You can’t both deliver information to the public and protect it from them at the same time. As the column points out, there are numerous ways round it and it only takes one determined person to defeat it.

If you accept it, the burdens DRM imposes also shortens the life of consumer data considerably, since it tends to tie the data to a device. This lifespan is already pretty short – witness the raft of obsolete data formats that have come and gone from the home (both physical and electronic). Anything that requires special sockets, sprockets or software is inherently doomed. (That includes all you pod-people in Apple’s locked-down, faux-Bohemia.) I don’t see how this can fail to devalue the work in the eyes of the consumer.

DRM doesn’t serve the publishers or the consumers. It is snake-oil, providing only a false sense of security to those that buy into it.

On the opposite end, I’m not convinced by the long-tailed economists who believe giving everything away for free will just work out because wishful thinking wants it to.

Writers will still write and readers will still read. I expect a lot more wrangling as the new social contracts for publishing are worked out and the business of being a bookseller/middleman mutates. I don’t expect DRM to be the last mistake in that process.

(Although the direct-to-the-public thing is much heralded, I don’t think the death of the middleman is coming any time soon. Thog knows, there are limits to how close I want to get to the slush pile, or even any given publisher’s chosen output.)

I think the reasons for Baen going away are tad more complicated based on my reading of Eric Flint’s letter (and also reading the forum boards). Yes, they thought they’d get more buyers/readers, but they also mentioned distribution problems that they couldn’t get around. The other key point is that Baen was paying extremely well and pulling in popular author names. Not that this is a bad thing at all, but they did have a high expense ratio from that standpoint. Even Eric…or was it Resnick? I think Resnick who wrote the article–anyway, one of them pointed out that done right, they still think they could make it work and they may give it another go.

I’d like to see them make the mag more available as well–like formatted for the popular readers like Kindle and sold via Amazon–just for the eyeballs if nothing else. Too many people didn’t even know about the magazine.

Which I guess is what Gary is trying to do here…come to think of it!

I never understood that why on a publicity level this wasn’t done. Sure, some reviewers refuse digital copies (and we certainly used to not prefer them), but you can easily placate the few significant reviewers if that is their preference (by significant I mean the trades, major papers or if Colbert or Oprah invites you on). In the SF/F corner, the number of online venues who should have true bargaining power are virtually (pun not intended) non-existent beyond a handful – Io9, SciFi are among the few who are slamdunks (and neither really focus on books). I imagineSciFi and Gawker have stacks of Kindles version 10.0s in their guest bathrooms!

Obviously we know why they don’t want to do this, but I’m not sure if the damage is so profound to worry about it. Seem like a waste of time to me, but then again I fully admit I don’t have access to studies or eve real statistics done by publisher to gauge the potential loss–they may be well founded in their practices.

That said, It does seem a bit like the whole, old Kid Rock thing with Itunes.

I generally agree with your sentiments, but as a partial counter argument, Baen just closed down their online magazine because panhandling on the street wasn’t bringing in enough money.

I think the authors that stand the most to gain from ebooks are those that can republish their out-of-print backlist. These authors already have a following (one can assume) the backlist has been professionally edited and so on. If they make it available on Kindle and Sony and so on–at an attractive price, there’s no real need for someone to go hunting down a used copy or a pirated copy. Pretty easy to one-click on Amazon or wherever.

It’s been interesting to watch just how much the whole ebook thing has taken off this last couple of years. I think it’s going to get even more interesting.

Maria