the big point of the drm is: in the future will I be sure to still be able to read my books ? there is the format obsolescence, the fact the compagny have only a limited life span. For the use of DRM it must be an official (ie by law supported) site who allow me to always get my books back even if I change my computer or ebook reader, and to allow me to give my book to frends or to pass them to my children as a family librairy.

My God!!! Someone else who actually Knows about BAEN. I’ve been a faithful purchaser of ebooks from Baen since they started it, back in 1999 (I think?). DRM is really not as applicable to books as i would think it would be to music. Keep the price *fair* and everyone will pay for it. And yea, there will be people that would occasionally give a DRM-free ebook to a friend hopeing to hook them onto a series, so they would have even more things in common. But BAEN is the only publisher (though they also sell some e-reads, tor and a couple other publishers books too) that truly believes they have more to gain than loose by selling hot-off-the-press (so to speak) ebooks for a fair price.

Really the Publishers need to follow BAEN’s lead, Lets get serious here, there’s ONLY ONE ELECTRONIC COPY of an ebook. When you buy one, your not buying 1 of 10,000. your getting a copy of 1. Amazon, B&N, Fictionwise they all have a copy of that 1 book. So where’s the major expenses??? Give the author more on his royalty (then watch and see how fast they sign up for thier work to be ebooks). and pay the artist (who makes the cover art work) and the editor good wages. There’s no printing costs, no guessing how many copies to print off to meet demand. Just pure profit. Hey drop the price of an ebook down to $4.99 (about 1978′s price range) and everyone wins. Author wins, publisher wins and we win.

pardon me as I get off my soapbox.

I’m an early adopter and a huge ebook reader, but I’ve made a promise to myself that I will never pay $9.99 for an ebook unless it is less than 2 months old.

I usually buy paperbacks, and not only because they’re cheaper, but also because they take less space on the shelf (true, an eBook reader solves this problem for good).

So I believe $9.99 is still excessive. In my opinion, $7.99 would be the right price.

Then more people would buy them. The same thing happened with MP3s. In the early years that MP3s were on sale with DRM such as on ITunes, sure some people bought them, but not me and not anyone that I personally knew.

When DRM was removed, I immediately bought an iPod and regularly buy songs. I simply will not let DRM decide where and how I listen to music. Same with eBooks.

> No one knows what happens without DRM

Not true. O’Reilly sells all of their eBooks without any DRM. http://oreilly.com/ebooks/
And to be honest, 85% of my eBooks are from O’Reilly. Another 5% are from Apress, which only looks their PDFs with your e-mail address. While not ideal, that can be easily removed. The other 10% are various free eBooks.

While I am quite interested in going entirely for eBooks in the future, I refuse to purchase a book with DRM. Unfortunately I think that, like MP3s, it will take several years before the industry realizes this point. So I will mostly likely not make many eBook purchases except from certain publishers such as O’Reilly.

Also, the industry really needs to pick a standard format. I’m extremely happy with PDFs, but there seems to be a push for ePub. It’s ridiculous to buy any Kindle book and not be able to read it on any other device including your own PC. If anything, DRM is preventing eBooks from reaching their full potential. The industry needs to learn from MP3s.

I agree that in time the removal of DRM may happen but what’s the rush? Allow me to buy easily, move between competitors (taking my books with me), let me use any online store, any time, lend my books to friends or family, enable my purchase to survive the death of a single company and do all this with ease and the argument against DRM becomes a crusade centred on dogma.

It might take a few minutes, a day or a week to write a song. It is often a buzz simply to play to an audience and an artist can reap the financial and social awards of success through live concerts etc.

Writing is different. There is so much rubbish talked about it from those who have not spent years locked away on their own trying to create something new. The odds of making a living have always been long and that’s unlikely to change but at least there is a chance. It keeps many of us going.

People who love books should be wary. There are many voices out there with their own agendas (this is a general point – not throwing stones). I agree that punishing honest readers is not the way to go. Neither is the Kindle lock-in.

Things are changing fast. Keep pushing for that freedom. Keep shouting. But the arguments should be centred on what can and cannot be done, not in blind obedience to the technicalities of how it is accomplished.

But it doesn’t look like we’ll get to know any time soon whether this scenario would come true.

Speed, security (knowing what you are getting and the quality you want) and lastly when you give people a reasonably priced alternative to stealing most of them will buy.