No, the bigger issue is that you never foresaw it could happen. Many of us did. Welcome to the beginning of getting up to speed.

lets just say?

c’mon, you’re a _publisher,_ for cryin’ out loud…

***

> Lets just say if this had come out last Monday,
> I don’t think the blog posts on DRM
> would have got written.

any competent observer could have known that
– given the combination of licensed books on a
phone-home machine, with storage in the cloud –
instances like the 1984 recall would occur, and
will occur again, any time a court orders it done.

-bowerbird

Gutenberg is free. Teasers at Baen are free. Webscriptions at Baen are not free. Its a paid subscription service. With Litres you have a choise – you can pay upfront for a file in one of 14 DRM-free formats. Up to 14 downloads per file. Or you can read the book for free online – with lots of ads on the pages. The revenues from those ads then get shared with authors. The payment system is somewhat different as well. Basically, you can transfer money to your Litres account with credit card or PayPal. Then you can pay out of that account for downloadable books. As a result, you don’t have to bother with credit card transaction every time you want to buy a book. I personally prefer this to the Webscription system.

But basically, what neither of these systems are is attempt to mangle some dinosaurian business model to fit on top of the “intertubes”. Both work – in that a) they are more convenient alternatives to hunting stuff down on Darknet and b) they pay the authors. No DRM, no hardware lock-in, no geo-restrictions. None of that nonsense.

Given that working business models exist and have been around for awhile now, why should anyone even debate whether it is possile to get away with building something worse?

While DRM does not work against piracy, piracy does work against DRM. Putting DRM on your content makes the assumption people buy books out of ignorance (of alternatives). Selling them DRM-free makes the assumption they do so out of preference. Last time I checked (about a year ago), SF/F archives on the Darknet totalled for around 7 GB. Any impact piracy has on sales has already been here for years. People who pay for e-books today, do so because they want to. Doesn’t make sense to change their minds, just to accommodate bizdev monkeys at Amazon and Apple playing monopoly – which as mr. Doctorow has been saying, is what the DRM is really about.

http://bit.ly/jCQcT

Really, ‘unscrupulous’ is the first word that springs to mind after you’ve read the referenced article. If DRM is a loaded gun aimed at pirates, Amazon just right now pointed it at their own foot and started repeatedly pulling the trigger. Perhaps the Baen model really is the way to go – all those free texts, and they’re still in business.

Glad you liked my digital escrow notion – it really was a bit of an off the cuff idea, although I rather suspect the same publishers who don’t want you to download a Kindle book more than twice would throw lawsuits at any such escrow scheme since it would remove their control over said texts.

The thing is, you can look forward to more of this sort of thing happening, too.