I find this kind of casual slur on people in general to be quite offensive and part of the idiotic disrespecting mindset of publishers in general toward their public.. There is absolutely no evidence, whatsoever, anywhere that the ‘public’ are dishonest in the way you suggest, by pirating eBooks. There is only margin evidence that eBooks are being illegally downloaded in any great numbers despite all of the cynically exaggerated bleating and dishonest ‘surveys’ of the major publishers.

As a result, when other sellers were using the old wholesale model, many publishers wouldn’t deal with them for fear of the Amazon backlash, Amazon being the 800-pound gorilla in the eBook world. A publisher would be more than happy to set a wholesale price (say 70% of their suggested retail) and let the outlets battle it out, but Amazon is basically forcing everyone into the agency model by its practices.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg. Amazon’s policy or some publisher forcing the agency issue? I don’t know, but that’s the situation as it stands today.

Oddly enough, you can lower the price on Amazon and the other outlets won’t even notice. We did that recently for a book to see if we could make money at a 99-cent price point (no, we couldn’t, since we only got a very few extra sales and almost no return on each sale at 35% royalty). The same book at $4.95 is selling much better than it did at 99 cents — go figure; people are sometimes unpredictable.

When AKW Books (akwbooks.com) started publishing books a year ago, we looked at the market and found that customers absolutely HATE DRM. We also discovered that all of the DRM schemes (some cumbersome at best) had been cracked and the software to do the job was readily available on the Internet — for free.

Fictionwise has it right. No DRM sells more books. Soooo, we went along with that model and have never looked back. The road is full of potholes. If too many people pirate the stuff, the authors will quit writing and everyone loses out (no new eBooks, no incentive for the writers, publishers, or distributors).

We currently produce books in several formats; all without DRM: ePub, Microsoft Reader (LIT), Kindle (PRC), Adobe (PDF), and MobiPocket (PRC). There are very few readers that can’t handle one of these formats.

If the rest of the world would follow this model (and if the public would remain honest), eBooks would be easy to deal with and downright cheap to buy. An eBook of around 100,000 words (a “fat” paperback) sells on our site for $4.95 or there about. We may experiment with even lower prices to see if we can make up for the price with volume. All of our books are NEW, not reprints, and the writing quality is just as good (and often better) than what comes out of New York.

There is no reason for an eBook to cost the $9.99 that Amazon charges (and claims they lose money on).

This seems ludicrous to me. Baen Books, feedbooks and manybooks can be read on more devices than the E-Puke books being sold my B&N. Can you read it on a Sony? How about a Kindle? Those alone cover over 50% of the e-readers on the market. Lies, Damn Lies and Statisticians!

If it requires Adobe Digital Editions to read (and nothing else can read it), then it’s not EPUB.

If it can’t be created with free and open source tools and components (versus expensive and proprietary encryption software) then it’s not EPUB.

So many natural benefits of ebooks are lost, when the open format is adulterated.

Ebook buyers would be outraged — if they understood.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

Or they could choose to sell you unencrypted ePub files as well (Like Fictionwise already does for some books).

Also worth noting is that with the password based scheme, even when the password is a credit card number, it is never stored either in the book or on you device/computer in a recoverable form.

@David
Social is a very imprecise term that can and does mean different things to different people (is it encrypted, is it watermarked, or is it both?).

It is my hope that all of the RMSDK customers will choose to update to 9.1 for all their devices (including the COOL-er, Opus, etc…) to help reduce end-user confusion, however as I mentioned there will be short-term confusion until we get this sorted out.

Thanks,
David

B&N has licensed this scheme to Adobe for inclusion in the RMSDK (Reader Mobile SDK – it’s the ePub/PDF engine we license to device manufacturers) and ACS (Adobe Content Server).

Adobe in turn has licensed the RMSDK (that includes this method as well as our current method) to B&N, who is using it to implement ePub/PDF rendering on the Nook.

Other RMSDK customers will get this as part of the 9.1 release of the RMSDK (early 2010). When those customers choose to include it on devices/firmware upgrades will be up to them.

ADE 1.7.1 (the current version) does not support the new DRM format, but we do plan on releasing a version that does (and no there is no publicly released date on the version of ADE available yet).

This will cause confusion in the short term about what will work where as we get everyone (including us) ramped up, but the long/medium term goal is that from a customer perspective – it’ll just work.