"They will go to what­ev­er retail­er they can find online, and they find DRM a royal pain in the ass — indeed, a deter­rent to buy­ing ebooks at all." - Victor Ganata

"This is actu­al­ly one psy­cho­log­i­cal dri­ver for pira­cy — peo­ple who have paid for a book resent being expect­ed to pay for it again due to an arbitrary-seeming lock-in onto an aging piece of hard­ware. From their point of view, hon­esty is being pun­ished." - Victor Ganata

"(…cur­rent­ly Ama­zon have swamped the midlist among ebooks in a sea of self-published rub­bish. It's impos­si­ble to find any­thing worth read­ing in the Kin­dle store that isn't a very obvi­ous best­seller. This offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty for spe­cial­ist book­stores to offer a cura­to­r­i­al role. I believe the vora­cious genre con­sumers are picky enough about what they read that they dis­like Ama­zon's slush­pile approach, and will pref­er­en­tial­ly shop in bet­ter orga­nized outlets.)" - Victor Ganata

"To the extent that pira­cy is an issue, I think the horse is well and truly out of the sta­ble and over the hori­zon; bolt­ing the sta­ble door and adding chains and pad­locks hasn't worked to date, either in print pub­lish­ing or in music and film pub­lish­ing. How­ev­er, I would rec­om­mend con­sid­er­ing a switch to water­mark­ing. Water­mark­ing doesn't pre­vent copy­ing, but makes the orig­i­nal source of a copied file easy to find, which is a deter­rent to casu­al pira­cy. This appears to be the cur­rent best prac­tice in the music indus­try (in the iTunes store, all music down­loads are water­marked), and they're a few years fur­ther into the era of inter­net dis­tri­b­u­tion than we are." - Victor Ganata

"Drop­ping DRM is prob­a­bly not going to have a sig­nif­i­cant effect on the best­sellers, but I will note that J. K. Rowl­ing's move into ebook ter­ri­to­ry is DRM free; pre­sum­ably the ram­pant lev­els of pira­cy around her work was seen as a pre-existing con­di­tion, and any­thing that might con­vert pirate read­ers into pay­ing cus­tomers was seen as giv­ing Pot­ter­more an edge." - Victor Ganata

This is good, DRM-free is really the only way to compete with Amabeast, but there are still huge ecosystem issues. I'd like to have all my books centrally available, the same with all my book marks, search, etc. I don't know if that's enough. - Todd Hoff

Maybe it isn't enough, but it would certainly level the playing field between print books and e-books. I never have to worry that I won't be able to read ink on paper twenty or even three years down the line. - Victor Ganata