TeleRead Poll: How many more e-books would you buy each year without DRM around?

Comments:

• Ron Lauzon says:

  March 31, 2006 at 8:30 am

  If it has DRM, it must be priced at a “throw away” price (and for eBooks that’s less than $1) or I will not buy it.

  Any non-DRM eBook that costs more than half as much as a paper book is poor value and I will not buy it.

  All that removing DRM does is make the eBook more valuable and, therefore, I would pay more for it.
• skyguy says:

  March 31, 2006 at 8:30 am

  I live in Japan…so I’d LOVE to be able to buy DRM free ebooks, assuming the price were reasonable (say, half the hardcover price). But I’m not going to spend money on books I eventually won’t be able to access.
• Branko Collin says:

  March 31, 2006 at 9:31 am

  DRM adds to the price. After all, the publisher needs to buy or license the technology. If a publisher prices DRMed works to what they are worth, which is far less than the un-DRMed version, he has to recoup the cost from the DRM technology from elsewhere.
• Richard says:

  March 31, 2006 at 12:41 pm

  DRM is a small part of the picture.

  An e-book must be both DRM-free AND in a non-proprietary, openly documented format. This does not mean a public-domain format, or a format that no company controls the standard to; but one that is openly documented, that anybody can implement.

  Then I would buy more e-books, but until both conditions are true then the answer is “No change”, because a non-DRM’d ebook in a proprietary format is only slightly more useful than a DRM’d ebook.