag and higher availability.

Higher availability (of your bought media) and a lower price tag will increase the value of the buy. And more people will be interested in buying the products, resulting in increased total sales. A simple example might be going from 10 sales at €5 which equals €50 to 20 sales at €3.5 which equals €70. At least to me, this is a no-brainer. If 20 people are not willing to buy my book, it probably wasn't a very good book to begin with. Of course this does not scale endlessly, but with a lower price tag the amount of potential buyers should increase.

Sure it also means it makes it marginally easier to pirate, truth is it is already very easy, so you might get more piracy. But at the end of the day piracy will not decrease your revenue, just your (sales/availability of media) ratio. Increasing sales on the other hand helps to even out the ratio, and also means you will get more cash in your pocket to pay quality writing.

Re:It's about time

[MickyTheIdiot]

I will gladly pay when it's easier to buy your book than it is to get a torrent.

Torrents are *not* easy to deal with, especially for someone with average computer skills. Then half the time you end up getting a Portuguese translation or something so badly formatted you can't read it.

Good quality product at a FAIR price is what the "free market" wants... and the free market is ALWAYS good, right?

Re:It's about time

[Albanach]

Too stingy yo pay for your media?

Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.

I read the book, thoroughly enjoyed it and told a friend a couple of days later. She responded by saying she'd love to borrow it. I had to explain that wasn't possible.

So, I saved a dollar.

The publisher saved the cost of printing a paperback book, physically transporting it to Amazon. Amazon saved having the physically store the book in a warehouse and didn't have to pay UPS to deliver it to me.

Once I had read the book, I couldn't lend it or sell it. The bits were used and might as werll be deleted. The publisher and Amazon win again, as there's no second hand market for that purchase.

I have made Kindle purchases since, but I'm much more selective. Typically I'll only do it where I need a book now, or I can be sure it's a book I won't want to share.

It's not because I'm too stingly - I'm still buying books. What I don't want is to lose the rights I have through the first sale doctrine simply because I purchased bits and bytes rather than tree pulp.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is like thinking you can cure a man of his heroin addiction by putting a "No Junkies!" sign on the front of your country club."

But, where will all the coke and hooker parties be held at?

Re:It's about time

[fifedrum]

Anecdotal and all, but I certainly will gravitate towards their offerings. Immediately. The very reason I don't buy any ebooks for my wife's kindle is that we can't read them on anything else. I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone.

So I say, "Good on them, and here's some money."

(posting to remove misplaced mod, because I'm an idiot and clicked the wrong text)

Re:It's about time

[gfxguy]

It's worse... I'm not too stingy to pay for my media, but when you add in the cost of DRM on top of that (the publisher doesn't pay for it with money it grows on trees, after all) to by media in a format that is inconvenient, when I could pay the same or less for media that is convenient, idiot's comment makes even less sense.

It's always been the case with copy protection - the people who legally buy copy protected materials are the ones who pay for the copy protection that reduces the versatility of whatever it is they bought. It's always been the people who "steal" who get unencumbered versions... it's like punishing the honest people and rewarding the ones who violate the copyright. Do they even understand basic psychology?

Honest people are honest; dishonest people are dishonest... adding DRM doesn't change that, it just hurts the honest people.

Re:It's about time

[rhsanborn]

If she had a kindle, you could lend it to her. Amazon likes this, because it means your friend has a kindle :)

Re:It's about time

[Chris Burke]

But, where will all the coke and hooker parties be held at?

That's why right below the first sign is one that says "Coke-heads w/ escorts welcome."

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

If she had a kindle, you could lend it to her. Amazon likes this, because it means your friend has a kindle :)

Only if the publisher has it flagged for lending, and most of the publishers don't because they're pricks.

Re:It's about time

[gfxguy]

Good quality product at a FAIR price is what the "free market" wants... and the free market is ALWAYS good, right?

Overall the (largely) free market is better than anything else.

Of course, when businesses collude to make life more difficult for consumers or defeat the purpose of competing, then it's not really "free" and I have no problem with the government getting involved. In this case, I think the government is already coming down on publishers and retailers alike when it comes to e-books. Maybe not enough.

The beauty of the free market though, even when companies that create non-necessities collude, is that you don't have to buy it.

Re:It's about time

[hawguy]

Too stingy yo pay for your media?

Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.

I read the book, thoroughly enjoyed it and told a friend a couple of days later. She responded by saying she'd love to borrow it. I had to explain that wasn't possible.

So, I saved a dollar.

The publisher saved the cost of printing a paperback book, physically transporting it to Amazon. Amazon saved having the physically store the book in a warehouse and didn't have to pay UPS to deliver it to me.

Once I had read the book, I couldn't lend it or sell it. The bits were used and might as werll be deleted. The publisher and Amazon win again, as there's no second hand market for that purchase.

I have made Kindle purchases since, but I'm much more selective. Typically I'll only do it where I need a book now, or I can be sure it's a book I won't want to share.

It's not because I'm too stingly - I'm still buying books. What I don't want is to lose the rights I have through the first sale doctrine simply because I purchased bits and bytes rather than tree pulp.

Just wait a month or two after the book's release and you can buy the book (including shipping) for half the price of the eBook. And after you and your friend are done reading it, you can sell it again for a dollar or two.

I own both a Kindle and Nook, but I still buy most of my books on paper because they are cheaper.

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

>>> I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone

Why not?
I used to read e-books on my 8 bit computer at 320x200 resolution. In comparison reading on a hi-res phone would be a luxury.

Re:It's about time

[Quiet_Desperation]

This is the beginning of the end of quality writing.

Awesome! Now is my chance to get published!

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

For those saying you would now buy ebooks from Tor..... do you buy the Sci-Fi magazines? That is where most young authors get their start. If they die out (they lose about 1000 subscribers/year), so too does the paid outlet for future talent. And most of the mags are DRM free too:

http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/dellmagazineauthorseBooks.htm?cache

.

Re:It's about time

[gfxguy]

Completely agree, Albanach.

We do buy many e-books, although I'm not thrilled about it. If the physical book is anywhere close to the e-book price, it's a no-brainer.

One benefit for the family (at least) is that all of our e-readers are registered to the same accounts, which gives all of us access to all of our books.

On the subject of printing costs, I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book. Now they are claiming that's not the case at all, that those costs are minimal, that it costs nearly just as much to sell an 'e' version of the book as it does to sell a physical copy. I'm not even going to type the expletive that comes to mind, you can figure it out or come up with your own, but here's a hint: it has to do with a certain type of livestock and a certain by-product of their existence.

As for the claim that the quality of books will go down... repeat the last sentence in the above paragraph. There will still be high quality books - they will just have to start competing with self-publishers. If they have the value, people will pay.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone

Why not? I used to read e-books on my 8 bit computer at 320x200 resolution. In comparison reading on a hi-res phone would be a luxury.

I assume the screen on your 8 bit computer was larger than a business card though.

Re:It's about time

[Pope]

I doubt your 8 bit monitor was 3.5" across.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww poor media company shill. You think your products are worth paying for dont you.
Just because it took you decades and piles of money to obtain all your products..

I can get ALL of them for free in a few hours with a pc.
You'll be lucky to have a job in 10 years. Be nice or you won't.

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

Problem with books is that they are small. That means you can download thousands in just a few minutes..... even over slow connections like dialup. (I downloaded the entire 60-year Analog collection in a few hours, and the Arthur Clarke novels in just one.) It is not at all inconvenient to acquire books/magazines; the pirates have made it exceedingly quick-and-easy.

Maybe the publishers could learn. If they sold Analog in decade-long bundles, that I could buy at a flat rate with just one click, I'd have gone to THEM instead of the pirates.

Re:It's about time

[lxs]

You could have lent her your Kindle...
Or you could have broken the DRM and did with it whatever you pleased.
Both options are probably technically illegal (I don't own a Kindle and don't feel inclined to read a long EULA), but progress isn't made by meticulously sticking to the rules all the time. In fact this move by TOR seems to indicate that the rules can be changed if they are systematically rejected and casually broken by the majority of customers.

Re:It's about time

[jedidiah]

Better the "end of quality writing" than the end of personal liberties.

My personal property rights matter too.

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

>>>So, I saved a dollar.

Actually I'd say you spent about 10 dollars. If you buy the print book for $13, read it carefully so as not to damage it, then sell it on amazon as like "new" for $11, you have only spent 2 dollars overall (instead of 12 for the ebook). This is why for a long time I resisted buying a Kindle... it is more costly to buy kindle books than buying the print versions.

>>>The publisher saved the cost of printing a paperback book, physically transporting it to Amazon.

I've heard that printing and mailing is only a few pennies, because it's all done in bulk, so the publisher didn't really save that much cash with the e-edition. On the other hand the U.S. DOJ is suing the ebook publishers for collusion (forming a price-fixing cartel), so maybe they really aren't charging more than they should.

The only "real" cost of a physical book versus e-book is Amazon mailing it to you for $3..... and you pay that cost, not amazon.

Re:It's about time

[Tastecicles]

well, no... as I said in a previous post on another thread, I purchase digital content from unencumbered sources. To justify: I donate on a regular basis to Project Gutenberg and the eTree audio archive (and the Moving Image Archive, both part of the whole that is the Internet Archive). Because their content is not DRM encumbered, donations are voluntary (and tax deductible), and their licensing is practically open (you can redistribute freely, as long as you nod the source), it's a trio of sources I've found far better value than the DRM-crippled stuff.

As physical media goes, for years since I found out that some CDs and DVDs wouldn't play in my computers, as to why: the standard for audio CDs is Redbook; any CD not compliant with Redbook is not an audio CD and has no business being advertised as such - this was settled in court some years ago although I am having trouble finding a link. For a DVD to carry the DVD Video logo it must be compliant with one of three standards: Books 3, Book B or DVD Video Recording Book. In no other circumstances can it be advertised or sold as a DVD video. They preempted any potential suits over standards and playability there by establishing the standards, logo and conditions before the media went mainstream.

I take a netbook with an optical drive to ensure I'm getting what I pay for with audio CDs because there are still some publishers that print non-standard discs (Sony!). Needless to say, with current tech that's a rare thing these days. Usually when I take a netbook out it doesn't have an optical drive rattailed to it and it's already loaded with music.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why anyone would use torrents to download specific ebooks, anyway -- it's a real pain in the butt for files on the order of a megabyte (single audio tracks, single ebooks, etc.). The benefit of torrents over other filesharing protocols (and HTTP filehosters like megaupload was) mainly come into play for big files/collections, and I have indeed torrented some packs of hundreds of ebooks. Hunting for a specific ebook is just a megabitch, and I've bought a number of such rather than deal with it. (Perhaps 50%, btw, were authors I'd heard of, but didn't know if I liked until I read something of theirs from one of those packs -- it's like an easier, less-legal equivalent of checking out books from the local library.)

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you just lend her your Kindle? That's what you would do with a book after all.

Re:It's about time

[interval1066]

What I find hilarious is that you apparently think people who are too stingy to pay for their media will grudgingly do so anyway when piracy is made slightly more inconvenient...

"Piracy" is not inconvineinced in the least. And you really don't have to take my word for it, anyone in the security part of IT would know. That's the punchline to the whole DRM fiasco. Kind of like the TSA, it really only inconveniences you, the reader, the lowest in the pecking order in this whole clusterfuck.

Re:It's about time

[bitingduck]

Printing *is* a significant cost. And shipping, and dealing with a bunch of printed stuff, especially if you're a small publisher. Hardcopy takes way more work to set up to look nice, and way more effort to distribute. There's a lot of friction in the distribution channels so you have to schedule things almost a year in advance as far as getting orders from distributors who get orders from bookshops, and it can take a year after a book sells to get paid. And if you're a small publisher you've got a bunch of money sunk in the paper copies that may or may not sell, and a good fraction of them end up getting pulped anyway because it's cheaper than returning them (mass market paperback).

E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills. If you're an expert at setting type with lead, then yes, it might be harder to set up an ebook. But for anyone born in the latter quarter of the 20th century, electronic books are much easier to set up.

Selling is a different story, because you need someone to actually find your book and decide to buy it. So if they spend the difference in the cost of setup and distribution on marketing, then yes, they can claim it costs as much to sell an ebook as a print book. But it's pretty artificial.

Re:It's about time

[cmiller173]

FWIW, I've read many novel length works on my old Palm IIIxe at 160x160 pixel 3.35" (excluding the graffiti area) 4-bit greyscale. More on a Palm T|X 320x480 pixel 3.9" 16-bit color display. I now prefer to read on my Kobo eReader but still can read on my smart phone, and do if I'm stuck waiting in line somewhere without my reader handy.

Re:It's about time

[Zordak]

I'd say the problem is that you feel entitled to take stuff as long as it's easy to take, or at least more convenient than paying the author for it.

Re:It's about time

[man_of_mr_e]

That's like lending someone your bookshelf, with all your books on it, just so they can read one of them.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard that printing and mailing is only a few pennies, because it's all done in bulk, so the publisher didn't really save that much cash with the e-edition.

This is sort of delusional.. books are expensive to print. In the absolute BEST case, the printing costs account for around 1/6th the selling price of the book. Transport and storage costs are extra on top of that. And note that is the best case (paperback, large production run).. It's not unusual for 1/3rd the selling price to be actual production cost.

Re:It's about time

[Chris Burke]

Well that's the irony, isn't it? DRM is supposed to make piracy inconvenient so people will buy, but what it really does is make piracy more convenient than paying for the product.

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

>>> I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book.

Link please.
I've never heard that.

The U.S. DOJ is currently suing the publishers. It will be interesting to see what kind of evidence they manufacture to justify why e-books should cost as much as print books.

Re:It's about time

[demonbug]

>>> I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book.

Link please.
I've never heard that.

The U.S. DOJ is currently suing the publishers. It will be interesting to see what kind of evidence they manufacture to justify why e-books should cost as much as print books.

In fact MacMillan, the parent company of Tor/Forge, is one of the publishers that refused to settle with DoJ. Kind of makes me wonder whether MacMIllan finally gave Tor/Forge the go-ahead to drop DRM as the start of a campaign to show how wonderful the agency model is that it allows such things.

No, of course I don't have any evidence - I just find the timing suspicious. They finally decide to remove DRM a week or two after being sued by the DoJ, after refusing to do so for many years. Perhaps we will see some more consumer-friendly moves as the publishers attempt to show that their cartel is a good thing for the buying public.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you said 3.5" Its not an iphone, most likely android then. Maybe find an app that uses TTS to read it to you then? This would be a plug for my app but I won't mention its name here. Instead I'd encourage you to find such an app yourself.

Re:It's about time

[Abalamahalamatandra]

I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone.

Why not? I do it all the time. Reading the Steve Jobs biography now. Aldiko rocks, and I always have my phone with me. In my pocket. And everyone thinks I'm checking email when I'm really reading a book.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotal and all, but I certainly will gravitate towards their offerings. Immediately. The very reason I don't buy any ebooks for my wife's kindle is that we can't read them on anything else. I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone.

I hear people say this all the time and I don't get it. I used to read books on my 160x160 Palm back in the day and I had no issues with it. Now I'm reading on my Droid and I love the smoother fonts.

Here's the thing: These are devices that are smaller and easier to hold than a paperback. There may be more pages to "turn" but flipping them is so much easier (a tap or small swipe, depending on the software) that I don't notice the difference. Moving from the bottom of the page to the top of the next is more effortless. If my eyes ever start to go, I can enlarge the font. And since I always have my phone with me I can read wherever I am; no more wishing I'd thought to grab that book before leaving the house.

I say, give it a chance. You may just be surprised.

Re:It's about time

[supercrisp]

So true. It's far easier to pirate and ebook than to check one out of my local library. And yesterday I needed a book, wanted it fast, but it was only on Amazon. And I have a Nook. Research, installation, purchase, DRM-removal, conversion and all, learning how to break the DRM and get reading on the Nook took me less than 10 minutes. And in future, I'll be able to break DRM and get it on my Nook almost as fast as any other book. It only takes seconds to drag and drop a file on the DRM-stripping applet. On the other hand, I spent a couple of hours last spring trying to get a book checked out of my public library and onto the ereader software on my laptop. I never succeeded. After that two hours, and a final crescendo of cussing, I just went and got the book at Pirate Bay. I don't mind buying books, especially books I can justify professionally, like the one I needed yesterday. Heck, those are the only books I buy; I don't want to litter my house with more damn paper books, and I want to buy ebooks. But I don't like the runaround. And it sure doesn't deter me; it just motivates me to be a jerk.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I think the Agency pricing is so ridiculous. If I read a good book that costs as much as either the hardcover or even the paperback, I don't bother recommending it to anyone. Now, if it is $5 or less (and good; yes those do exist), then I will most certainly recommend it to people with similar tastes.

It seems to me that they should charge *less* so they can sell *more*.

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

It's worse than that. I don't think copyright should even exist. There is not, in nature, a natural protection for one's ideas which, like fire, can be shared with others without diminishing one's own use of the idea (or flame). ----- The monopoly granted to authors is a PRIVILEGE that like all government-granted monopolies is temporary and revocable. The purpose of such monopolies is to enrich the whole of humanity with the creation of art, not just for the sole benefit of one person.

Re:It's about time

[gfxguy]

Sorry, I wish I could link back to my college days, but that's not possible.

Re:It's about time

[Defenestrar]

... ePub drm can be stripped away instantly (I used some promotional credit to acquire a DRM encumbered epub and stripped the DRM in short order).

Which is illegal under DMCA (even though there is plenty of court precedence to probably favor a ruling of fair use (IANAL)). I applaud you for your willingness to be a court test case (why don't you forward the above post to the publisher of the DRM content along with your name, address, and lawyer's contact info). As for me, I'll back you up by continuing financial support for the EFF (I'm willing to bet they'd help you out with lawyers if you don't already have one, or if you already do, there will be some briefs coming in on your side), and continuing my boycott of DRM books. I don't suppose you could initiate a kickstarter program for a lawsuit not yet brought can you?

I also am thrilled by the news that Tor has joined up with the Baen philosophy, and I hope their corporate overlords allow it to progress. The fact that it is yet another sci-fi publisher which has adopted this strategy should not be lost on anyone.

Re:It's about time

[CodeHxr]

Negative attitude aside, you're pretty much right on the money. I find it seems similar to the jock/geek mentality many of us encountered in high school. The jocks had the "power" then, but the vast majority of them have lost it, and I'd wager that those that did keep some of it did so because they buddied-up with the geeks before it was too late. The rest of them are managing McD's or something else equally unsatisfying.

In this scenario, the publishing companies become the jocks as they currently have the money/influence/power/etc. This will change (how soon is another discussion completely) and those that wish to retain any modicum of profitability are going to have to start buddying-up to those they chastise today.

And since I'm ranting anyway... I'm *really* looking forward to when this happens to the RIAA and MPAA. Their business model is changing and they aren't going to be able to rake in cash hand-over-foot as they have in the past. Their entire infrastructure is becoming obsolete and I'm going to enjoy watching them slowly crush themselves under their own weight and ignorance. It reminds me of a scene from Erik the Viking:

[Hy-Brasil is sinking, everything is collapsing and exploding] Everyone stay calm! This is not happening!

Re:It's about time

[cpu6502]

True. It was 14" (an old television that I still own). 40 characters per line. Ahhhh the nostalgia. :-) I feel like going to play Zork or Hitchhikers Guide again.

Re:It's about time

[Man Eating Duck]

E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills

I work in a publishing company, and have done the layout for countless [literally, I have no idea how many :) ] paper books, and made a heap of epubs from those Indesign sources. There are some unique challenges with ebooks, making a file that ends in .epub is easy, making a quality ebook is surprisingly hard. In one instance, a book with French grammar examples which was crossreferenced from here to next Sunday, I ended up with about 3200 links. I scripted parts of it, but still...

I would say that print and digital is about the same degree of difficulty, which is "not very difficult" if you take your time and know what you're doing. Digital just requires some additional skills, and better knowledge of the structural tools you have.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to what the other AC said, Albanach was talking about his first ebook purchase, which could have been years before Amazon started allowing people to lend ebooks.

Re:It's about time

[Moryath]

What "decrease caused by piracy"? Cracking the DRM on ebooks was trivial. There are more ebooks in open formats or PDF floating around than anyone could possibly want. All DRM did was piss off the paying customers.

The ugly truth of every industry that has bitched and moaned about "piracy" is that all the money wasted on DRM has not gotten them any money in return. The people who are going to "pirate" do it for lots of reasons. Some want a more functional copy that can be moved to other devices, or that they're sure will still work in 5 years if they upgrade to a newer model device. Some just want to not deal with this kind of bullshit - the unskippable ads/previews, annoying nag screens, and other nuisances. Some are the kind of OCD person that archives anything they can get their hands on, which is actually really fucking useful to society when it comes to preserving missing/lost episodes of TV shows or presumed-destroyed literary or computer works from a few decades ago.

Some are never going to be your customers merely because the prices are so goddamn high that they could never afford to purchase. And a decade ago, certain companies (*cough*microsoft*cough*adobe*cough*) used to have a "well we don't really care too much" attitude, because they saw the numbers: putting up with so-called "piracy" led to a lot of self-taught people using their product and then buying it legit at offices or other small business environments. When Adobe started cracking down on "piracy", all of a sudden you saw the rise of the open source movement handing out programs like Paint.Net to compensate. Only the staggering incompetence of the GUI designers and lack of foresight and marketing competence in the discordant linux community have prevented a similar situation on the desktop OS level.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't read them on your wife's Kindle? Where else would you like to read them?

Re:It's about time

[locopuyo]

Aren't there other ways for young authors to get their start now? I know someone who wrote vampire novels and couldn't get a publisher so she just released them for cheap on Amazon's marketplace. They did well and now she's a millionaire with multiple publishing deals.
I'm not sure how popular the Sci-Fi magazines are but just getting your books out there on markets as eBooks and selling them cheaper than well established writers seems like it might be an even better way to get recognized.

Re:It's about time

[Man Eating Duck]

On the subject of printing costs, I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book. Now they are claiming that's not the case at all, that those costs are minimal, that it costs nearly just as much to sell an 'e' version of the book as it does to sell a physical copy.

Well, they're right. As printing technology goes forward (digital printing, and better tools for setting offset plates come to mind), printing costs have gone significantly down the last couple of decades. They are no longer a very large part of the cost of a finished paper book. Generally I agree that ebooks shouldn't cost more than a paperback, but ultimately, what decides the price is what the customers will pay. Amazon probably sets the price according to what their algorithms tell them will give most profits, although they may have loss-leaders to push Kindles as well. Some people would rather read ebooks (I'm definitely one of them), and thus Amazon might be justified in setting ebook prices higher than paperback. I'm also a reader who would like cheaper ebooks, I'm just trying to analyse what's going on here :)

As for self-publishing: I've read quite a few stories, and those authors almost invariably ignore editing, copy-editing, formatting, and leave proofreading to Word's spelling check. Saying that they are worse is a gross understatement, most self-published works are downright horrible quality-wise, and a pain to read. As I say in this post I'm all for it with proper QA, but it's sad that so many good stories end up unreadable because the author used a friend who got an A in English in lieu of the whole publishing process. In the end self-publishing might have a very positive effect on ebook pricing and availability.

Re:It's about time

[R3d M3rcury]

I read books on my iPhone, which has a 3.5" screen. It certainly isn't as luxurious as doing so on a Kindle or iPad, but it isn't a horrible thing.

What you need to understand is you're reading the text--not the book. Forget the layout. Find a nice comfortable size for the text that is readable yet doesn't require constant interaction. For me, I get about 2-3 sentences on a screen and that works fine, but YMMV.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an awesome niche for a techy service provider. Remind me again why we need publishers anymore?

Re:It's about time

[hierophanta]

to quote Neil Stephenson - 'gold is the corpse of value.' this is really just the end of 14 book mega sagas - Wheel of Time anyone?

btw i did love that series

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Micky TheIdiot,

First of all, the idea that the so-called "free market" responds to the needs of the consumer is a fairy tale. It was made up by conservatives to make all of us feel safe in deregulating the markets. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I remember a car once called the Dodge Dart. Oh, that was a popular car. Millions of Darts sold. Chrysler was doing pretty well by the Dart and they weren't about to change a thing. Then disaster struck. A man did a study and wrote a book and the Dart was branded as Unsafe. There was a huge uproar. Consumer groups across the US demanded Chrysler stop production and recall the cars. The market had spoken. Chrysler immediately recalled all of the cars and fixed each of the many problems.

Of course they didn't. Lawsuit followed lawsuit, claim followed claim. Chrysler eventually had to be forced to remove this rolling safety hazard from their sales lots.

What the market said was "build a cheap little car and the American public will buy it". What "free market" apologists say should have happened is car manufacturers will build a great little car through better engineering. What Chrysler did was make the little car cheap by stripping out every single safety feature they could and selling it to the American public, then claiming it was safe.

Free market, schmee market. Give me government regulation any day.

Re:It's about time

[lgw]

It will be interesting to see what kind of evidence they manufacture to justify why e-books should cost as much as print books.

The answer to that one is simple: e-books and paper boooks "should" cost whatever the publisher wants to sell them for. No one has to justify their prices for anything to you or anyone else. Now, finding buyers - that's a different matter.

But the per unit cost of physical printing and shipping is quite small - more than a CD, but still liekly less than a dollar. All the costs are fixed costs - the advance to the author, the editing and proofreading, any legal clearances, the page layout (which is just as much work for an e-book as a paper book - both are done in software, after all), the proofing of the final layout, etc. Allmost all of the cost of the book comes before the first copy is "printed", and that's the same for paper and e-books.

Re:It's about time

[lgw]

Your confusing the fixed cost of preparing text for printing with the per-unit cost of printing. The latter is quite cheap (probably less than a dollar per unit). The former costs about the same for an e-book, which still requires editing, proofreading, layout, etc. It's only the actual ink and paper that you save, and that is pretty cheap.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

you can lend it one time, for a week, and then never again to anyone. that's not really good enough.

Re:It's about time

[DroolTwist]

"This is like thinking you can cure a man of his heroin addiction by putting a "No Junkies!" sign on the front of your country club."

But, where will all the coke and hooker parties be held at?

Join the Secret Service, and you'll be able to find them.

Re:It's about time

[Endo13]

Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.

But see, that's the whole problem right there. That's the real crux of it all, and the rest of your post all just reflects back and magnifies that. If the tree-pulp version that actually requires time and resources to manufacture and distribute costs $13, the bits and bytes version should probably cost about $3-5. And at that price, it wouldn't matter so much if you couldn't resell or share it.

Re:It's about time

[Endo13]

Sure, it's that cheap if you go with the cheapest option you can possibly find. Good quality hard-backs and paperbacks aren't cheap to physically print. (This is why it's not possible for some random individual who wrote a book on his own to just go and get it published on his own, when he's first starting out. It requires significant capital outlay to get the printing done because it's not cheap. Getting your ebook version on Amazon, on the other hand, is a trivial amount of money in comparison.) Of course, that's not nearly all the extra costs associated with a physical copy vs. a digital copy. Physical copies also have to be stored somewhere, in the right conditions. That means, at the very least, warehouses with all the ususal utilities to keep the temperature at the proper range for books, as well as staff at the warehouse, as well as equipment at the warehouse, etc. etc. And on top of all that, you've still got almost all the same digital resources required as for the digital copy. You still have to run the website, you still need the IT staff for it, and all of that. The only overhead the digital copy has that the physical copy doesn't is the storage space for the digital copy and the extra bandwdith to upload it. That's a pittance compared to all the extra overhead the physical copy requires, probably less than 1% as much.

Re:It's about time

[lgw]

The paper and ink and warehousing really are that cheap, per unit, in bulk. Almost all the cost of printing is the setup cost, not the per-unit cost. As the old saying went "Printing one copy will cost you $10000, printing 10000 copies will ocst you $11000".

But don't take my word on it. Charlie Stross wrote about what goes into a book. There's a whole series on his blog.

Re:It's about time

[Endo13]

[citation needed]

Books with poor editing, proofreading and layouts still cost as much as ones much better in all those categories. Meanwhile, books physically constructed in a higher-quailty manner sell for a good bit more. And the poorly-edited variety usually don't sell too well either. You'd think that if the cost of the actual publishing were that cheap (and they clearly cut corners on the rest of it) the per-copy price would be next to nothing. And yet they still don't drop the price to a point where it actually sells. So why exactly is all that?

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say a bigger problem is your inability to demonstrate any sort of critical thinking, or reading comprehension. Just because you THINK your reasoning is why person X does Y DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN it is correct/differing opinions are wrong.

Re:It's about time

[lgw]

Charlies Stross wrote a whole series on common misconceptions about publishing. Here's a good place to start.

You're trying to reason from the prices books sell for to the per-unit cost of publishing them? There simply is no relation there. (Unless you're talking about leather-bound books with gold-edged paper or somesuch, and even those are far cheaper to make than you might expect).

Re:It's about time

[Man Eating Duck]

Sounds like an awesome niche for a techy service provider. Remind me again why we need publishers anymore?

OK. TL;DR: Go ahead and self-publish, but you *need* language assistance and other services, they could come from freelancers. I've summarised it in in this post, replicated below:

No, keep doing this until we can buy directly from the authors all the time. There isn't much need for a middleman with digital goods.

I should mention that I work as a tech guy at an academic publishing company, but I write this post as a reader, albeit one with a better than average insight in the actual creation process of a book.

There is a large amount of vanity-published ebooks available for free or next to nothing (but not marketed, see below). Go on, drink your fill of awkward language and sentences, grammar/spelling errors, story arcs that don't quite work, descriptions and whole chapters which are superfluous, plot inconsistencies, etc etc. All presented in epubs very badly converted from Word with no cover or table of contents. Then, come back and tell us again that publishers are worthless with their editors, copy-editors, proofreaders, graphic artists and layout professionals who all work together as a team. Or, you could ask published authors if they believe that their publisher added any value to their books (or just read some prefaces).

As an author, yes, you can hire all those people yourself if you have enough capital. Seriously, it's an alternative you could look into, if you're good and have a fair bit of luck it could work out for you. No, you or your friends can't do it, no matter how well you did in $language class. If you don't already have an established name, you'll probably need marketing as well, which is nicely substantiated by the fact that you (parent post) obviously haven't seen very many actual results of self-publishing.

I've actually read quite a few of those, mostly science fiction novelas and short stories. The saddest thing is when what could have been a good story is buried beneath heaps of flaws, marring the experience and diminishing the author's initial chance of making it big.

I'm not saying that what you describe couldn't be achieved if we had large pools of good, reliable and readily available freelancers. This will probably happen one day, but we're not there yet, and until then we need publishers for QA. Publishers can and do use freelancers if necessary, but even for them it's quite hard to find good ones.

If an author can't/won't use a publisher, that's fine, but he NEEDS to get professional assistance if he's serious about his work.

Re:It's about time

[Dr.M0rph3us]

If this move will give better, well-publicized results, others will follow. DRM only encumbers legitimate users, while those who want to pirate the books can find them anyway.

I'm certainly not reading a 400 page tome on my phone.

I have read dozens of books on multiple phones, some having more than 500 pages, and I enjoyed it. I started a couple of years ago after I finished reading all the books at my place and wanted more, so I purchased a couple of Iaim M. Banks e-books that weren't yet published in my country, wrongly thinking it should work on my old WM6 PDA, but guess what: there were no apps that support that specific DRM format, so I had to find them elsewhere. A while later, I switched on an Android Phone which had a better screen for reading but after this DRM experience, I avoid buying e-books having this protection.

Related on reading books on mobile phones, it just takes some time to get used, but I have no problem reading small text. I know not everyone can adapt to that, but I enjoy it, since it's small, multi-functional, and I can easily use it in transit.

Re:It's about time

[chrismcb]

I don't know enough about the publishing world. But based on what you've said, and what I've read from similar comments, the problem is the lack of the right tool. Yes SOME ebooks will be difficult. But most should be fairly trivial and straightfoward. And if they aren't then there is something wrong with the system

Re:It's about time

[chrismcb]

Anecdotal and all, but I certainly will gravitate towards their offerings. Immediately. The very reason I don't buy any ebooks for my wife's kindle is that we can't read them on anything else

Why not? You should be able to read them on your laptop, your computer, your tablet. What device can't you read them on? a nook?

Re:It's about time

[fifedrum]

with the kindle app, and if Amazon decides you shouldn't own the book anymore, you lose it. I prefer to puchase books that can be kept, not purchase a license for a book that can be revoked. I guess that's really what it boils down to. (and no, I don't care that they've only done this N times, once is too many)

Re:It's about time

[fifedrum]

because I simply don't like staring at my phone for long periods of time, eye problems I guess. I blame my job, staring at a computer screen all day.

wish I could do it, like reading in a car. If you can read in a moving car, more power to ya. Whenever I do it, people yell at me to keep my eyes on the road.

Re:It's about time

[centre21]

Honest people are honest - until they think the opportunity for them to get something for nothing presents itself.
I can guarantee that when the average person learns that DRM is gone and they can "lend" and "borrow" books as they wish, not only will it signal the death of physical books, but paid authors and publishing as well.

And everyone who says that they'll pay for things now that publishers are talking about eliminating DRM, I can guarantee that'll last less than three purchases, because they'll find some OTHER reason to "justify" why they need to get the book (or movie or song) for free. If you're really interested in supporting your favorite author, actor, director or musical act, then suck it up and pay for the media, DRM or not.

The fact is, whether you want to admit it or not, the average person, given the chance, will rob you blind if they think they can legally get away with it.

Re:It's about time

[FauxReal]

Curious, do you personally believe that authors should be compensated for their work? If so, do you attempt to pay them in any way if you do enjoy what you downloaded, what is your method of compensation?

About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

and for some reason this makes me want to purchase every Tor book they offer,

Re:About Time

[Junta]

The implication being that DRM somehow encumbers piracy. The simple fact is it is completely ineffectual at slowing piracy down. You can find pirated copies of every piece of music, video, and publication you want despite the draconian DRM that is so prevalent in the industry.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither, actually. Their selection sucks.

Re:About Time

[firex726]

Only one book in the AWARD WINNERS section:
http://us.macmillan.com/torforge/categories/General/torforge/Awardwinners/all/title

Plus they seem to be the ones behind those classics of American literature, the Halo series.

Re:About Time

[elsurexiste]

The implication being that DRM somehow encumbers piracy. The simple fact is it is completely ineffectual at slowing piracy down.

That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.

You can find pirated copies of every piece of music, video, and publication you want despite the draconian DRM that is so prevalent in the industry.

That's a popular confusion about the purpose of DRM schemes. Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it. People willing to pay only $0 will pay exactly that. Fans will pay you nicely regardless of DRM. The group that DRM targets is the big crowd that can pay your price, but won't give you a dime if they can get it for free.

I recall the people behind "The Witcher" put DRM on their files and removed it after the product was delivered. Other people won't bother, but they can do it with exactly the same results in their profits. Because, indeed, DRM is not a piracy-stopper but an initial-piracy-slower.

Re:About Time

[PhilHibbs]

Very laudable, and this is a great move that I hope more publishers adopt, but one side-effect of this kind of enthusiasm is that the Tor experiment will be hailed as a resounding success because of people exuberantly rushing to support the first major mover in this direction.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would it? The music industry have finally managed to work it out online. Most likely you will see the sold files having your customer number embedded, yes, you can strip the code away, but most people aren't capable of that. For example, Apple was doing this with Xcode 4.0 DMGs (for Snow Leopard users, Xcode 4 was payware) but most of the torrents out there were distributed with the customer tag embedded in the file... not sure if they closed down the accounts, but I would guess they did so.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell the Ender's Game series.

Re:About Time

[Wattos]

Simply not true anymore. That might have been the intent, but that does not work.

Movies are available on release dates (DVD, Blueray) on torrent sites. Same goes for most games (which have the crack ready the next day).

Re:About Time

[firex726]

Yea, only downside is who here has not read Ender's Game?

Re:About Time

[Joehonkie]

That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.

So, where is a valid source of these numbers, specifically as it pertains to eBooks? In the case of eBook piracy, the DRM used in ePubs is so easy to break that anyone can download an app an break it. Much easier than for DRM encumbered video and audio, which are usually broken during or before their release periods. The only person that ePub DRM inconveniences is a legitimate buyer who wants to swap his books around to new devices.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, indeed, DRM is not a piracy-stopper but an initial-piracy-slower.

Ever heard the expression 0-day warez?

The cracked versions hit the pirate sites before they are available to the legal channels. (Most true for movies and games, don't know how it is for books.)
This is possible because the publisher holds distribution of the finished product until a specific release date to "maximize profits".
I guess it is more profitable to make sure that everyone buys it at the same time, otherwise the early buyers might have time to warn their friends what utter crap it is. They will also not have time to flood the used market.

Re:About Time

[hawguy]

That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.

How does DRM slow down piracy when there are a multitude of programs out there to rip and strip DRM off of DVD's, Blurays, and popular eBook formats?

I've seen a number of new releases for download on the day the Bluray is available, so I could have the movie in my house even faster than Amazon can ship it to me overnight. How is the DRM on the Bluray slowing the initial piracy?

I think the industry is deceiving itself if it thinks DRM is doing anything to stop or slow piracy, all it does is make it harder for legitimate users to use their content. I have a Kindle eReader and a Nook tablet. Each has its advantages in different environments, so why can't I read my purchased book on both readers? If I download a pirated copy, it's got no DRM restrictions and I can easily format-shift it to read it on either device, so the industry has made the pirated copy more valuable to me than the legitimate purchased copy.

Re:About Time

[ravenscar]

Maybe, but they have the Mistborn series which is well worth the read. In fact, I just bought the series as an ebook from BN. I should wrap up reading it today or tomorrow. My 12 year old son would like to read it. Unfortunately, it is not a series flagged for lending. On top of that, if it were, I doubt my 12 year old would blow through the 2000 pages in the 2 week lending period. It was looking like I might have to purchase the series twice or hope that the local library has copies of the books available.

Thanks to this decision by the publisher things are looking up. I wonder if they'll automatically strip the DRM from my existing purchase or if it will only apply to future purchases.

Re:About Time

[tomhath]

DRM doesn't slow down people who seek out illegal copies from pirating. What DRM does do is keep people who choose between legally borrowing a book versus buying their own copy from borrowing. Kind of like the old saying that the lock your front door only keeps out honest people.

It will be interesting to see the effect of this experiment though. My guess is that it won't make much difference, people who buy books will continue to buy them and borrow a few, people who refuse to buy DRM protected material might buy a few more but will continue to pirate them as well.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

The implication being that DRM somehow encumbers piracy. The simple fact is it is completely ineffectual at slowing piracy down.

Try SACD or DVD-Audio. Through guarded hardware secrets, the only thing the pirates can rip is the CD layer on hybrid discs.

(I'd /love/ to rip those onto my computer, but I can't. I wish Radiohead or someone released a SACD-only album, just because people might then have a go at cracking those formats. But they'd probably just rip it through analogue means.)

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

and for some reason this makes me want to purchase every Tor book they offer,

And if you want some good ebooks to purchase: Orson Scott Card's Ender's series books and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. just to name to excellent series by Tor!

Re:About Time

[icebraining]

The fact that you think the two are incompatible shows how much the brainwashing has worked: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

Re:About Time

[cpu6502]

>>>the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it

Not only is that not true now (games are uploaded same day of release), it's never been true. As soon as a game was released in the 80s, pirates would set to work cracking the floppy, rewriting the assembly to ignore the disk errors, maybe add a trainer (infinite lives, skip levels, etc), and upload it to a BBS on day 1 or 2. A few days later you could even download the ripped SID or Paula music.

Re:About Time

[Tastecicles]

um...

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. You are wrong.

The major purpose of DRM (and I work in this industry, hence the anonymity) is to protect entrenched players from competition by new business models. All this talk about “slowing initial piracy” is hogwash, and everybody in the industry knows it. What you are quoting is marketing-speak, which is a euphemism for blatant lies—the statistics behind these have been debunked by industry veterans again and again, yet the fool public continues to drink the marketeers' cool-aid.

Re:About Time

[cmiller173]

While I have read Ender's Game and some of the sequels, I haven't read all of them. Plus the ones I have read were dead tree versions I borrowed from my sister. Since I might like my daughter to read them I may end up buying Ender's Game to whet her appetite.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering pirated releases are usually present before real releases, your point is pretty much moot.

Re:About Time

[julesh]

http://code.google.com/p/sacd-ripper/
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=96860

Found within moments of googling for each.

Re:About Time

[julesh]

Second. Baen have been selling DRM-free ebooks for years. In fact, Tor *used* to sell their books through Baen's system, but had to withdraw then, due (I'm led to believe) by pressure from their parent company.

Re:About Time

[Princeofcups]

You can find pirated copies of every piece of music, video, and publication you want despite the draconian DRM that is so prevalent in the industry.

Not really. Almost none of the books that I am looking for can found in eFormat. Unless you are looking for best sellers or classics, you are probably SOL. Maybe this will improve with time, but right now only a tiny subset of previously printed media are in eFormat, and only a slightly bigger subset of currently printed media. I'd love to be able to get rid of my physical book library, but it's not happening any time soon.

Re:About Time

[seandiggity]

Simply not true anymore. That might have been the intent, but that does not work.

Movies are available on release dates (DVD, Blueray) on torrent sites. Same goes for most games (which have the crack ready the next day).

There was a short window a few years ago where I might have agreed with you. However, things are different now...take a look at the effectiveness of Internet policing and takedowns, stronger internal policies by Big Media (more attention paid to who gets DVD screeners, etc.), and a change in social attitudes and purchasing habits by American consumers (I suspect my generation, those born in the 80s, carries a large part of the blame). This has been accompanied by changes in the way that pirated content is spread online...maybe you haven't spent much time on the PirateBay recently, but talk to those who have and they'll tell you the juiciest torrents are moving "underground".

As far as books are concerned, perhaps the largest collections out there were hosted in phpBB-style forums that linked to MegaUpload, RapidShare, etc. and vanished a few months ago.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'd very much like to be.

Re:About Time

[tlhIngan]

Very laudable, and this is a great move that I hope more publishers adopt, but one side-effect of this kind of enthusiasm is that the Tor experiment will be hailed as a resounding success because of people exuberantly rushing to support the first major mover in this direction.

Actually, the cynic in me has it that Tor simply wants to keep the money for itself. I've been annoyed at times to find some sci-fi books are unavailable on Kindle/Nook/iBookstore, then I remember that they're published through Baen.

Great, since they're DRM-free and all that (and really quite generous - they often include a CD of tons of ebooks with their deadtree with permission to share them). Their CEO has denounced DRM for many years now so it's not completely unusual.

Tor's move though could be to simply avoid leaving money on the table. Why put up with the agency model of ebooks, when you can sell them yourself and keep the 30%? Of course, there'll be higher expenses (that 30% covers a lot - payment (credit card/gift cards - stores don't stock gift cards out of goodness of heart - they often buy them 20+% off face value), servers, bandwidth, support (being now a user has to get the ebook from their computer to their reader - something Amazon realized which is why the Kindle was the first autonomous ebook reader)).

It's just like how the music industry went DRM-free in order to break out from the tough Apple contracts being imposed in order to sell music on iTunes. With a competitive marketplace, the music industry can dictate the terms to their customers (Apple, Amazon) rather than Apple calling the shots. Same thing here - rather than having to be beholden to Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc., they can do it themselves and keep the cash they would've spent managing all those customers and pocket the 30% as well.

All the benefits of the agency model, without having to deal with middlemen. Apple won't care (do people buy books from the iBookstore?) since iTunes is but a secondary business that happens to do a little more than break even. Amazon, B&N, and Kobo will be affected most since they sell content.

As for can the experiment be repeated? It's hard to say. I'd say sci-fi enthusiasts probably are among the more technically inclined part of the population, so beying direct from Tor and loading your ebook reader is a minor inconvenience (unless you're stuck without your computer - though tablets (iPad, Android) both let you download e-books and import them autonomously). For someone who prefers romance novels or other reading public, it might be a foreign concept.

And hey, the Halo books were surprisingly good. I just wish Tor didn't hold back e-book releases at times, especially on the reprints.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a popular confusion about the purpose of DRM schemes. Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it.

Yes, but DRM for ebooks, in practice, doesn't work that way -- new DRM schemes are broken relatively quickly, and can't be introduced frequently enough to keep ahead. So for any given ebook, odds are there's an off-the-shelf tool that even unskilled users can use, taking 5 minutes to strip the DRM. Adding 5 minutes isn't worthwhile, particularly considering a book might take several days for the typical reader to get through, so nobody's in that big a hurry to get it as soon as it's released.

Now for software, where DRM can be modified with each release, and a release group has to have skilled guys develop a dedicated crack for that release, it can add some days, even months in some cases -- that makes it a worthwhile proposition.

Re:About Time

[oldmac31310]

Me!

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Now I have to get a PS3.

Re:About Time

[Raenex]

Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it.

Really? So which book from:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/new-releases.asp

will I not be able to find a pirated version of? I just did a test for "The Witness", which was released 9 days ago, and found it no problem.

I suspect the real reason for DRM is to "keep the honest people honest", in that by putting up some token security measures you're preventing them from casually copying.

Re:About Time

[lgw]

I think I got a DVD-Audio ripper by accident when I bought a tool to rip my Bluray discs so I could watch them on my PC too. (VLC will play Bluray from the disc, but it doesn't work well for me). I guess I could be wrong, since I've never actually used it for DVDA.

But those formats sound no better than CD, so why bother? (SACD is famous for having a noised-up copy of the CD on the CD "layer" so that if you did an A/B comparison with the disc the SACD version sounded much better). Admittedly there are a few titles that were remastered only for SACD or DVDA, which is annoying, but the format itself sounds the same.

Re:About Time

[Chaos Incarnate]

It was looking like I might have to purchase the series twice or hope that the local library has copies of the books available.

They may have print copies, but Macmillan refuses to allow library lending of ebooks.

Re:About Time

[Junta]

maybe you haven't spent much time on the PirateBay recently, but talk to those who have and they'll tell you the juiciest torrents are moving "underground".

I don't honestly track things that closely, but if they are 'moving underground' it isn't because DRM has been effective, it's because the frequent litigation is actually scaring people into hiding. Though I think some of the litigation is heavy-handed, as a strategy I prefer it to DRM as a) it has a lower chance of inconveniencing a legitimate user and b) unlike DRM it does cause change in the market.

Re:About Time

[chrismcb]

Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it.

Can you clarify what you mean by "slow down?"
Many pirated items are available before the item is even for sale. Most of the rest will be available that same day. So what is there to slow down?

Re:About Time

[chrismcb]

I've been annoyed at times to find some sci-fi books are unavailable on Kindle/Nook/iBookstore, then I remember that they're published through Baen.

i've read plenty of Barn's books on my Kindle. Yes I had to copy them by wire. But I could have paid Amazon a small nominal fee to whispernet it to me.

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

I may actually start buying e-book literature then...

Sure thing

[sandytaru]

Going to go poking around the Tor archives and grab myself a couple books as soon as this comes to fruition. Reward good behavior.

Re:Sure thing

[Eponymous Coward]

What are you going to get? There's so much to read and so little time, I'd appreciate some suggestions and opinions from my fellow slashdotters.

Re:Sure thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.

Re:Sure thing

[sandytaru]

The rest of the books in the Ender's Game series, to start. I read the first one but never bothered with the rest. I might try one of the Halo books to see how terrible they are. Also, After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn looks quite interesting.

Re:Sure thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Tor has Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge.
No true geek should pass them.

I'd also look at Steven Erikson myself.
I think a lot of Windling's crew are at Tor too, for the early urban fantasy.

That's off the top of my head, with no access to my dead-tree books right now.

Re:Sure thing

[jo_ham]

I suggest anything by Neal Asher.

The Polity universe is very good (home of his earlier stuff, including the excellent Agent Cormac series and the Spatterjay series). I have just finished "The Departure" from his new series (Owner series) and it is excellent.

If you're looking for a "quick" blast into the series, then the Spatteryjay series (set in the Polity universe) is a collection of three novels (The Skinner, The Voyage of Sable Keech, Orbus) rather than the lengthier Agent Cormac run, which stands at 5 (possibly 6 now with prequels?), beginning with Gridlinked in publishing order (but not chronological).

Re:Sure thing

[jkflying]

I found the rest of the Ender's Game series to be a bit preachy. The Ender's *Shadow* series fits the first book a lot better (it follows Bean rather than Ender).

Re:Sure thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest books by Vinge are not as good as the earlier books:

Peace War
Marooned in Realtime
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness in the Sky

Re:Sure thing

[cpu6502]

Scroll down to the review section. Tons-and-tons of book recommendations from professional critics. BTW Speaker for the Dead is a faaaar better book than Ender's Game (imho). I look forward to reading it a second time. :-)

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/depts.htm

Re:Sure thing

[Nemyst]

Tor has Sanderson and Jordan too, if fantasy's more your fancy.

Re:Sure thing

[oldmac31310]

Shadow Puppets was complete rubbish by any standards.

Re:Sure thing

[Eponymous Coward]

I was look for Tor recommendations specifically, but your link has a lot of great stuff. Thanks.

Re:Sure thing

[BlueBlade]

Don't bother, the rest of the books are tainted by Card's religious zealotry. They are preachy, arrogant and generally terrible. Ender's Shadow, a retelling of Ender's Game through Bean's point of view is the best of the bunch, but it's still nowhere near as good as Ender's Game.

Having read them, I wish I had spent those hours reading something else instead. If you want to go with Tor, You have amazing series like Game of Thrones, or the Wheel of Time series.

Re:Sure thing

[Xtifr]

Really? I didn't think that Peace War or Marooned in Realtime were anywhere near as good as his later works. In fact, I often recommend that people skip those two and read everything else he's written (including the brilliant early novella, "True Names"). On the other hand, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are major classics and easily rank with the best in the field. Nothing he's done since matches those two, but I thought Rainbows End* was outstanding once you got past the disappointment of it not being another AFUTD/ADITS.

* note to the peanut gallery: the lack of an apostrophe in the name of this book is deliberate.

Re:Sure thing

[Chaos Incarnate]

If you really want a terrible Halo book, go with The Flood by William C. Dietz. If you want one that's actually readable... Nylund's are good, as were Bear's (though they aren't really "Halo" per se). Haven't read Traviss's yet, but her other books are pretty good.

Re:Sure thing

[jkflying]

Better than Speaker For The Dead.

hmm

[buddyglass]

Note that if the profitability of removing DRM is dependent on eBooks being more attractive because they're able to be read on multiple devices then that profitability will disappear if one device begins to dominate the market. Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

Re:hmm

[Junta]

Profitability is driven by two directions, revenue and cost.

For revenue, there is more confidence even in a theoretical single-device market that the media will endure.

For cost, the infrastructure to support DRM is a non-trivial expense contributing to erosion of margin. It also serves an additional limiter in terms of scale, per-copy costs have a not-quite-zero incremental cost on the publisher due to DRM.

Re:hmm

[FBeans]

Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

Yes, if *you* are only going to read it on one platform, you won't care. For those people who would like the opputnity to read an e-book on multiple platforms, this is very useful. Or to phrase it a different way: yes, your choices are made based on your needs, woopty do!

Re:hmm

[elsurexiste]

I expect some karma flak now...

Hi! I program DRMs for a living, among other things. buddyglass is correct: the extra sales are going to be from the extra platforms that now can use those eBooks. The "DRM Infrastructure" is trivial for authors and publishers, I'd not dare to call it "Infrastructure" at all. Also, costs are usually insignificant: you usually protect an entire work, not individual copies.

Re:hmm

[Asic Eng]

Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

Are you absolutely certain you will only use one platform, and will only buy books from one supplier for the next twenty years? You don't think within this time frame some new device will come out - similar to e.g. the iPad did - and you'll get this device and will want to have the content you already paid for available on it?

Don't you think at the speed new devices are developed these days, some company will introduce something to the market with an entirely new display technology - much better than e-ink, super-amoled and retina display together? Are you sure it will be your currently preferred vendor who'll pioneer that new device?

Re:hmm

[Brucelet]

I agree! Also, my glorious vhs movie collection will never be made obsolete by the introduction of new media formats, because why would the industry ever change away from such a dominant format?

Re:hmm

[MickyTheIdiot]

I don't fault anyone for making a living. Let me start there.

However, I am not sure that DRM protects a damn thing. Like it says here, the idea itself is flawed. It's also not inherently a technical idea, as the flow of technology is to allow open access to information and it goes against the grain of that. It's a technical idea borne by non-technical people.

DRM is there to protect that mythical money loss of piracy. The arguable point is that the vast majority of people that "pirate" would not or could not pay for your product anyway. You have the group of people who want to read the book buy can't afford it (typified by your college students who get de-DRMed books) and you have the technical group who won't pay for anything ever and are fine with going through hoops to get it for free. *Neither* group is a loss because you never get money from them *ever.* So I would argue you're enabling a whole new group of people to get and pay for the book at what is a very low or nonexistent monetary loss. I think this is good and sane business. DRM has shown is laughably bad at it's primary purpose and wonderfully good at preventing honest people from using property (or a license) that they legally purchased.

I am sure you're not programming a product that is technically broken, but I am also sure you know the idea behind it *is* broken.

Re:hmm

[MickyTheIdiot]

This is typical for me to use them all for ALL my Kindle reads, but I often read kindle in a combination of these:

- My Kindle touch reader.
- Kindle app on my new Android Tablet
- Kindle app on my Nexus S (especially if I get caught waiting somewhere without my reader)
- Kindle cloud on my Work desktop (I use and support Linux for a living)
- Kindle cloud on my laptop (also Linux)
- Kindle app on my work Mac

This is what the digital revolution is about. I haven't hurt the author one iota and I am using the content in the way that fits my needs. Also, the Kindle "ecosystem" is great for purchased books (not so great, however, for content from other places which is a problem IMHO). There is no reason that all books should drop the DRM crap and even more accessible (include full Linux accessibility... HELLO AMAZON! wake up on this).

Re:hmm

[MickyTheIdiot]

it *is not* typical to use all those platforms. way to screw up a good point, genius.

Re:hmm

[milkmage]

"profitability will disappear if one device begins" pretty sure Kindle dominates right now. how is making your content MORE available impacting profits in a negative way?

can I [POTENTIALLY] make more money on amazon..
or amazon + everyone else?

what if the device you DO have doesn't have a contract with Tor? You'd have to wait for them to get into bed together. w/o DRM read what you want when you want on the device you want. - this is why you should care.

Re:hmm

[gnasher719]

Note that if the profitability of removing DRM is dependent on eBooks being more attractive because they're able to be read on multiple devices then that profitability will disappear if one device begins to dominate the market. Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

You would care very much if in three years time, there are much better readers for a different platform.

Re:hmm

[pjabardo]

How can you even suggest that something new won't come from apple?

Re:hmm

[b4dc0d3r]

Pointless diatribe. If someone wanted to pay me to make a pointless product, I absolutely would take their money and do the very best job I could. I would make a screen door for a submarine, and make sure it fit and was easy to install.

I don't care what I'm writing, as long as I'm writing. The more pointless it is, the more fun I usually have. Whether it is effective or not is secondary to the paycheck, and usually takes a back seat to the fun. Effectiveness is a business problem, not a code problem.

Take their money, and document all the ways people could get around it so they can't say you implemented an easily defeatable product.

And most importantly, come to technical venues and support or refute peoples' posts so readers know more about it.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

The article seemed to be suggesting that any loss in revenue due to the removal of DRM, i.e. book-sharing eating into legitimate purchases, would be offset by individuals being more likely to legitimately purchase eBooks because, sans DRM, they're a more attractive product. Because they work on multiple platforms. I'm just saying: if that is indeed the calculus at work here, then if the "multiple platforms" disappear then so does that boost to the attractiveness of DRM-free eBooks.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

I was positing a future in which there is one dominant platform. A future in which, for all intents and purposes, *everybody* is a single-platform reader. At that point, cross-platform readability isn't really a selling point.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

Don't know about you, but I'm fine with my media purchases having a usable lifespan of ~10-20 years. I don't have the expectation when purchasing physical media that it will remain usable in its current form for perpetuity. Books are somewhat of an exception to this rule, since there's no "format" to change. Then again, being physical media, books that are regularly used do tend to disintegrate over time.

In any case, time will tell whether there are enough people who feel as you do (i.e. place a large value on a lack of DRM) to offset those who, with the absence of DRM, will simply stop paying for product.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

You would care very much if in three years time, there are much better readers for a different platform.

Only if my original purchase was predicated on the assumption that no better readers would ever be developed, or that, should they appear, my purchase would be usable on those platforms. If, however, my original purchase was an informed one, i.e. made with a full realization that better platforms will likely appear at some point in the future and that my purchase won't be usable on them, then I wouldn't be particularly distressed when that came to pass.

Does that make sense? Basically the lack of future proofing affects how much I'm willing to pay for the product. Maybe I'm willing to pay slightly more for the DRM-free version since it's more future-proof. But if no DRM-free version exists and I look at the price of a non-future-proof eBook and still conclude it's worth buying then I'm not really justified in complaining when, in fact, it turns out not to be future-proof.

Re:hmm

[FBeans]

This is fantastic if you want to use your Kindle. Of course to drive down prices, and to insure variation a market needs competition. What is occurring as you describe it, is not helping competition. DRM may or may not aid in the "fight against piracy" but it's pretty much a no-brainer: companies like amazon use DRM to lock people into their product. Fine, it's a perfectly viable buissness technique, but I, like many (I assume) will not be playing along.

Re:hmm

[jedidiah]

Sounds like MS-DOS.

Single vendor encryption platforms are problematic regardless of how you try to spin it. They allow a single crappy vendor to dominate the market and ignore technological change.

At least DVD and BD encryption allow for multiple competing hardware vendors to compete for our money and mind share.

Re:hmm

[jedidiah]

> Don't know about you, but I'm fine with my media purchases having a usable lifespan of ~10-20 years

You're an idiot. Hopefully you won't ruin it for the rest of us.

There is no good reason to expect ANY media to have an artificially limited lifespan. This is true even of physical media that degrades due to the limitations of physics. To tolerate an artificially short life span on pure data is simply assinine and begging for corporate abuse.

You are begging for corporate abuse.

Count me out of your little S&M fantasy.

Re:hmm

[jedidiah]

No it doesn't make sense.

You're trying to pretend that a media purchase in 2012 needs to be an inherently temporary one when recent history clearly demonstrates that such needs not to be the case. You are advocating the purchase of products that are priced as long lasting archival copies as if they are supposed to be very temporary rentals.

That's a very bad and abusive shift in the consumer mentality.

If something is "only temporary", it better be dirt cheap.

The only thing keeping an eBook from being as durable as a real one is DRM. There are 20 year old eBooks already. There's no good reason that today's product can't last 20 years too.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

If corporate abuse means "I pay less for an eBook" then, depending on the discount, I may be fine with it. They're selling a product (gimped, admittedly) at a price. If I don't think the price merits the product then I won't buy it. Obviously if there's a DRM-free eBook selling for the same price as a DRM-laden version that's locked into a single platform then I'm going to prefer the former.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

OK, consider this scenario...
You have built up an extensive library of e-books for your device. All of the e-books are actually on some company owned server. The company goes bankrupt or just closes down the server. Now your device is just an expensive brick!

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

You're trying to pretend that a media purchase in 2012 needs to be an inherently temporary one when recent history clearly demonstrates that such needs not to be the case.

Actually I'm pretending nothing of the sort. There is absolutely no technical reason a media purchase in 2012 need be inherently temporary. There may be market realities, however, that render completely open media less than optimally profitable for publishers. My point is that you're not "ripped off" when you buy DRM-laden media since you knew a priori that it was DRM-laden and still chose to buy it at the price being asked.

You are advocating the purchase of products that are priced as long lasting archival copies as if they are supposed to be very temporary rentals.

Again, I'm doing nothing of the sort. I was responding to your claim, "You would care very much if, in three years time, there are much better readers for a different platform." I said, "No I wouldn't. At least, not unless my media purchase was predicated on a bunch of false assumptions, such as the notion that it would be usable in perpetuity."

If something is "only temporary", it better be dirt cheap.

That is one type of consumer preference. Most folks either don't consider temporal limitations or, when they do, respond "meh". If more folks start thinking like you then the profitability equation will shift and the publishers may move to a tiered pricing structure or just offer everything with no limits (albeit at a higher price point). As an aside, another change that would shift the profit equation in favor of open media would be a decrease in illegal sharing. To the extent you want to see open media, you should be an ardent advocate against sharing (in place of buying).

Re:hmm

[cmiller173]

Kind of like 3-4 years ago when tech articles declared that mySpace won the social media war ... ;)

As long as some geek somewhere thinks he can build the better widget there will never be a single platform. A platform may dominate for a time but eventually will fall to a better one. I just want my purchased media to be able to follow me from one to the next which DRM generally prohibits.

Re:hmm

[cpu6502]

Now, instead of just being stuck with kindle, I can buy whatever e-book reader is cheaper. Or offers the best features. Same thing I do with VCRs, DVRs, Bluray, PCs, and so on. Removal of DRM means I am no longer stuck with a proprietary piece of hardware.

Re:hmm

[0123456]

My point is that you're not "ripped off" when you buy DRM-laden media since you knew a priori that it was DRM-laden and still chose to buy it at the price being asked.

Really? Where does Amazon say whether a book has DRM?

I believe I've worked out which arcane line in the product description implies that a book is DRM-free, but there's nothing on the site which tells you directly.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

Alright. So if you buy from Amazon, then, you're buying in ignorance. I personally wouldn't assume, in the absence of information, that a eBook is DRM free. I'd be more likely to assume it the opposite and set my price requirements accordingly unless the publisher makes it clear there's no DRM.

Re:hmm

[0123456]

Most e-books on Amazon are DRM-free. The majority of books on Amazon from big publishers use DRM, which is why I mostly buy e-books from self-publishers and small publishers because they rarely do.

Re:hmm

[metrometro]

Because platform lockin leads to crap platforms. Competition!

Re:hmm

[ragefan]

The "DRM Infrastructure" is trivial for authors and publishers, I'd not dare to call it "Infrastructure" at all. Also, costs are usually insignificant: you usually protect an entire work, not individual copies.

Yes, the costs are so trivial that Wal-mart, Microsoft, and Yahoo all tried to shut down their DRM servers and only caved to the backlash, with no promises that they would remain on forever. If the costs are so trivial, then why bother with shuttering the services?

Re:hmm

[Em Adespoton]

Note that if the profitability of removing DRM is dependent on eBooks being more attractive because they're able to be read on multiple devices then that profitability will disappear if one device begins to dominate the market. Why should I care if my eBook is multi-platform if I'm only ever going to read it on one platform?

Do you have any dead-tree books that you've owned for more than 5 years?

Do you have any e-readers that you've owned for more than 5 years?

The answers to those two questions should answer your other question. DRM'd books vanish when the DRM is no longer supported. I've got books that are over 100 years old -- I'd like to be able to pass my e-book collection on to my kids too.

Re:hmm

[Darundal]

That's wonderful as long as Amazon is still in business. Yeah, you can say that Amazon staying in business is probably a safe bet, but shit happens. For the average user unDRMing their already DRMed books isn't much of an option, and if Amazon goes tits up for some reason or decides to shut down their Kindle service then they can say byebye to all their stuff the second something happens to w/e devices they have their books on. DRM free content doesn't just let you access stuff across a number of devices now, it lets you actually hang onto your digital content past the life of w/e service and the life of whatever format it was in originally.

A Move in the Right Direction!

[dryriver]

This is a _positive_ move. I think that there is going to be a time - say in the 2020s - where people look back at the DRM'd digital media of today and scratch their heads... "What were these people thinking, restricting digital media use like that? What did all that DRM'ing achieve?". Again, kudos to the publisher for not using DRM, and for setting a positive example for the rest of the publishing world to follow...

Re:A Move in the Right Direction!

[CrimsonAvenger]

Again, kudos to the publisher for not using DRM, and for setting a positive example for the rest of the publishing world to follow...

Might be better to say "kudos to the publisher for following Baen's lead and not using DRM".

Do keep in mind that Baen's ebooks have NEVER had DRM.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction!

[Anonymous Coward]

Baen's website also sells Nightshade Books.
Not to mention a few of the classics and, for a very short time, Tor...

Re:A Move in the Right Direction!

[TheRaven64]

Or of publishers like Pearson and O'Reilly, who also don't use DRM in their eBooks (if you buy them via Amazon you may get Kindle DRM, but not if you buy them directly), but also have a sufficiently large turnover that the example they set is relevant.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction!

[Anonymous Coward]

Baen may have more pulp, but Tor certainly puts out its own share (I still regret having bought Herbie Brennan's "Faerie Wars", which Tor published).
Conversely, Larry Niven, Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon and Catherine Asaro, all award winners, have all published books with Baen as well as other publishers.

I would also point out that Baen has been republishing some of Heinlein's works of which I suspect some meet your criteria of belonging in the general canon.

At any rate, I find myself going more by author than publisher now anyway.

What about the price?

[Dyinobal]

Okay now lets do something about the price. I'm so tired of seeing ebooks that are as expensive as regular books or more expensive. There is no reason for it other than 'I want to' or 'I'm afraid of cannibalizing my own paper back sales'. They really should do some experiments lke Valve did with Steam so they can determine the proper pricing for an Ebook. As it is I don't buy stuff for my nook simple touch I got for Christmas simply because any book I want to buy it cheaper than the Ebook version 99% of the time. This is because I tend to buy used over new when I buy a book. The publishers pricing of their Ebooks isn't protecting their profits it's negating them yet no one seems to get it.

Re:What about the price?

[crafty.munchkin]

The printing costs of a book are negligible in comparison with the editorial, typesetting, proof-reading and other costs associatd with releasing a book. Go and read Charlie Stross's essays on common misconceptions about publishing to discover WHY it's impractical.

As an aside - games on Steam are almost always more expensive than the copy I buy with a disk from a store, with the exception of when the steam sales are on.

Re:What about the price?

[Dyinobal]

Even if the actual making from the book isn't the bulk of the cost, an actual book has the same associated costs for editorial, typesetting, proof-ready and any other costs as an Ebook would. There is no excuse for them being priced more expensive than the actual paper copy of the book when they cost less to produce.

Re:What about the price?

[MadKeithV]

The printing costs of a book are negligible in comparison with the editorial, typesetting, proof-reading and other costs associatd with releasing a book. Go and read Charlie Stross's essays on common misconceptions about publishing to discover WHY it's impractical.

It doesn't matter though. The cost of all that overhead stuff is sunk once you have the book ready for publishing - all you can do at that point is try to maximize price * sales. If people are not prepared to pay as much for an eBook than for a physical one then it may have to be priced lower in order to maximize that function, regardless of the actual cost involved. The eBook presumably has a (much?) lower marginal cost and a totally different MC curve to a physical book - therefore it shouldn't be sold with the same assumptions as physical books.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

The printing costs of a book are negligible in comparison with the editorial, typesetting, proof-reading and other costs associatd with releasing a book.

Not true in the least. Most authors are paid shit, unless you're a major player. Their only hope for real income, which still isn't much, is from royalties. Furthermore, more and more, authors are required to do their own typesetting. Furthermore, most publishes have tools which largely automate most of what's involved. Most of the proofing is done by poorly paid staffers. For most publishers, the cost of printing and distribution, per copy, represents the largest cost, per copy. And as counts go up, the cost of everything else is artomorized into an insignificant dollar amount whereas the cost of print and distribution largely remains the same.

Sorry, but electronic copies should be dirt cheap. There is a reason why print copies should cost more, and that's because they actually do.

P.S. I have a friend who is an author with two books out.

Re:What about the price?

[MickyTheIdiot]

that doesn't account for Kindle books that cost more than trade paperback.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Economies of scale. Anything that is "unique" to one format over another has its cost spread over each copy. Assume for a moment that typesetting is a fixed cost and must be done for the print book as well as the e-book. If 90% of book sales are still paper copies then the cost can be spread over a wider base. I'm not saying that's necessarily true, just that it's conceivable that e-books could cost more "per copy" due to lower volume.

Re:What about the price?

[MickyTheIdiot]

So you are saying that we should include the publishers in with the *AAs because they are playing the same BS game with creators.

I'd go along with that.

Re:What about the price?

[PhilHibbs]

The physical cost of printing and distributing a book amounts to 10-15% of the cost. Lets assume tha it's 15% and that it drops to 1% for eBooks (you still have to run the servers and deal with administration around the sales of books).

So your $10 printed book gets you $8.50 per copy to pay the author, editor, proofreaders, advertisers, etc.

So you want to move over to eBooks, and you still want to make the same kind of money.

If you just drop the price by the 14% saving and sell it at $8.60, what will that do to your sals? If it stays the same then you have made the same amount of money.

If you drop it by more, then you will only see the benefit [i]if[/i] your sales go up proportionately to the price drop. At the $8.50 price point, I don't think a $1 price drop will significantly boost sales. If you halve the price, will that double sales? I very much doubt it. Maybe. It's a big risk, though, and maybe a few publishers will try it, but there's a limit to how many books any one person can realistically buy and read.

If you drop prices to App Store levels, then a few lucky winners will selll millions of books instead of thousands - but the top sellers are selling that kind of volume anyway at current prices. Many will simply fail to make any significant amount of money.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Save your breath, that's been shown to be deliberately wrong several times. When publishers lie about their "costs", their figures are meaningless. There's no way a tiny text file with a little bit of market should cost more than the logistics surrounding dead tree versions.

Re:What about the price?

[Quiet_Desperation]

I'm generally seeing much lower prices of the Kindle versions these days, at least on the ones I look at. It's all over the place though. Sometimes it's $1 less, sometimes it's as low as 50% of the printed book.

Lower is still relative, though. I was looking at an $80 technical book, and the Kindle version was $50 but... seems I can go up to $10 or so for an eBook. More than that and the resistance starts, and at $50 it seems insurmountable despite the fact that with something technical having a search function and many digital bookmarks would be great.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that the editorial, typesetting, proof-reading and other costs are what cost the most. But those are sunk costs. A one-time cost that has to be recuperated by dividing it up among each copy of the book. The more books you sell, the lower the per-book price needs to be to cover that cost.

But with a physical book, you still have the printing costs per book, so there is a minimum price you have to charge in order to make a profit on each book (e.g. you can't sell a book for 1 cent because the physical materials to produce each book cost more than 1 cent). And of course, that minimum price naturally limits the demand, i.e. the number of copies you can sell.

With ebooks, there is almost no per-book cost. Theoretically, you can lower the price to whatever you want, which drives up the demand, and you can make up the difference in volume.

I know, that only works in theory. There are plenty of other practical issues to take into consideration. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in Stoss's argument.

Re:What about the price?

[deimtee]

Actually, once you have a typeset paper book, typically either in quark or indesign, the cost to convert it to an ebook would be trivial.
Ideally, the fixed costs should be spread all copies in any format, and the production cost across the copies in that format. This would mean that the average paper book should be one to two dollars dearer than the ebook.

Most people don't realize just how cheap mass printing is. For a black ink only paperback with a color cover, setup is probably under a couple of thousand, and the per unit run cost is less than a dollar.
Hardbacks are only slightly more expensive, but cost more because of:
A. shorter print runs, and
B. because they can.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

A typical e-book deal for an author who wasn't completely butt-raped by their publisher is:

The publisher gets 70% of the purchase price from the retailer.
The author gets 25% of that 70%, while the other 75% goes to the publisher.
The author then pays 15% of that 25% of that 75% to their agent.

So the retailer gets 30% of the cover price, the publisher gets 52.5% of the cover price, the agent gets 2.6% of the cover price and the author... you know, the person who actually wrote the book... gets 14.8% of the cover price.

Alternatively they can self-publish the book and get the whole 70%. Or they can self-publish the e-book for $2.99 instead of $9.99 and still make more money per sale than they would have done through a publisher.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull. Steam almost always has the lowest price. I've gotten countless $1-8 games there.

Re:What about the price?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with traditional publishing is the fact that its overhead costs are incredibly high because executives are being paid six-figure incomes and the CEO and president probably collect seven figures. If a publisher has overhead costs of $10 million for costs not directly involved in book production and publishes 200 books a year, that's a $50,000 per book cost just to cover executive salaries. A streamlined e-book publisher could easily make plenty of money without those overhead costs. And as we're seeing, a standalone author can sell his own e-books online and cut out even the publisher and make even more money.

Re:What about the price?

[silas_moeckel]

Roughly authors make about 10%, publishers 40%, distributors 10% and retailers 40%. Ebooks can effectively cut out the retailer and distributor completely. Publishers are already taking care of marketing and have reduced costs (about 10% of gross to phonically print it ship it handle returns etc goes away). Amazon's publicly available price for ebooks it a 30% cut so ebooks should be roughly 70% of the cost of a new physical book just with everybody making the same amount. Factor in that the DRM laden versions precluded resale pricing should be even lower while keeping profits the same.

Now business do not work to keep profits flat they want to make more that's what businesses do. Some companies have reacted to ebooks as something new and scary and shunned them other have embraced them. Individual authors have looked at moving from 10% ish royalties to 70% and self published/formed there own publishing staff as a fixed cost. The reality is an author can self publish with very very little up front cost. Perhaps there is a new market for commissions based marketing firms in the publishing industry to replace the traditional publishers role.

Re:What about the price?

[Hatta]

The printing costs of a book are negligible in comparison with the editorial, typesetting, proof-reading and other costs associatd with releasing a book.

Hire a freelance editor, typeset it yourself in LaTeX, and crowd source the proof-reading. I bet that's much cheaper than buying into the publishing behemoth.

Re:What about the price?

[julesh]

Actually, once you have a typeset paper book, typically either in quark or indesign, the cost to convert it to an ebook would be trivial.

Maybe it should be, but that simply doesn't happen a lot of the time. Ebooks are frequently re-typeset, sometimes even retyped (or at least OCR'd and re-copyedited). It's ironic that Stross has come up in this context, because it was when reading one of his Laundry books on Kindle a couple of years ago that I first noticed that it had typos that aren't in the original.

I think, basically, what happens is that the publisher subcontracts the production of the book, and doesn't get the digital files back (I suspect they get a format that isn't readily converted back to a text-like format, such as a list of x/y offsets for characters). It then has to go back to the original source and get somebody else to produce the ebook, requiring a duplication of effort. I imagine some publishers have started moving over to combined producers who do both, but it certainly isn't universal yet.

Re:What about the price?

[argStyopa]

Impractical might not be the word I'd use.
"Hoist by one's own petard" might be closer.

From your link:

...Selling ebooks cheaply is a threat to their other sales channels â" the phrase "cannibalize our market" is commonly used â" but readers see ebooks as being less valuable than physical objects because they consistently over-value the paper-and-ink (and we in the publishing business have systematically trained them not to recognize the fact that the price on a book doesn't reflect actual production costs, but a measure of availability â" if you want to buy it early, we want to charge you more).

Congratulations, you taught us that. Now we insist you behave consistently with reality as you defined it.

Further, by your (and that site's author's) logic, if only 10% of the price of a book is in the medium itself (the dead-tree and ink), then bookstores really aren't all that handicapped pricewise against online sellers....so why is Amazon eating their lunch? If the price differential is only 10%, that wouldn't describe the market as it is today.

A far better exposition on books and pricing is from http://www.mwsadispatches.com/node/825.
It's of course more complicated than I can lay out here, but using a $25 (selling price) hardcover as an example, just the printing of that book cost about $5. 20%? Not quite. That book is sold from the publisher to the distributor for HALF that, or about $12.50. Given that he has a margin built in there, and depending on how charitable (or how tendentious) one is in one's calculations, the publisher's making about $3. Which means the soft and one-off costs of editing, art, marketing, etc are about $4, or slightly less than the print costs.

Further, he says this "...Regarding those hard costs, the single biggest one is the printing itself..."

So taking that, it shows that the dead-tree costs of books, are about 40% of the actual costs to the publisher of a book. By that logic and using the same multiples, he COULD produce that $25 bookshelf-price-dead-tree book for $15 and still get the same return (and in fact better, since there are NO ebook return costs which can be 30% or higher....suggesting that a price point of $10 is absolutely legitimate.

Re:What about the price?

[crafty.munchkin]

Bull yourself. $1-8 games don't count as most retailers won't stock them anyway. An example: COD:MW3 - $66.99 USD at the moment with it's 33% off for this weekend sale. Versus $65 Aus in a bricks and mortar store - which considering the 2% currency conversion charge on credit cards makes it cheaper. Ozgameshop.com has it for $44.99 with free shipping, charged in $AU. Guess where I'd buy it from?

DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Richard_at_work]

Pricing is - eBooks should be lower priced (although not to the pennies on the pound level, I find that argument ridiculous) and currently they rarely are.

Neal Asher books - Gridlinked as an example, his earliest Agent Cormac book, first published in 2001, now published by Tor: £7.99 on the iPad, £5.11 paperback on Amazon, £4.75 Kindle edition.

Will the removal of DRM flatten out those pricing peaks and troughs? Will the eBook version go up or down? That will determine if piracy goes up or down.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Ironhandx]

It will likely mean that certain proprietary formats will slowly disappear and the pricing will get down to the 4.75 kindle edition as no one buys the iPad editions etc.

Right now some of the pricing peaks and valleys are due to the fact that some devices have fees attached to publish for them at all.

As we go further into DRM-Free, most books will probably just start coming in PDF or something similar and fancy PDF reading apps will be more abundant than they currently are, and available on more devices.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[crafty.munchkin]

As I just said above - the printing costs of a paperback are negligible in comparison with the editorial process that occurs with each book. Look for my post above and click the link in it to discover why :)

Good example - I just started reading it yesterday :)

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[crazyjj]

Where I'm at in the U.S., e-books are usually considerably cheaper than their hard-copy equivalents. But I've heard (I think on an earlier thread on /.) that this varies greatly not only by country, but even by region and for individual users. I save quite a bit of money each year buying e-book versions, especially with textbooks. My Kindle pretty easily paid for itself in the first year I owned it. I don't think I've ever seen a Kindle version of a book that was more expensive than the hard-copy version (have seen a few that were equal).

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Anonymous Coward]

As we go further into DRM-Free, most books will probably just start coming in PDF or something similar and fancy PDF reading apps will be more abundant than they currently are, and available on more devices.

I sincerely hope not. PDF's as ebooks are a bad idea because you lose the ability to change fonts, font sizes & properly change pages. I only have 3 PDF's on my ebook reader and that's only because they are graphics heavy and PDF is the correct choice.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[jo_ham]

Gridlinked is a still a bargain at that price though, but I see your point. The bulk costs that went into it (like editing, proofreading, etc) are sunk already. I think we're meant to believe that the extra cost is down to reformatting it for eBook release.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[GiMP]

PDF is to preserve presentation. This is precisely what you do NOT want on an e-reader. ePub, which is really just HTML, is designed to provide reflow for e-readers. It can be used with or without DRM.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Hatta]

PDF is the worst possible format for e-reading. Suppose you want to enlarge the text and have it reflow to fit your screen? Even plain ASCII text is preferable to PDF.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[demonbug]

Pricing is - eBooks should be lower priced (although not to the pennies on the pound level, I find that argument ridiculous) and currently they rarely are.

Neal Asher books - Gridlinked as an example, his earliest Agent Cormac book, first published in 2001, now published by Tor: £7.99 on the iPad, £5.11 paperback on Amazon, £4.75 Kindle edition.

Will the removal of DRM flatten out those pricing peaks and troughs? Will the eBook version go up or down? That will determine if piracy goes up or down.

The pricing is really strange. Neal Asher is a great example, although here on Amazon Gridlinked is $7.99 for either the mass market or Kindle version, pretty standard price for a paperback. But what if you want to get the second book, Line of Polity? Unavailable in paperback or hardback (I guess Asher doesn't have a big following here in the U.S.; for years the only way to get it was to pay $20+ for an import version), $9.99 for the Kindle version. Why does the e-book cost more than a normal paperback? This isn't a new book where the electronic version would be competing with hardback sales; it was published in 2003 and if it ever had a U.S. run it was many years ago and very brief. So why the high price on an e-book?

Until they get pricing figured out, I really don't care that much whether books are DRM'ed because I'm not going to be buying them anyway - I'll stick with using my Kindle to carry around a library of classics that I can get from Gutenberg and others for free (which is actually not a bad thing - forces me to read many books I've meant to read for years but never gotten around to, currently Les Miserables). I still prefer dead-tree versions most of the time anyway; ideally one would get a free e-book when purchasing the dead tree version, but that idea seems to be a complete non-starter with the possible exception of Baen; which reminds me, I need to get all my Vorkosigan books onto my Kindle at some point - good thing Cryoburn (or was it Diplomatic Immunity?) came with a CD with all of them on it.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[itsdapead]

Will the removal of DRM flatten out those pricing peaks and troughs? Will the eBook version go up or down? That will determine if piracy goes up or down.

The value will go up: I don't have to worry about Amazon going bust (...I still re-read paperbacks I bought in the 1970s - even if I survive another 40 years, I doubt my Kindle will) because I can format-shift stuff and I can "lend" (a.k.a. give) books to friends.

The last might sound like a way of losing sales, but how many of the authors who you buy regularly did you discover via a loan? How many bands who's music you buy were you introduced to via a dodgey C90*?

There's also a lot of cheap books on amazon by self-published authors -and once you start the "also read..." links lead you to others. I've bough a few (because at £1 or so a pop what's to lose?) and so far none of them have been eye-gougingly bad (I've certainly paid full whack for worse) and most of them have been, at the very least, entertaining. This might start to have downward pressure on prices.

(*if you don't know what a C90 is GET OFF MY LAWN!)

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Ironhandx]

So as several people have pointed out, I prefer dead-tree format books still.

Until the price is cheaper for a digital copy, that is what I will be sticking with.

Now, I have heard of and used ePub, but PDF was just the one that leaped out to me as an already extremely common document format, and what we're really talking about here is documents.

I apologize for apparently insulting the large ebook using populace out there. Please mentally replace PDF with ePub or whatever other format floats your boat in the parent post.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[painandgreed]

PDF is to preserve presentation. This is precisely what you do NOT want on an e-reader. ePub, which is really just HTML, is designed to provide reflow for e-readers. It can be used with or without DRM.

Sorry, but I while I agree PDF isn't the best for everything, there are plenty of books where I do want the presentation preserved. Not to mention the difficulties of trying to cite something when text is reflowing all over the place.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[Khashishi]

eBooks need to cost more to pay for all the development or licensing of the DRM.

Re:DRM wasn't my sticking point

[GiMP]

Most or all ebook formats and/or readers can now give you the location of text as it is in the printed form, which is arguably useful for citations. However, citing can be done without page numbers. MLA and APA guidelines are notoriously slow to update, but they'll catch up, if they haven't already. You could just specify by the chapter/paragraph/word count. Sticking to page numbers is like sticking to a desktop metaphor. It is a metaphor, it is limited and broken by design.

Preserved presentation only works if you're publishing on paper, or targeting a specific form factor (and thus device). iPads are homogenous enough that fixed-format magazines are available for it, for instance. You can make reflowable content work where you would traditionally use fixed layout. Reflowable doesn't necessitate linear, either, webpages can reflow so that they look similar to fixed-layout designs at wide enough resolutions, or become linear with narrow text. Those of us that have been around a while know how bad the web was when people thought they could just transfer their traditional media without redesigning... or when they thought that some high school kid with HTML experience and a copy of Photoshop could drive your online corporate image. Pushing paper design straight into eBooks has the same problem, but luckily, most of the big players have figured this out already.

That all said, yes, some works are better on something like an iPad which has good graphics, a large size screen, and touch. Others are better linear. Even books of the same sort can be written in different styles which extenuates this. Math textbooks as they're used in primary education work better on tablets, while masters-level mathematics books that concentrate on theory are better on an eReader. (As to which style is better would be a digression, lets not go there...)

Probably No significant change in sales

[mehrotra.akash]

A minor increase in sales due to people who would have avoided buying DRM'ed ebooks will be balanced out by a minor decrease in sales due to an increase in casual piracy (those who arent bothered to go looking for a pirated version, but wont mind taking a copy from a friend who buys it)
Its possible that the casual piracy may lead to more sales as well, but thats questionable at best

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[Toze]

Disagree for two reasons. First, because of personal experience; I hit Baen's free library one day and encountered John Ringo's work. I have since bought about $200 worth of Baen books, mostly Ringo but frequently other stuff I found on their free library. A friend passed me a pirated copy of Jim Butcher's entire Dresden series; I now have the whole run purchased and sitting on my shelf. The specific method I've seen work is this;
1) DRM-free
2) Pirated/shared
3) Lands in the hands of someone who was never going to buy the books
4) Turns them into a trufan who buys some or all of the books.

On the one hand this may not be the precise method Tor is hoping for, and I agree that the /direct/ impact of being DRM-free isn't going to be worth much, but the long-term effect is of more people reading Tor books, and in my experience that means more people buying books. The second reason I disagree is that experiment after experiment shows that "piracy is not the problem, obscurity is the problem." Releasing stuff for free almost never decreases profits, and usually increases profits. Doctorow and Lessig have both explained this at length.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[FBeans]

The point being, DRM makes next to no difference either way in terms of sales? So perhaps, it's just here to make good slashdot posts, to allow people here to talk about something other than MAC vs Linux vs Windows? I can't see any other benefit's, it can go in a box along with the current copywrite/pantent/trademark laws...

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[MickyTheIdiot]

It's there because most of the people in the suits are idiots. Period.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[MickyTheIdiot]

Assuming that there is *no* change in the sales, then the worst outcome is that there is no harm and no foul... that's also neglecting the fact that they aren't paying for DRM technology any more.

Look for the other replies to this post for the better outcomes.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[FBeans]

I wish there was a good reply proving you wrong, i /really/ *really* !really! wish there was. It may well be the case, that you are just 100% correct, how sad :/

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[julesh]

On the one hand this may not be the precise method Tor is hoping for

I suspect it is. You mention Cory Doctorow later in your post as a proponent of this strategy; note that Tor is his publisher. Tor have experience of the increase in sales he saw when he released free copies of his books. Now note that he is also a friend of one of Tor's most senior editors, who may not set policy but is certainly very influential with those who do, and I think you start to see the picture of how this happened.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Disagree as well.

Baen has done well out of thier DRM free product line-up and other innovations.

I particularly like Advance Reader Copies and other innovations ... that let you nail a pre-release copy of your favorite author's latest offering months before the final release is published.

Having recently had to junk/give away thousands of conventional paper books in a house move I am now resolved to buy digital when possible, and to, as far as possible, only buy non-DRM'd product that will not become obsolete with time or as standards change.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm conflicted. On one hand Baen is DRM free. On the other hand, Ringo is a pedophilic rape feteshist, and his books are unabashed vile selfwank material.

Re:Probably No significant change in sales

[Xtifr]

Technically, Doctorow may be his own publisher, since his work is released under a Creative Commons license, but he has an agreement with Tor to make nice, pre-packaged versions of his work for sale to a mass audience, which is probably close enough to the same thing. :)

Will they also fix typos in the older books?

[WillAdams]

I bought Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ from the Sony Reader Store for my PRS-600 and the book was so rife w/ errors as to be essentially unreadable --- I actually had to look up some bits on books.google.com in order to understand some passages.

I purchased Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and (tried to) read it over the weekend --- the book had so many errors, I wound up proofreading it instead:

- all discretionary and non-breaking hyphens show up as question marks in the text
- lots of extraneous hyphens
- a couple of chapter titles are mis-spelled
- There're a couple of typos which are so bad as to confuse the meaning of the text (a word specifically referencing a tabu mentioned in an earlier paragraph is replaced w/ gibberish)
- they even get the year of his birth wrong on the last page, rendering it as 190? instead of 1907

Here's an e-mail I sent to Tor Books:

I purchased a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and it was so rife w/ errors that rather than enjoying reading it, I found myself proofreading it over the weekend. Apparently this ebook was _never_ proofread, since it has numerous errors, including mis-spelled chapter heads, question marks placed wherever there was a discretionary or non-breaking hyphen, a slash instead of an italic capital ``I'', &c.

I've got a 42MB Notes file exported from my Sony PRS-600 which highlights all of the errors, things like:

Inside front cover:
``From Mars to Venus—to danger-filled advenTures...''
- should be adventures

``...ever managed to become Space Cadets at the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex...''
- missing period, should be ``...Space Academy. Young men...''

pg. 11 ``... thin air stood Hay-worth Hall...''
- extraneous hyphen, should be Hayworth

pg. 22 ``...it had a score showing in it—"yjT Well, he thought...''
- missing end punctuation and closing quote mark, the score is gibberish--- should be ``37'' (had to look that up on the Google Books copy).

pg. 27 ``Lieutenant Ezra Dahlguisty Who Helped Create the Tradition of the Patrol—ig6g-igg6.
- Dahlquist. gibberish at the end should be a pair of years, probably 1969--1996.

pg. 30 ``Don't play 'iron man.'There's no sense...''
- space missing between single quote and ``T''

And it goes on and on like that, w/ a lot of the errors actually confusing the meaning of the text.

Re:Will they also fix typos in the older books?

[Megane]

What's the point of using DRM if you're just going to do a SOS (Scan-OCR-Shit^Hp) job? The "pirates" would be better off starting with their own scan.

Re:Will they also fix typos in the older books?

[MickyTheIdiot]

did you want to win the "i'm a formatting nazi" award today or something.

This is a problem, but enumeration isn't necessary.

Re:Will they also fix typos in the older books?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Reader's Digest Condensed Version

He bought a Robert Heinlien eBook that had so many errors it made some parts of the book confusing. He would up proofreading it and sending a list of corrections to the publisher.

Re:Will they also fix typos in the older books?

[0123456]

But that's impossible. Everyone knows that e-books from trade publishers are so expensive because of the cost of proper formatting and copy-editing. You must be imagining it.

DRM Free... from where?

[SAN66]

This sounds great and all, but...

Would they really be able to convince Amazon or Apple or Sony to sell the books DRM free from their marketplaces?

One of the authors I read publishes through Baen books, DRM free (Or at least in multiple formats emailed to you), but you have to download from the Baen website because Amazon won't have any of it.

I suspect there will be a place you will be able to download DRM free TOR books, but from the markets themselves we'll still have DRM. Who knows though? TOR has some clout and some A list authors so they may be able to push their weight around.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[Megane]

Would they really be able to convince Amazon or Apple or Sony to sell the books DRM free from their marketplaces?

What makes you think Apple wants the DRM? The music from iTunes Store only had DRM because the music labels required it in the contract. When iTMS became successful and the contract was up for re-negotiation, Apple forced them to go DRM-free.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[FBeans]

Well the ideal situatuon would not be for Amazon et al. to be /forced/ in to anything. Instead they shall simply see that DRM isn't reducing piracy / increasing sales, hence there is no need for it. It's a step in the right direction, but it's a long road ahead.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[TheRaven64]

Would they really be able to convince Amazon or Apple or Sony to sell the books DRM free from their marketplaces?

Who cares? Purchasers have three choices:

• Buy from Amazon, works on the Kindle.
• Buy from Apple, works on the iPad.
• Buy directly from Tor, works anywhere.

Which do you think Tor would rather they do? Not sure about Tor, but my publisher really likes direct sales of eBooks because the margin is higher (they get to keep the cut that the retailer usually takes). In fact, this is one of the main reasons why the music labels dropped DRM on music - it prevented the retailers controlling the channel.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[gnasher719]

Which do you think Tor would rather they do? Not sure about Tor, but my publisher really likes direct sales of eBooks because the margin is higher (they get to keep the cut that the retailer usually takes).

I don't know how it works with Tor books, but books in DRM-free ePub format that I pay for and that get downloaded using a link in the browser will automatically show a dialog "Do you want to open this book in iBooks" on my iPad, they then get automatically imported and opened, and appear in my iTunes library as well - interestingly marked as "purchased" even though I didn't buy them through iTunes at all.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[SAN66]

I'm sure Tor would love to cut margins and sell all their content direct as does Baen in my original post, but their books get far more exposure being sold through the Kindle store or iBook store.

The masses are not geeks and nerds who will stray from their primary download source, even with sci-fi/fantasy books.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[cmiller173]

For Amazon the DRM is to lock you to their ecosystem, not protect the content per se. Since there are a lot of kindle users with a lot of kindle DRM ebooks, when it is time for their device to be replaced they will have to replace it with a kindle to access their old content (or break the DRM). There have been authors that wanted to distribute ebooks through Amazon without DRM and Amazon said no.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[julesh]

Do you really think Amazon care about piracy? All Amazon care about is locking kindle owners in so they can't decide to switch to another manufacturer when someone else has a much better reader available in a couple of years' time.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[0123456]

There have been authors that wanted to distribute ebooks through Amazon without DRM and Amazon said no.

DRM is a check-box on the Amazon e-book upload page; enable it or don't, that's your choice.

Re:DRM Free... from where?

[cmiller173]

Actually that did change, there was a time when my previous comment was true, I just hand not kept up. Thank you for the correction leading me to further research the current situation.

Will Kindel versions be DRM Free?

[allcar]

From TFA:

Now users can finally read their books across multiple devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo eReader and Apple's iBooks.

It will be interesting to see if the likes of Amazon honour the publishers wishes, or whether they still insist on using DRM. This might finally damage the Kindle business model. In a similar situation, I recently purchased the new Stephen King audio book directlty from Simon & Schuster, as it is in a DRM free MP3 format. Who would buy from Audible if the same material was available elsewhere in a better format?

Re:Will Kindel versions be DRM Free?

[drjzzz]

Maybe because I have credits at Audible but not even registered at S&S? Friction and inertia are sales concepts too.

Re:Will Kindel versions be DRM Free?

[0123456]

It will be interesting to see if the likes of Amazon honour the publishers wishes, or whether they still insist on using DRM.

Amazon do not force anyone to use DRM. Which part of this is so hard to understand?

When a publisher uploads a book to Amazon, they get a check box in the web interface to select DRM or no DRM. If the publishers choose DRM, that's their problem.

The only issue I'm aware of is that you apparently can't turn off DRM once you've enabled it for a book; from what I understand you have to delete the book and upload it again, which loses reviews and 'also boughts'.

Good call, Tor. Now when I buy...

[capnkr]

...a book, whether digital or dead-tree, your name will be there along with Baen as my first choice of publishers to support via the wallet.

Now if we could get a decent version of Asimov's

[crazyjj]

Being an e-book reader and science fiction fan, I've been very disappointed in recent years with how weakly science fiction publishers have been supporting the e-formats. Of all fields, you would think science fiction would be on the CUTTING EDGE of technology. But, alas, it was only recently that Asimov's even launched a e-book version of the magazine--and it's been plagued by poor formatting, missing illustrations, etc. Very sad when science fiction's leading magazine can featuring writing about the future, but can't seem to actually *embrace* the future.

Glad to see at least one major science fiction publisher is trying to do something with the format.

Some degree of "piracy" helps marketing

[Lonewolf666]

Several years ago, Baen Books (ahref=http://www.baen.com/rel=url2html-25847http://www.baen.com/>) started to make some of their books available as e-books for free, with approval from the respective authors.

Reportedly, those authors actually saw an increase in sales of their paper books as a result. Maybe TOR is betting on a similar outcome (besides saving the trouble of supporting a DRM system).

It is not the DRM stupid.

[stanlyb]

It is the PRICE TAG. Can anyone explain me how a dead tree book costs $10, while the ebook is only $18??? What? The bits and bytes are more expensive than the ink!!! Nevertheless, my top limit for a book is $9.99. E-book. No matter how much i want to buy "Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. III", i would never ever go over my top limit. I would rather steal it, print it, and give it for free, but would never never never ever feed the pigs, i mean the publishers.

Re:It is not the DRM stupid.

[FBeans]

Well, firstly, it's naive to think that the materials are the only cost. It may be cheaper to produce each indivdual file realtive to a book, but things like website admin, server admin, storage space, bla , bla.... all contribute to a final price. Having said that, I agree, that the prices are not representative of the value of a the books them selves.

doubt it will affect sales much at all

[apcullen]

DRM is so easy to remove from ebooks that it's really not much of an inconvenience. Downloaded music DRM used to be a bit more difficult and more restrictive. And don't get me started about the ridiculousness of DRM on digital movies.
On the other hand, people who copy works illegally are generally not ever going to be customers. I'm guessing that DRM cost the publisher money in licensing fees, and wasn't effective at all in stopping copying, so it makes good business sense to drop it.

Re:doubt it will affect sales much at all

[MickyTheIdiot]

It's hard for people that can barely understand what the concept of DRM is... which is a massive majority, unfortunately, which is why the fight against only gets slow traction.

Re:doubt it will affect sales much at all

[gnasher719]

DRM is so easy to remove from ebooks that it's really not much of an inconvenience. Downloaded music DRM used to be a bit more difficult and more restrictive. And don't get me started about the ridiculousness of DRM on digital movies.

Removing DRM is illegal. Therefore, if it has DRM, I know that I could remove it, but I'm totally unwilling to do something illegal in order to read a book that I paid for. Therefore, no matter how little inconvenience, I won't buy it.

Regular books don't have DRM either

[Anonymous Coward]

It was always a silly idea to have DRM. I understand why it's tempting -- the last thing you want is hundreds or thousands of non-DRM books up on a torrent somewhere, so people can download all that work without paying for it. On the other hand, DRM costs money to implement, it is an impediment for paying customers trying to use the product, and worst of all it wasn't going to stop copying anyway. These DRM schemes are not effective, so what's the point? Good riddance.

Now I'll have to check out what Tor has to offer, because I wasn't buying anything with DRM on it.

Makes me want to buy Tor

[mattr]

Seems to me Tor now has as good or better than a name as Baen.
I was already on Tor email list because I think they publish great stuff. But I only have bought from them dead tree versions in bookstores when I have seen them. Since I am overseas much this will give me an incentive to buy.
If there was a way to buy via Kindle that would be great or maybe there is a way to buy directly from Tor which would be better and ought to save me some money since no middleman?
Also I have bought from Tor books that I have read many times in the past because I love them.
I would very, very much like to have a Tor digital library on my hard disk.
Also I would be very willing to consider buying exclusives like maybe interviews with authors or special content that is only available to fans of authors etc. This is going to be AWESOME for Tor and to me anyway this makes them the best publisher for sci-fi in the world. I already enjoy very much the emails they send.
Next, if they would sell me a zip file of all the winners of Hugo or similar awards in the future (I dunno, is it worth $50 for a digital version?) I would snap it up in a flash. It is hard to find them sometimes.
Good luck Tor!

Re:Makes me want to buy Tor

[mattr]

p.s. Tor can you give me a version that works with Calibre, with beautiful artwork I can view on my Mac? I would probably read it mostly on my Kindle but would enjoy collateral like information about the author and so on.
And I wouldn't hold it against you if you want to sell me DVDs or cool comics, etc.

Consumer goodwill and consumer quality

[concealment]

Removing DRM engenders consumer goodwill because people are no longer forced to use cumbersome restraints with their ebooks. These restraints mainly penalize legal consumers, because those with intent to steal will circumvent them as a matter of course.

However, it's worth noting that not all consumers are the same. Legal consumers tend to like books which require a brain to read. If you released the Twilight series without DRM, it will be pirated more than a brainier book.

ID Software

[Grindalf]

ID software used to do this to it's games, so they would run without the CD in and with a patch. They are very smart guys ...

I'm not surprised, actually.

[Lord Crowface]

The success of companies like Baen in selling DRM-free e-books to the SF-reading public has shown that, at least for SF and Fantasy readers, not having DRM tends to drive sales rather than piracy. The fact that when the Harry Potter books were released as e-books it was in a DRM-free form probably didn't hurt either. The interesting thing to see will be whether the current DRM-free trend spreads to works outside the SF and Fantasy genres.

Here's a Few Obvious Ones

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you going to get? There's so much to read and so little time, I'd appreciate some suggestions and opinions from my fellow slashdotters.

I am an avid fan of two of their series and they are painfully well known. Obviously, Ender's Game and the whole series and parallel bean or 'shadow' series that comes with that.

Another, longer series that is quite good (though certainly not without tedious faults) is the late Robert Jordan's incomplete Wheel of Time series starting with Eye of the World. The series is still being finished by another fantasy author (Sanderson) through Tor.

Where can I buy?

[Anonymous Coward]

So WTF can I buy these DRM free books? These guys wasted a hell of an advertising opportunity.

Re:Where can I buy?

[cmiller173]

Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.

July 2012, assuming the "W" in "WTF" was "When"

DRM works!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using the ultimate DRM for my latest book - I keep it all in my head and I've never even thought the whole thing through.

And it works perfectly! Not one person has an unpaid copy of it.

Success? Indeed!

Re:DRM works!

[ProbablyJoe]

The question is, does anyone have a paid copy of it? Maybe if you removed your DRM, you'd have more paying customers!

Re:DRM works!

[Dinghy]

The question is, does anyone have a paid copy of it? Maybe if you removed your DRM, you'd have more paying customers!

This is not the first time I've seen beheadings suggested as a way to respond to DRM.

Re:DRM works!

[HaroldBakker]

That only works as long as you wear your tin-foil hat.

This is a tech advance

[Anonymous Coward]

This move narrows the technological gap between e-books and paper books. The unreliability that DRM forces has been a major barrier keeping from being seriously considered. Getting e-books into the realm of paper books can only be a good thing.

What remains?

Water proofing? Paper books don't handle a drop into the tub very well either, but they handle it better than most current e-gizmos. This is fixable, though. Anyone wanna mention some particular readers are at least a little bit water-resistant? It wouldn't be too shocking if there's one or two out there.

Battery life? e-ink isn't quite in the same league as paper but it's pretty damn good compared to most others. I'd say e-ink is "close enough." The LCD readers are still a decade or two short of being close enough.

What else?

Re:This is a tech advance

[jabelli]

Any one you want to use, if you put it in a Zip-Lock bag.

Tor DRM BAaaaaddd!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, all it took was every single title in their catalog to be online DRM free on torrent sites to prove to them it doesn't work!

What brilliant forethought!

Do these guys read Slashdot??

[Tastecicles]

I mean, we were only talking about this yesterday!

Re:Do these guys read Slashdot??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. http://slashdot.org/~pnh => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Nielsen_Hayden

Re:Do these guys read Slashdot??

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Slashdot's unofficial motto is "bringing you yesterdays news today, if you're lucky, it might be much older than that". On Tuesday Tor announced it was going to sell DRM-free ebooks, and Tor UK announced it yesterday. Yesterday's /. article was a link to a blog post by Charles Stross who actually linked to Tor's announcement and his blog post was in fact prompted by being asked by bigwigs at Tor (or was it their parent company) several weeks ago to give his opinion of why going DRM-free would benefit them.

Doesn't have to increase sales.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to increase sales. All it has to do is cost fewer sales than the licensing cost of the DRM and consequential expenses (returns for broken DRM, customer support, et al).

Where the hell are their ebooks?

[gnasher719]

Could anyone post a link where I can find Tor's ebook offerings, especially DRM free ones? Google searches like "tor ebooks" just get me to were Tor is blogging about ebooks. Guys, if you want to sell stuff then could you please not hide where you sell it?

Re:Where the hell are their ebooks?

[jcgam69]

http://us.macmillan.com/TorForge.aspx The DRM-free books will be rolled out over the next few months.

Re:platform

[TaoPhoenix]

Won't we be able to read these on our desktops too?

So wouldn't that be at least two platforms?

Recommendable Tor Authors

[ryzvonusef]

Amongst the ones I can personally recommend, Tor has:
1-Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn)
2-Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time)
3-Steve Erikson (Malazan)
4-Orson Scott Card (Ender)
5- George R.R. Martin (Song of Ice and Fire)

Brandonson has been itching for DRM free ebooks, and even offers a totally free ebook on his website (Warbreaker). Good to see his nagging has had some effect.

Re:Recommendable Tor Authors

[Nemyst]

I hope all of these authors release (or re-release!) ebooks so that I can support their work and Tor's decision. I probably would never have discovered Sanderson if it weren't for Warbreaker being available for free with no strings attached (an excellent book by the way).

Re:Recommendable Tor Authors

[Xtifr]

Some Tor authors I can personally recommend:

* Vernor Vinge (more Hugos/novel than anyone)
* John Scalzi (Hugo for Old Man's War, also SFWA president)
* Charles Stross (Atrocity Archives, Clan Corporate)
* Stephen Brust (Dragaera series)
* Nancy Kress (Hugo-winning Beggars in Spain & more)
* David Brin (Multi-Hugo-winning Uplift series & more)

Then there's people who have had some, but not all, of their work published by Tor, like:
* Diane Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle)
* Jack Vance (SF grandmaster, many Hugos)
* Poul Anderson (SF grandmaster, many Hugos)
* Larry Niven (Ringworld, many Hugos)
* Robert Sheckley (one of the best SF humorists of the mid-twentieth)

Baen gets competition.

[hendrikboom]

Now there's a second publisher I can get current scifi ebooks from that I can keep longterm.

-- hendrik

Try something new

[ryzvonusef]

I replied with a list to another poster's similar enquiry, allow me to link it: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2812905&cid=39807871

Basically, I HIGHLY recommend Brandon Sanderson as an author, and his publisher is Tor. He is by no means perfect, but I have confidence that you will at least feel it money well spent.

He has a entire book (Warbreaker) free on his website as a taster, so you might want to check that out first.

I say buy The Mistborn series. It's first trilogy has ended, so no waiting. The first book of the second trilogy is also out.

If you want a one-off, try Elantris. It's also a nice book.

The Way of Kings has just started (the first of ten!), it's a *massive* door stopper (~1000 pages) and the first book kind of lags in the middle, so I recommend you try some of his *other* work before sinking your literary teeth in this one.

DRM is a negative feedback loop

[uepuejq]

DRM licensing and implementation increase production cost. The increase is compensated by taxing customers with higher prices. As prices rise, the incentive to purchase is lessened and the reality of copying and free distribution becomes more pronounced. A practically infinite supply of ebooks can only be adequately priced by experimenting within markets. The tangible goods approach to electronic markets is flawed at inception, as it ignores reality and attempts to contain a force much greater than itself. Imagine flying water into the sun to inhibit global warming.

Baen had Rick Cook

[ryzvonusef]

I liked his computer+wizard series, and I am not even in a computer related field!

Baen had a modest selection but it wasn't all crap.

pricing

[colesw]

I'd love to see them fix their pricing. I've noticed people have mentioned Tor and Baen, but their pricing was terrible (at least for the author I liked).

Latest David Weber Book -
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-1550-a-rising-thunder.aspx - $6

Price of David Weber Book published by Tor (not sure how long its not been available) -
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-601-off-armageddon-reef.aspx - $18

I just don't understand how they think because they are Tor, they should charge 3 times the price!

Ebook pricing

[Firethorn]

Indeed. I like to say that if I'm not paying less than 2/3rds the cover price, I'm not trying. My local stores(not B&N) START at 25-30% off the cover price.

As such, ebook versions are typically $2-3 MORE than what I'd pay for the paperback. As such, I only buy books that I know I'll want to keep and reread.

The publishers need to take a page from Steam's game sale model - offer sales and deals just like the brick and mortar stores do on physical product. Declare 30% off everything every so often. You'll get loads and loads of purchases then.

They're STILL not serious about marketing eBooks.

[sehlat]

I say that because, with the exception of Baen, publishers clearly still think of their customers as the faceless corptocracies of Wal-Mart, B&N(brick), etc.

I buy from both B&N and Harlequin because they offer easy-to-jailbreak ePubs. All I get back from them, however, are mass-marketing emails. You know the type. It's a big announcement of the new Stephen King, or the new Tom Clancy, or some other blockbuster-wannabe. It's almost gotten to the point where I'm going to blacklist the damned things.

In an age when databases are (almost) trivial to set up, nobody has yet figured out that readers want to know about books from authors they like. Right now, if I want to keep track of Dana Fredsti, or Lisa Shearin, or Katherine Garbera or ... I have to search the sites for these authors individually, and do it regularly. That means an enormous investment of time I simply do not have. There is simply no notification service for Buy on Sight lists. Anywhere.

When I can go to B&N(web), or AMZN, or Haralequin and tell them "Notify me when 'Plague Nation' (or any Dana Fredsti) or 'Ready for Her Close-Up' (or any Katherine Garbera) or ... [whoever/whatever] is ready for immediate purchase and download." THEN you'll know publishers have finally gotten serious about eBooks.

I still buy Paperbacks

[elgeeko.com]

Sorry guys, even though most people consider me an uber geek I still buy all my books as a paperback. Sure, I've been known to grab something from Baen's free library or from Project Gutenberg , but it isn't the same. There is nothing like cracking the spine on a freshly printed book. I love me some tech but sometimes, the best tech, is low tech. I still applaud TOR and I'll still buy their books, but just the one's made out of paper.

I want to know one thing

[jvkjvk]

Do people feel that this agreement would allow Google to do any of the following:

1) Use a picture you gave them for their own advertising purposes.

2) Sell a picture you gave them for advertising purposes of their business partners.

3) Create a derivative work that uses your uploaded music in a video on YouTube.

4) Publish your content in dead tree form and sell it.

If not, what prevents them?

From a naive reading of the policy, all of these would be acceptable uses.

Doh!

[jvkjvk]

Wrong story, sorry!