Slightly off topic - Ebooks

[David Kramer]

Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 12:08:51AM -0500, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>>> Yes. Don't buy DRM'd books. Wait for another year or so; the
>>> market will sort itself out, and the hardware will get better
>>> and cheaper.
>> This is really the comment I'm curious about.  Why do you say "don't buy drm
>> books?"  What do you think will change in the next year, and what bad thing
>> do you think will happen, if you buy drm'd books within the next year?
> 
> The "bad thing" is licensing DRM'd books; it's already here.  Publishers
> are going to either move to DRM-free ebooks or find themselves doing
> too much work for too little return. As customers grow more savvy about
> ebooks, they will express a preference for non-DRM'd ebooks. One of
> the factors driving that will be a desire to avoid lock-in. When you
> change ebook readers, your library will need to move with you, even
> across manufacturers.

I'm not as confident as you are in that, and here's why:  We on this
list are so frackin' far from the common consumer on the street.  Just
like my frustration with the death of the PDA market because so few
people are data/PIM geeks anymore, so a $50 cellphone suffices.  The
average consumer out there hasn't even thought about end-of-life of
Amazon, accessing their content on anything but a Kindle or Windows, or
privacy.

The concerned, informed, geek market that's willing to vote with its
dollar is just too small.

Think about the post Daniel Clark sent.  RMS uses this one laptop with a
tiny screen and that's it, because it's the ONLY ONE ON THE MARKET that
has completely free software down to the BIOS level.  Not even this
crowd is willing to vote with their dollar to that extent.  Nor do I
think they should.  Most of us are only willing to sacrifice so much
convenience and capabilities in the name of telling big
(business|government) what we feel is right.