Chuck Wendig:
You don’t want books to be pirated; you implement DRM. DRM mostly just pisses off regular users who suddenly have reduced access to the thing they thought they owned. They decide to become pirates, instead, because it’s easier and it gives them the access to the content in the way that they want it.
DRM creates — and then challenges — pirates.
It punishes regular readers.
Funny, interesting piece from the writer about publishers and publishing.
“DRM creates — and then challenges — pirates.” Applies to music, film, tv, games etc. This is the most distilled version of the argument I’ve read to date.
The very best way to prevent shoplifting is to close the store and build a 20-foot high wall around it.
Learn about Baen books (SF editor) experience. They dont use any DRM, and in fact for a long time, there was in hardcovers CDs with the others ebooks of the same author + promo material. CD which were downloadable from internet with Baen consent.
They stopped the CDs not because of piracy but this was a condition of them being distributed by Amazon. They still have a very signifiant free library of e-books (still without DRM) in their own store, mostly of the olders titles of series.
From what they gathered, they lost hardly a sale due to piracy, because people are buying more of paid e-books in the same serie, & authors see their sales increase when an older book is added to the free library.
Some Baen (big & small) authors are also edited by a major US SF publisher, Tor, who used DRM, like D.Weber. Ebooks sales increased again when Tor dropped DRM. It goes further because when there was still a DRM on Tor Books, I had no legal mean (being oversea) to buy the english ebooks of safehold serie before the translation in French was available 3 years later.
That was discussed to death in Baen forums and it is clear that DRM hurt sales, at least in the case of a small specialist editor whose customers are tech savvy,
Yep. This is why I don’t purchase movies from iTunes.
He’s a bit precious in style, but his central points are very valid.