[oclug] O'Reilly books online $10 each?

[Brad Barnett]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:43:17 -0700
Ross Jordan <rjordan at numb.ca> wrote:

> It would seem Brad Barnett, on Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 05:40:46PM -0400,
> wrote:
> > On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:52:40 -0400
> > "Ian! D. Allen" <idallen at idallen.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > > http://download-ebook.org/index.php?target=price&p=5&s=Oreilly
> > > 
> > > 245 O'Reilly texts available for $200?
> > > 
> > > Their legal page claims that they pay necessary royalties, though
> > > they can't spell.  Is this for real?
> > 
> > 
> > Well, seeing as they are ebooks, I can see how the cost should be
> > significantly reduced.  No shipping, storage, or manufacturing costs
> > of the like associated with normal books.  According to publishers, a
> > major portion of a book's price is due to these costs.
> > 
> > It really burns my craw, when I see a paperback ebook for the same
> > price as the paperback.  That's at _least_ 10x the profit for the
> > distributor, perhaps even 50x and I'm willing to bet that the author
> > doesn't see a lot of that.
> 
> The costs to develop and support the DRM has non trivial costs. I
> wouldn't be surprised if they exceeded the dead tree manufacturing
> costs.
> 

First not all ebooks use DRM.  For example, many of the O'Reilly ebooks
I've seen are simple HTML or PDF.

Second, DRM is not expensive if done right.  Most ebooks I've seen handle
DRM automatically, are very non-cost intensive.  The software is mature,
already present, and works extremely well.  Mobipocket, eReader (by Palm),
and others work quite well and easily.  Again, from the forums I've seen,
there is little assistance required for DRM.

Probably this is because DRM for ebooks is a self enclosed system, and has
no one installed extra daemons onto the computer (re: Sony silliness) or
trying to copy from one format to another.  People know that when buying
an ebook with DRM, well.. you use the Reader for that format, and that's
that.

There is no DRM -> mp3 -> whatever involved.

I must say, that the hundreds of ebooks I have bought have been utterly
painless and completely transparent.