[acdha]

A lot of this comes down to terminology: the people who are the most upset about DRM are the people who thought they were “buying” something in the same manner as a physical item and are at some point rudely reminded that the company considers it more like a temporary license. Very few people mind services like Netflix or Spotify because it's extremely clear that you're paying for a month of access at a time.

I doubt we're going to get much legal change in the short term but imagine how different the discussion would be if there was a clear labeling law which required either labeling things as rentals with a very clear time window or the company is required to either provide access or refund your money should their system lock you out.

[bad_user]

The problem is of course that we as humans don't like to rent, we like to own and for good reasons. We only prefer to rent when overall the price is much better than owning or when we don't have a choice.

Netflix and Spotify don't have a problem with their subscribers because the price is fair. $10 per month is fair for unlimited access to TV shows that you like. $10 is also fair for unlimited access to all the music that you want. And in fact both Netflix and Spotify don't really need DRM in order for them to work. I can already find all of that content on PirateBay, all of that content has already been pirated. And if I'm paying for Netflix, I might do so out of convenience and because pirating is illegal.

But charge $10 for an eBook or $15-$30 for an audio book or $10 for a music album and that price is no longer fair with DRM. The problem is that these companies want to have their cake and eat it too, by creating the illusion of ownership, with people not realizing they are locked-in until it is too late. And that should be clearly illegal, I wonder when people will wake up.

[dhimes]

But these prices haven't changed much in decades. Books have always cost that much, as have albums (the exception being textbooks). Discount vinyl record albums were US $5.99 in the 1970s.

I have issues with DRM, but not because I find the prices exorbitant.

[mfoy_]

The prices haven't changed if we are talking ownership. But we are not talking about ownership, we're talking about licensing.

That dichotomy is what we're talking about. People are tricked into thinking they are buying a book. They are not. They are renting a book at the same price as buying.

[jessaustin]

When you bought vinyl or CDs, you owned that. How can a temporary rental be worth the same?

[tedunangst]

Because it takes up less space in my house.

[reitanqild]

I say not valid because you can rip the physical media and store the original in cheap offsite storage for whoever inherits you => best of both worlds.

[tedunangst]

I say not valid because audio doesn't have DRM anymore, just books, and ripping a book to PDF is more work than I'm inclined to do.

[marcosdumay]

> Books have always cost that much

How much renting them used to cost?

[hsod]

What makes a price fair?

[TeMPOraL]

The general perception of the marginal cost of a vendor of stocking and selling the good, as compared with the price they ask you and the value-added service they offer. With digital goods, the marginal cost of delivering you a copy is pretty much zero. As for service provided - it depends, but most of the time, the service itself doesn't seem to be costing much more than "pretty much nothing".

What matters is perception. To use Amazon Kindle Store as an example - the primary service they (and most on-line merchants) offer you is... a payment gateway. It doesn't seem expensive. They also host the ebooks, but again - downloading digital goods is free at the margin. You could say that e-book prices also subsidize Kindle R&D and/or manufacturing (not sure if that's true, but assuming it for the sake of an example) - but at this point I have to ask, why should I care?

Businesses like to move around costs and profits and do anything but transparent pricing in order to maximize profits. Koerig sells you coffee machines at a loss for price X, and then tries to make it up with DRMed, overpriced coffee pods. I feel it's unfair because - why should I care about the coffee pods subsidizing my coffee maker? They didn't tell me up-front they're doing it, they just sell me a coffee maker for X.

Similarly with ebooks. The marignal costs to the retailer are zero, so the price should be low too - if they're subsidizing something with ebook sales, that's not my problem. I'll call expensive ebooks unfairly priced. If they want me to think the price is fair, they need to work on my perception of their cost structures, instead of obfuscating everything.

[nickbauman]

This is why generally I don't buy Amazon stuff for my kindle. 99% of my kindle contains stuff that was either free in the first place (ibilio, gutenberg proj, etc) or was purchased without DRM installed.

I made an exception with Audible but I'm going to cancel it because while I love the idea of Audible, I've been racking up freebees every month and not pulling the trigger because I just don't have the time.

[acdha]

I generally see it as a price threshold: when a Kindle book is much cheaper than the paperback I'm willing to accept getting less value, especially if it's something like book n in a series which I'm going to read on the plane and don't expect to reread.

[michaelmrose]

Probably nobody would be on board with paying 25-90 to rent a singular work for 5-20 years.