Thanks for the perspective on DRM and restrictions. My own opinions pretty much parallel your with respect to the value proposition of DRM, for whatever that’s worth.

Best,

Jay

Additional restrictions that prevent people doing things, like reselling the books and lending them to friends and family, that they are allowed to do with print books, and which readers put great value on. And then they try to charge as much, in some cases more, for such crippled ebooks as they do for print books! That’s why people are so upset and largely why ebooks are perceived as worth less than print books. If ebooks were sold with licenses that were no more (and no less) restrictive than print books (i.e. the exact same license terms copyright law imposes on print books) the whole issue would be considerably easier (there would still be the issue of no warehousing costs, no printing costs and virtually no distribution costs for ebooks vs print books of course).

If publishers want to impose such enhanced restrictions then they are free to do so (whether by technical means or simply a more restrictive license) but they have to understand that this makes the end product less valuable to the customers, it lowers it’s utility, and the only way that might work is if it’s sold at a lower price.

Trying to charge the same price (or nearly the same price) for a product with more restrictions than the alternative just gives people an incentive to violate the terms of the more restrictive license, which is the last thing you want because that in turn just triggers an arms race, and then everyone loses.

I think a movable price point is likely were things should/will end up. My guess is Amazon’s $9.99 price is about right for 90% of new books, and that it should gradually get down to the $1.99-2.99 range over a few years (see JA Konraths work on these prices)… of course that lower price point makes for an interesting problem. What works for JA there is that these are out of print back catalog books that the publisher has already gotten their cut on and no longer get a piece of the action. In the future, one can see that the publishers will want to tie up SOME income on these back catalog books so they get part of that long tail income.

I know I’m being an idealist when I talk about licenses, but I think what I’m doing is trying to reason my way back towards first principles here, and come forward again with a possibly new philosophy on publishing. Ambitious? Yes. Likely to succeed? No. But the questions are worth asking. Your input continues to be very helpful.

Best,

Jay