Tor Books is going DRMless

Martin Persson said:

What plan is that?

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The one that's been in place since nearly the beginning of the age of consumerism.

Shoeless said:

It may not be a plan.

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It is not. It is just technology advancing.

Shadow_Ferret said:

The one that's been in place since nearly the beginning of the age of consumerism.

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Are you joking or do you seriously believe that there is a conspiracy going on?

Martin Persson said:

Are you joking or do you seriously believe that there is a conspiracy going on?

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I think he means less a nefarious 'we'll sell them this and then sell them it again' plan and more a general lack of forward-looking in terms of formats and support. When DVDs came along, it wasn't like the engineers behind the standard sat there cackling like Ysma in Emperor's New Groove and going, "Now they'll have to buy all those movies they got on VHS a *second time*! It's brilliant, brilliant, BRILLIANT, I tell you!" They came up with a significantly better format and charged onwards, without regard for backwards compatibility. (To their credit, they learned from this and pretty much every Blu-Ray player can also play DVDs.)

Or take audio, for instance. If I owned an album on vinyl and then got a cassette player, I could record the album onto vinyl. If I got an MP3 player, I could record the tracks into digital format using one of those USB turntables.

Where the wrinkle with "let them convert their own libraries" develops is with DRM; take a look, for instance, at the Plays4Sure initiative (ironically named, in hindsight). Microsoft came up with this massive DRM-locked digital music initiative back in 2004, and then four years later they'd come up with something better for the Zune and were originally telling people "after 2008, if you don't have your P4S content licensed on your machine, you won't be able to re-validate it because the DRM policy servers are going away." Which meant all the music you'd bought from the MSN Music Store would effectively stop working; if you got a new computer, you wouldn't be able to re-obtain a DRM license for the new machine. They did allow you to burn to audio CD, so that you could blow a bunch of blank CDs and back up your music that way, but otherwise the music would turn into random unusable bits. In the end, they backed down after massive outcry and are still running the policy servers, but it's not hard to imagine this happening with other formats... including eBooks.

Martin Persson said:

Are you joking or do you seriously believe that there is a conspiracy going on?

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Conspiracy? Like the grassy knoll type? No. Not at all.

There's no "conspiracy" at all. It's simply how businesses operate. Have you never heard of the term, or practice, before?

Here, from Wiki:

Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time. Planned obsolescence has potential benefits for a producer because to obtain continuing use of the product the consumer is under pressure to purchase again, whether from the same manufacturer (a replacement part or a newer model), or from a competitor which might also rely on planned obsolescence.

In some cases, deliberate deprecation of earlier versions of a technology is used to reduce ongoing support costs, especially in the software industry. Though this could be considered planned obsolescence, it differs from the classic form in that the consumer is typically made aware of the limited support lifetime of the product as part of their licensing agreement.

For an industry, planned obsolescence stimulates demand by encouraging purchasers to buy sooner if they still want a functioning product. Built-in obsolescence is used in many different products. There is, however, the potential backlash of consumers who learn that the manufacturer invested money to make the product obsolete faster; such consumers might turn to a producer (if any exists) that offers a more durable alternative.

Estimates of planned obsolescence can influence a company's decisions about product engineering. Therefore the company can use the least expensive components that satisfy product lifetime projections. Such decisions are part of a broader discipline known as value engineering.

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As a reader, it makes me happy. As a writer, it means Tor won't be in my publishing future unless they dramatically increse royalty rates for ebooks.

Jamesaritchie said:

As a reader, it makes me happy. As a writer, it means Tor won't be in my publishing future unless they dramatically increse royalty rates for ebooks.

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Why is that, James?

Jamesaritchie said:

As a reader, it makes me happy. As a writer, it means Tor won't be in my publishing future unless they dramatically increse royalty rates for ebooks.

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Yeah, that confuses me too. They still do a heck of a lot more work on your book than you'll get from Amazon or Smashwords if you're self-publishing.

Tor adds value; do you think it's not enough value?

Shadow_Ferret said:

Conspiracy? Like the grassy knoll type? No. Not at all.

There's no "conspiracy" at all. It's simply how businesses operate. Have you never heard of the term, or practice, before?

Here, from Wiki:

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I think that's mostly bull. I work in high tech, and we try to accommodate backwards compatibility as much as we can, but it most often becomes untenable after a while especially between hardware components. Decisions have to be made. Often what we do is support something as long as feasible, but when it becomes too expensive or physically impossible, we have to move on. If that's planned obsoleteness, then so be it. But it's not a really planned at the time we bring out the technology.

I think most people assume that business really have their act together well enough to actually plan this kind of thing. It mostly isn't the case. They produce something with as advanced technology as they can to give it as much selling power and life as they can. Often that means that they cannot support older technology at the same time. Again, I think that Wiki post is mostly a supposition and done without any understanding of how this kind of thing really works.

Planned obsolescence dates back to the automobile industry in the 1950s when every manufacturer changed the style every year to make the previous styles unappealing, and the cars' maintenance became too expensive to keep them on the road much past 100,000 miles. That's all changed now mainly due to imports, but technology? How come we get a new version of Windows every couple years or so? My old W98 laptop and XP desktop still work just fine. Why did the first version of the iPad lack features that people want? PO is still a marketing strategy. I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, though.

Al Stevens said:

Why did the first version of the iPad lack features that people want?

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Probably a huge combination of factors, but if you're thinking that they purposely left out features so that they could get customers to update to the next release, I think that's not likely. I've worked in the software industry over 20 years, and have never heard that even mentioned in secret, hushed conversations as a reason to not implement a feature

You can only have a certain amount of resources (time, money, people, hardware, etc.) to spend on a product cycle before you need to release.

PEBKAC said:

I've worked in the software industry over 20 years, and have never heard that even mentioned in secret, hushed conversations as a reason to not implement a feature

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I've got about 30 years on you. I started programming in the late 1950s. You're right. They never did it in a secret, hushed environment. They did it out in the open, and it was expected. The main reason for upgrades to anything is to promote follow-on business. Without that, a company cannot stay in business.

Release early, release often.

thothguard51 said:

OK, please bare with me...

Technology like this left me some time ago. I understand that will a little skill, hackers can break DRM in a matter of minutes and upload the file. But, anyone doing this is intentionally doing this and not because they are clueless.

My question, is what is to stop me, from buying a DRMless book and then sending it to 10, 20, or 100 of my friends, for free?

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Time and value. Sure you could do that, but in the end, why would you want to? If the amount you need to spend is trivial (under $20), the sources you can buy it from are plentiful, you can bundle book purchases together, you are no longer at the whim of pirates to distribute the book. . . it makes things easier.

Awesome, good job Tor!

There are free DRM removal tools all over the place...sso it won't change a thing.

Xelebes said:

Time and value. Sure you could do that, but in the end, why would you want to? If the amount you need to spend is trivial (under $20), the sources you can buy it from are plentiful, you can bundle book purchases together, you are no longer at the whim of pirates to distribute the book. . . it makes things easier.

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It would certainly hurt sales though.