cdamian

Comment Threads

• julesjones commented on Look over there ...
  Aside from the hard numbers, there is the other thing Shiloh refers to in that post -- the experience many of us in romance have had of seeing the pirates talking about how they can't wait for the next book in the series to come out. That really doesn't sound like people who haven't read past the first half dozen pages. I've seen a pirate who'd just posted a copy of one of my books to share with a few hundred of her closest friends saying what a great series it was, and how disappointed she was that I've never...
• Charlie Stross commented on Look over there ...
  Jeff, I'm not 100% sold on the NYTimes figures. For one thing -- and this is one of those things that strikes outsiders as utterly brain-dead -- publishers sell ebooks via retail channels that take roughly the same proportion of the price as profit as a dead-tree book retail channel. Baen are different: webscription is, I think, an arms-reach subsidiary and their proportion of the take is rather smaller. But B&N or W. H. Smiths aim to take the same percentage of the price of an ebook as they do of a paper book. (The publishers put up with this...
• Charlie Stross commented on Look over there ...
  Sebastian, you missed the elephant in the living room: DRM. Let's pretend to be a publisher who insists on DRM'ing their ebooks. What happens when a customer hits on, say, Fictionwise.com, adds the book to their shopping cart, and clicks "buy"? What happens is: firstly, Fictionwise take the money off their credit card or paypal account. (Which is a marathon and a half of web transactions under the hood, but let's not go into that here.) Then they send an encrypted http request to the publisher's server. This basically says "hi! We're Fictionwise, and our wholesale rate applies. A customer...
• Charlie Stross commented on Look over there ...
  Sebastian: On a side note, I was unaware that in a "must-have-DRM" scenario the publisher is the one encrypting the books? Wouldn't it be far saner to have the shop doing this instead of pinging the publisher's servers? Yes, but that assumes the publisher trusts the shops to inform them reliably of how many copies they're selling -- or to keep the unencrypted master copy under lock and key. Any discussion of DRM which assumes that the parties involved are sane, well-informed, and mean well is doomed to inanity. The reality is that DRM is a plague upon the content...
• waters.boyd commented on Look over there ...
  perhaps this comment thread is dead, but... "What I'd really like is more Subterranean Press editions of our host's work, bundled with a corresponding DRM-free ebook. (Feel free to watermark the ebook like the technical publishers do.) I would pay above current hardback prices for this combined package, and buy direct from the publisher." Here, here: me too. And perhaps all 30 or so of us commenting here. But perhaps that's what small-print-run shops are for... I've got no problem, so far, with Amazon Kindle. It's very simple: I click "purchase", they charge my credit card, and my iPhone suddenly...