[amazingamazing]

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason.

looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.

it's just too easy to share the books. you can get tens of thousands of books for what, a gigabyte? without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.

here's one moderately popular author's take:

https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/flowers-and-questions/

[AlotOfReading]

Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.

[badlibrarian]

They also refused to make their e-books available to libraries because they said it hurt sales. Which at least is a new wrinkle on the endless DRM debates.

Hell, if I ran a publishing company I'd remove DRM just so I wouldn't have to listen to Cory Doctorow rant about it. Having to proofread his books is punishment enough.

[AlotOfReading]

I hadn't heard that they limited availability, only that it was on a 4 month delay after consumer publication.

All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.

[Mindwipe]

No publisher has done anything other than laugh at Cory for years now.

[amazingamazing]

pretty hard to do any rigorous analysis without public sales info of all publishers, but yes I have heard that as well. their main competitor, baen also doesn't have drm

[didntcheck]

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle

If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd probably be right, but we're now in the "cloud consuming" era. Hence the trajectory of music piracy. When people were used to managing their CDs and MP3s, ordinary consumers absolutely did engage in opportunistic (often friend-to-friend) piracy, but then streaming came and made both legal and illegal MP3s almost a footnote

[1] Of course you can upload your own "personal documents" to your Kindle library via send-to-Kindle, but few people know that outside of tech/enthusiast circles. Even knowing what an EPUB or AZW3 is almost puts you in that bubble

Errata: rephrased the first sentence from "several hundred megabytes" to "a high-quality movie", to better explain the point that download size is rarely a barrier for piracy

[amazingamazing]

> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle

citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book signing. most people who have ebooks don't even ever deal with the files in any respect.

[gcr]

Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device.

We exist! There might even be dozens of us!

[didntcheck]

Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?

[Mindwipe]

Size is absolutely a factor in that most ebooks can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't.

[iggldiggl]

> can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't

The average pop song at average bitrates would fit that limit, though, too, even with less room to spare.

[cyberax]

> looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.

Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well.

> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.

Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users.

I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.

[agnishom]

> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire

They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time

[internet_points]

It's easier to just pirate a book than to buy it from amazon and open a windows vm and strip drm in order to read it where I want. DRM doesn't stop people copying.

(And https://www.bloomsbury.com sells quite major "hits" like Sarah Maas, Madeline Miller and Ann Patchett, without DRM – doesn't seem to have hurt their sales.)