Will e-books ever go DRM-free?

My fear is that the shift continues to the point where the economics of paper publishing stop making sense.

A world where books are only available digitally is, to me, a very sad world. No more second hand books stores, no more loaning a book to a friend, no more libraries as we know them, no more book bins at the recycling center, no more leisurely browsing the stacks of either your favorite book store or some place new and exciting you discover while traveling.

Yes, it’s all very sad. But e-readers are great, so you’ll get over it eventually. Or if not, there’ll probably be junky POD versions of books available even after the transition is basically over.

There’s a chance that there will always be a somewhat sizable market for paper books. I don’t know if it will decline to the levels of, say, vinyl records vs. digital music.

There are a lot of advantages to digital music – songs are short listens so it’s good to have a lot of variety with you. There isn’t that same kind of advantage for a $7.99 ebook vs. a $7.99 paperback. There still isn’t a good cheap e-reader platform for non-fiction books that have a lot of photos, tables, etc. And there are a lot of people who may only read a few books a year so there’s no compelling reason to get a dedicated e-reader, though I suspect that market may be captured by devices like the Kindle Fire, the iPad, etc.

Then again we may reach a tipping point where digital sales have cannibalized physical book sales to the point where bookstores go out of business and that may kill the paper book market.

I’m not convinced that if paper sales disappear that will mean the publishers will disappear. They lose their big advantage, distribution, but they will still have a lot of money to throw around.

Few things ever disappear completely. The question is, what role will they have. Today, their major role is effectively a capitalist one in the purest sense of the word: Out of their vast vaults, they front money to the writer, as well as to the printer, artist, editor, &c. in order to make the book production possible, and then recoup that money down the road as the books sell.

I think there’ll always be a demand for that role. Even though the production cost of ebooks can be a lot lower (if you’re a tech-savvy writer, all you really need is a cover designer and an editor to put together a professionally-produced ebook), writers aren’t generally people sitting on cash stores such that they can front money to publishing service companies; and in fact, they probably still want to get some up-front cash themselves.

But I think the companies that end up in that role are going to be a lot smaller and leaner than today’s publishing companies.

That all depends. I don’t doubt that for a lot of people (you) this is true, but for a lot of other people (me), carrying a huge number of books in a tiny amount of space/weight is a godsend. Just a business trip is enough to make you feel the difference between one Kindle and 2-3 books, but if you’re the type of guy that likes to read on the beach, the difference is massive. Two years ago my wife and I went on a beach vacation and had to take an entire suitcase full of books, no exaggeration. Now that we each have a Kindle, we can carry all our reading material in her purse.

Actually, the people getting hurt worst are authors, given the absolutely terrible ebook rates the publishers have been giving them.

Based on this poll, the outlook for DRM-free eBooks is looking pretty grim.

Here’s an article which seems to agree with the premise put forth on this thread:
Publishers cutting their own throats

How long did it take for DRM to disappear from computer games?

It’s a mixture now and it always will be. For eBooks, ditto ditto.

Ha, by Charlie Stross. I wonder if Cory Doctorow also is anti-DRM?!?

The weird thing about his analysis is the hate-on he’s got for Amazon, though. I agree with him that Amazon is putting price pressure on publishers (though his characterization of the negotiation there is ridiculously one-sided; yes, Amazon pulled all paper editions… after the publisher pulled all the ebook editions), but unlike him, I think this is inevitable. Publishers’ current cost structure is just unsustainable in the long term, and the sooner they recognize that, the… sooner a bunch of people have to give up their very nice jobs. So, yeah, that recognition will be delayed until it’s past the point of inevitability.

And what about music?

Don’t take the model it’ll follow for granted.

Canuck - Yea. Stross is an asshole, but he’s right on this issue. There’s also the little matter of the fact that agency pricing is very very probably against EU law, hence the investigation

I don’t know about that. Stross is complaining because Amazon is putting pricing pressure on publishers, cutting into their profits, which trickles down to affect him. What he’s not seeing is that in a world that is moving to ebooks he has a lot more opportunity now to publish directly or use the leverage of the threat of publishing directly to get a better contract with his publisher.

Currently the standard ebook contract is splitting the profits 75-25 in favor of the publisher. The publisher can tie up rights for years and years, also. What Stross needs to ask is what is the publisher doing to earn three our of every four dollars in ebook profits?

Right now we’re still in a paper book world, but that may not be the case three years from now.

they ever go on for DRM-free

yeah they will definitely go on time by time…

What is a game publisher doing to earn the majority of the money?

I don’t think ebook drm will go away until/unless both the nook and the kindle die. Either that or another major contender comes along that isn’t also a book seller.

Amazon and kindle are probably using the drm to combat the rival device (by locking you on to their hardware) as much as anything else and i think it will only get worse, just like PC digital distribution is getting (fuck you EA!). Kindle or nook exclusive books are a certainty at some point.

There are already Kindle exclusives. Amazon has formed its own publishing unit and will have about 400 titles up by end of year. They’re going all in with publishing. They also just bought a children’s book publisher and now own 425 kid’s books. They are competing directly with publishers now as well as bookstores.

Oh hey, also an investigation in America over eBook cartel pricing;

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gfV4-JKt7pSzX6xHGPXx8Isc1VFA?docId=4d3d87e5578b43c3bc013c692b4d7558

Edit: And Aeon, stop the fuck whining about your inability to deal with file formats

Why would I search a store site when I want a price comparison?

I mean, I want the book, I want it in epub format, and I want to buy it right the fuck now and read it on stanza because I have stanza set up the way I like it.

I don’t know what the fuck a nookbook is, or whether the kindle version works on my phone rather than a kindle. I want a dang epub!

This was made bizarrely difficult. I was irritated.

Anyway the book was yet another GRRM “I am blueballing you, suck it” experience a decade in the waiting, so I guess that played into it.

If you know what an epub format is and what format your current reader needs, you probably know what a nook is. The reverse is often not true though.

I’m new to ebooks myself, but the business seems too immature to have much in the way of price wars/comparisons, kind of like how video game digital distribution was a couple years ago. Possibly even worse since there is basically no competition because the different file formats don’t work on the other major system.

Yeah “nookbook” does kind of make you sound like an old man. The present vendor/file-format system sucks ass, but not because it’s hard to actually find something, or for that matter “comparison shop” in any meaningful way. It’s basically whatever your gigantor vendor format is - search the vendor - or a cross-platform format from the publisher - search the publisher.