Agreed. I like Mr Berlucchi's focus on the consumer, I think this sometimes gets missed in the welter of discussion on market share and the future of the industry.

That said, people have done time for sharing music in the same way that Berlucchi is advocating the sharing of books.

Well, perhaps not quite the same way but where is the incentive to write a book if its just going to become public property?

..and good luck with that. If the combined might of the Music and Film industries haven't figure this out over the last 15 years with something as data heavy as audio and video I don't think the publishing industry stand a chance with a glorified text file. As long as something exists people will copy it. The only way to stop it is to not create it in the 1st place. Sad but true. Don't waste millions trying to come up with technology to prevent it because there are thousands of people around the world who make it their hobby to crack a new challenge and once one has done it it goes viral and you're back to square one.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is to stop throwing everything at a technology that will eventually ruin the industry and get back behind the printed book again. Sometime in the next week would be fine.

Sorry, but it's a pipe dream. There's no way to protect a book against replication and thus DRM is literally impossible.

An ebook has to be displayed in a way that a person can read. If it can be read, it can be copied. The simplest way, time-consuming though it is, is simple transcription: you copy the book out. That happens more often than you might think.

The next simplest way you might break any DRM is to take a screen shot of whatever you're reading it on and run an Optical Character Recognition program on it. You could easily write a script to do that on your PC and rip a book from, say, Adobe Digital Editions or Kindle, in minutes. It doesn't matter how fancy your DRM software is when you can sidestep it that way.

And bear in mind that any DRM scheme actually has to give any legit customer the encryption keys so that they can read the book. So any algorithm can be reverse-engineered in a couple of different ways without too much difficulty. It's easier in many ways to protect a Blu-Ray or a CD, which at least need to be read by a machine to be intelligible, and look how quickly they were cracked.

None of these methods are quick and easy, but it only takes one person to break the DRM. The book's then out in the wild, unprotected, and people write little tools to strip all of the rest of your books. If you look at the quality of pirate books these days, you notice that five years ago they were full of typos because they were made from scans of printed books, or painstakingly copied out. Now they're indistinguishable from the commercial editions, because they are the commercial editions; and anyone who wants one can easily get one. The more successful the author, the easier it is.

DRM on ebooks isn't working. Pirates never even notice it, because they're outside the DRM ecosystem; legitimate customers, if they notice it, are annoyed by it. Spending money on it is a waste of time and resources that could be better applied elsewhere.

"What DRM does is stop the average person from pirating and copying everything, there will always be people who can pirate an eBook - but the majority won't."

I'm sorry, but that is arrant nonsense. The average person who wants a pirate copy of an ebook simply googles for it and finds an edition with the DRM already removed by a more sophisticated pirate. It's the path of least resistance.

"I don't see what people's umbridge is is with Amazon locking you into their system, you buy a Kindle from Amazon - why wouldn't they want you to continue to buy books from them?"

My sense of umbrage comes from the fact that if you want to switch reading platforms at any stage you have to leave your library behind you. Let's say you decide you'd rather read in iBooks on your shiny new iPad. Well, you can't read any of the books you bought in Kindle. You either fragment your library or you make a decision to stick with one vendor for as long as you're reading ebooks, whatever happens in the future. Kobo brings out an e-reader better than the Kindle? Nook offers cheaper prices? Sorry, you can switch away from Amazon but you can't take your books with you. You'll have to blow the dust off your old gadget should you want to reread anything.

I can understand how it benefits Amazon. It doesn't really seem to benefit the consumer much.

"The idea that everyone should be able to read every eBook regardless of the device will only happen if a publisher puts their material on every platform possible."

Whereupon you will need to buy the same book once for each platform. This also doesn't seem to benefit me much. I'd much rather choose where to buy my book from and then be able to read it however I wish.

"Having no DRM on any eBook isn't a good idea in my opinion, you are just opening the door for everyone to copy and share your material."

Newsflash: everyone copies and shares DRM ebooks right now. It's easy to beat.

"So where as now if 10 people want to read it, generally speaking, those 10 people have to pay to read it."

Nope. At the current time, if a person wants to download a free pirate ebook, generally speaking, there's no difficulty about that at all.

"No DRM would be the opposite - 10 people want to read it, 1 person just has to buy it and share it. How would any publisher survive with that?"

Plenty of publishers do manage to live without DRM. Pan Macmillan. Baen in the US. JK Rowling will release Potter with no DRM. And look at other industries: all iTunes music is DRM free, for example.

You need to cure yourself of this assumption that DRM is actually doing anything to prevent sharing, or that removing DRM will cause an explosion of it. Honestly: it isn't. If it were, I'd be with you, but it isn't.

Nick, you seem to have misread me a bit. I don't say that 'the average person' is a pirate; I'm talking about the average person-who-wants-to-pirate, for whom DRM is no impediment.

Most people are honest. They are the people who get into annoying wrangles with DRM. For example, as a legit customer, why should you not be able to play your mp3s on whichever player you wish?

The iTunes thing changed around 2009 - iTunes no longer requires DRM - but you need to pay to upgrade your library to DRM-free. That's actually a good indication in this discussion - Apple realised that people would actually pay more for DRM-free content. DRM is actually of negative value to your customers.

"I am also aware that people buy their tablet or e-reader based on what they want from it - i don't know many people out there with an iPad going "I wish i had a Kindle" - in the same vein that I know plenty of people with a Kindle that bought it because the iPad is too expensive."

Sure, but let's say you're reading on your Kindle now because the iPad's too expensive. Next year you've saved up enough to buy one and you want to switch to iBooks. You have to leave all your old books behind in the old device. Is that what you want?

I don't mind Amazon locking Kindle books into the Kindle device. What I mind is that they demand exclusivity if we use certain of their services, like the Kindle Lending Library. They expect us not to sell on any other website if we use it.

I also mind that they do price matching and can reduce the price they pay if they see an ebook on another website at a lower price. It's possible for publishers to sell ebooks at a more competitive price on other websites because they don't have to let Amazon take 30% commission (or 65% in a number of countries).

It should be possible to sell ebooks on other websites for less if we want to, and doesn't have an impact on Amazon because people who want Kindle books will buy from them. The other websites are selling ebooks for other devices. If Amazon don't want competitive prices on other websites they should lower the commission they charge.

And I think people could change the device they use for reading and would want the books available for both. We have a Kindle at home and we're very likely to get an iPad. If you build a library of ebooks it seems like a valid concern to me that you don't want them locked into one device.

I agree the price matching is a massive pain, but I think it is something you come to terms with as Amazon has always billed itself as a discount retailer for customers - it wouldn't last too long if its prices were higher on a Kindle - grey scale - than say on an iBook for the iPad where you get better quality. I am using picture books as an example of that.

When you say that you have a Kindle and are likely to get an iPad - is that at the expense of the Kindle? As I believe that many people who are likely to have both are likely to keep both - meaning that the locking to one device isn't such a massive issue.

I think for the Kindle Lending Library its a bit of a double edged sword really - people want to be part of it and get the money that Amazon has on offer but don't want any negatives with that. Asking for exclusivity is a pain, but its one of those things that you don't have to be part of the Library Lending. In the same vein as all of this Author App for the iPad which locks your text books to the iBooks 2 model - people are flocking to it and are happy for that exclusivity. Those that don't like it just don't do it.

I find with Amazon that they are a pain but those things that are a negative in one sense sometimes prove a positive in others. In our printed books side the whole lowest price on the net part of Amazon works wonders, why? Because quite a few times Amazon has found our books cheaper on third party sites and matched that price or got very very close to it - without it affecting our rate.

No one will ever like everything Amazon does, mainly because Amazon is such a behemoth that if you don't like that one aspect it can effect you on Amazon internationally. But on the flip side - one of those companies driving eBooks forward in the digital age is Amazon.

As for the competitive price issue - in my experience I don't actually know many platforms that sell at a largely better commission than Amazon? iBookstore is pretty similar, Kobo is along those lines, Even the Nook isn't vastly different. The 65% off in a number of countries can be counteracted by opting out of any country that doesn't have an Amazon website.

"I know that the costs of creating and maintaing said eBook for Publishers is massively less."

My experience has clearly been different from yours. If I make a children's book the vast majority of the cost - paying the author, editing, design, marketing, etc - goes against both the print and ebook editions.

There's practically no unit cost for ebooks, but there are two other factors that eat into ebook profit. The first is VAT, which costs up to 20%. The second is increased author royalties - they can be twice as much as the corresponding print edition. With a 30% cut to Apple, say, you're looking at paying out up to 75% of ebook cover price right off the bat.

The nice thing about ebooks is that you can't really *lose* money on them - conversion costs, as you say, are tiny, and you don't need to risk anything on printing and warehousing physical books. But they're not massively more *profitable* than print.

My feeling is that ebooks should be cheaper than print - by a couple of quid. With ebooks you don't get the loving care of the type designer, the pleasant heft of a physical object, or many of the property rights we associate with print books. But I also think we should try to keep the two editions in the same neighbourhood where price is concerned. It becomes rather difficult though when Amazon are being mischievous - say, discounting the (reseller model) print edition so that it's cheaper than the (agency model) ebook edition in an attempt to force the latter down. ("This price was set by the publisher.")

You hit the nail on the head with your final point. Pricing ebooks artificially low, for whatever reason, is shooting yourself in the foot. If the industry goes the way ebook fanboys want it to go then print books won't be around to subsidise the design, editing and marketing of ebooks any longer. Where does that leave you to go with pricing other than up? Then all the cheap and nasty 49p ebooks will swamp the charts, standards will plummet and in the meantime you've sped up the demise of the printed book by increasing the incentive for readers to switch to ebooks.