[bsder]

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what?

All of the evidence points to the fact that people have more than sufficient entertainment options and have set their budgets at a fixed point.

It wasn't piracy that killed music. It was the fact that the prime purchasers of music had a fixed entertainment budget and switched to buying video games aka. zero-sum market.

[cstross]

My take: the zero-sum game is not solely about people having a fixed entertainment budget in purely financial terms -- incomes go up and down and it depends in the aggregate on the economic cycle. Rather, people have a fixed entertainment budget in terms of leisure hours per week that want filling. You can get a pay rise, but you can't get 5% more hours in the week than the 168 that your clock gives you.

Another issue is that some recreational products are rivalrous of time; you can't read a book and play a computer game simultaneously, or combine one of those with doing the ironing or cooking dinner. You can watch a video or listen to music while you're doing something else. Oh, and some products are use-once, while others are use-many-times (and in some cases this varies from individual to individual: do you re-read books, or read them once and discard?).

TL:DR; There's a zero-sum game in the picture but nailing it down is a whole lot more complicated than it looks at first sight.

[jamesaguilar]

At a minimum, books can compete against other forms of entertainment. Books can also compete against other types of consumption, like cars, food and houses. Until I see some compelling evidence that the book market writ large is of a fixed volume, regardless of price, I assume that the size is dynamic, like almost every other market.

[lotsofmangos]

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what?

Me probably. And all the folk I know with reading habits like mine who have not bothered getting an ebook reader yet, despite having problems seeing the floor for books sometimes.

edit - I think Amazon are complete and utter [redacted] over DRM, the 1984 debacle, their general attitude, etc. That said, I think they are probably right that everyone would make more money if the price dropped on ebooks. They are going about it in a very [redacted] way, of course. And even if they are right, their tactics seem pretty [redacted]. But that's Amazon being Amazon. Just because they are behaving like [redacted] doesn't mean that their economics isn't accurate.

[mseebach]

>1984

Isn't the fact that we're still discussing a single screw up that was immediately rectified from 5 years ago evidence that Amazon is actually going about this DRM business in a pretty sensible way? Also, Amazons complete lack of interest in "fixing" the very easy DRM removal process seems to provide further evidence to the same end.

Sure, it'd be better if there was no DRM, but there's the perfect world and then there's the world we actually live in.

[riffraff]

FWIW, I just bought a book (sequel to "a fire upon the deep" by vernon vinge) on kindle yesterday and it came with a "this book has no DRM at the request of the publisher" disclaimer.

So maybe we should complain about publishers rather than amazon at this point?

[mseebach]

We can complain all we want, but I struggle to see how we can place meaningful pressure on publishers.

I wanted to say that it's like iTunes and the switch to non-DRM, but I think the dynamic is different with Amazon as there isn't any meaningful competition on the e-reader device market as there was (and is) on the MP3 player market, where DRM was a major pain and thus a driver for DRM-free.

Short of Amazon pressuring publishers to drop DRM (which could well happen, but there's not a lot of business upside to it, although do downside either), I guess it will take a viable competitor to the Kindle that Amazon can't or won't provide an app for for DRM to get pressured out by end user market force.

[jessaustin]

...I struggle to see how we can place meaningful pressure on publishers.

I've never "bought" an e-book with DRM. (With DRM it isn't really a purchase, but rather a lease of indeterminate term.) I don't find it a struggle.

[jamesaguilar]

FYI, the book publishers compelled amazon to use drm. Where the publishers allow it, they distribute books free of drm.

[freehunter]

>[redacted]

Either you can say the word or you can't. Luckily our language has ways of working around saying certain words, so you don't have to put in [redacted].

[lotsofmangos]

No [redacted], Sherlock. Was clumsily intended as some sort of badly construed comedic effect, to be honest. It didn't really work though.