One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free | Hacker News Reader

One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free

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48 pointssofperseus11 comments

I remember someone pointing out that the DRM on books was massively, hugely successful to one party: Amazon. Imagine if all publishers had jumped in on distributing mobi and epub from the start - Amazon would have far less hold.

It was trivial for me to move from Amazon MP3 to Google Music (and back, if I want). It'd be far more work to get off Kindle. Even if tomorrow another company came out with a far superior device than the Kindle Paperwhite, how many users could just jump ship? Ripping the DRM off is a pain, even if it just requires some googling and downloading into another program.

Publishers getting off DRM is a good thing. Just remember that the real reason is they're terrified that Amazon holds the keys and are regretting their decision to willing hand things over to Amazon.

Almost certainly Charlie Stross. (cstross here, and elsewhere)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understa...

When iTunes had DRM on music, it was the same, but with Apple/iPod. Luckily about 3 years ago or so, iTunes finally offered DRM-free versions of songs, and I spent £50 or so to upgrade my entire library. Thanks to that, I was able to listen to my music later on my Nintendo 3DS, and now my phone.

And yet, because of DRM when I think about buying an electronic version of something, I still feel in my gut "It's not really mine", and I hesitate to buy.

True, I would not buy anything which is DRM-protected unless I knew how to remove the DRM restrictions. I buy quite a few Kindle books, but only because it's easy to remove their restrictions. I don't share the DRM-free books over the internet, but I still keep a copy of each book which does not suffer from present or future seller restrictions.

Title is misleading; the article contains no results.

"we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles" [...] "The move has been a hugely positive one for us" [...] "we’re still pleased that we took this step"

Possibly "result" (synonym of "impact") would be more accurate than "results" which could imply facts and figures?

Tor is not bankrupt, neither have they seen an increase in piracy. Those are pretty good results, IMHO. Sure, you probably want numbers but you aren't going to get them, especially not from a publisher smaller than Amazon.

Another great piece of hard data to try to put a stake in the DRM myth. (which is only partially myth, since it's true that if the good is priced way too high DRM is the only way to get even some people to pay that price).

Reminds me a bit of when Lotus took DRM off Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80s. Prior to that you had to have the disk that Lotus installed from in the floppy drive at all times. Totally sucked. They dropped DRM, sales went up, and their support costs went down (paying customers affected by DRM make support calls, pirates dealing with DRM do not usually :-)

No numbers?

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