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Games guide publisher’s sales shoot up after after it drops DRM—plus Kindle-related links (as required by law) and more
December 14, 2007 | 9:36 am
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By David Rothman
E-books are showing special strength in special markets such as games guides, textbooks and romances, according to the Associated Press.
Significantly, guide publishers are shunning Draconian DRM. In fact, sales shot up 30 percent at DriveThruRPG in 2005 after it dropped DRM in favor of watermarking.
The AP’s Peter Svensson wisely warns: “Don’t lock up the content.” Hello, big publishers? (Thanks to the much-appreciated Mike Cane.)
Other links of interest—all spotted by Mike except for the last:
- Less than fully enthusiastic thoughts on the Kindle from Philippe Starck, a well-known French designer, via Robert Scoble. Photo shows Scoble (left) with Starck and the K machine. “The designer,” says Starck, “wasn’t humble enough to disappear.” Hmm. Out of shame or because the design called too much attention to itself? Review video here.
- Los Angeles Times review of the Kindle, the iLiad, the Sony and a dictionary gizmo from Franklin.
- Ubergizmo on the release of the NUUT e-book relater. More NUUT information here. Can anyone do a better translation job than Google and fill us in on the latest details.
- A child’s upbeat verdict on the XO, a gem of a review found on the BBC site.
- How Dymocks is doing with its e-book store—1,000 orders so far. Plus iLiad info. (Thanks to Carol Jurd!)
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Comments:
Steve Jackson Games has also had a lot of success with selling their GURPs line through PDF. They have an interesting model where the two core books to the game are print-only so as not to completely cut out the comic book/gaming stores, and then everything else is either PDF-only or PDF and print. No DRM.
Like the guy mentioned in the story, I bought a ton of stuff at Drivethru, especially out of nostalgia (oh wow, there’s the supplement mom through out because of the half nekkid chick in chainmail).
As for piracy, it’s like I’ve been saying. The problem is that piracy has a cost too. Yes, you can find everything at DriveThru illegally if you want, but the cost is usually higher because the scans posted on filesharing sites tend to be crap, crap, crap.
Paying $10 to buy something at DriveThru and know its actually going to be legible is much cheaper than spending weeks looking for probably 75dpi scan on some warez site.
I had a look at DriveThru for the first time, not exactly my interest, but many of the prices seemed where they should be for ebooks.
We still need an easy payment system for small amounts, but the best protection against piracy is value for money, quality items, and some value added services (such as being able to download lost and destroyed copies that have been purchased).
Being in Australia, and near Indonesia, cheap pirated DVDs usually of bad quality (filmed in movie theaters often) surface here and there.
However, recent releases sell for over $30, when tickets to see the films are around $15. Basically the price is too high and as people buy DVDs, or go to the theater, for very different reasons lowering the prices to $15 would just about kill piracy here without adversely effecting theater releases.
“I had a look at DriveThru for the first time, not exactly my interest, but many of the prices seemed where they should be for ebooks.”
Especially since this becoming more and more of niche market and the physical books in the stores are typically in the $40-$50 range, if not more.