7:00 PM Tuesday, <October 29>, <2013
So the government went after Apple and the publishers and stopped the agency pricing model. It's supposedly to help the consumer, to keep prices low. And it sort of worked. Allegiant came out this week or last week. $6.99 at Amazon. $6.99 at Apple iBookstore. But Amazon doesn't use ePubs, and I can't remove the DRM from iBooks. I got Divergent from the Sony eBookstore, but Allegiant goes for $11.76 there. But that's ePub, and Tracy uses a Sony PRS-T1 Reader, and we got Divergent from there originally. And then looking around, it's $13.99 at Feedbooks, $9.99 at Kobo. So how does that help the consumer? Imagine if each book of the series was cheapest in a different store. Which is entirely possible. Then, assuming I don't know how to strip DRM, that I would have to buy 3 different devices, in order to read the 3 books, that, thanks to the US Government, the individual stores could determine prices on. Instead of, say, the publisher had decided on the price, and all the stores sold it at the same price, and then they'd have to compete on device, or interoperability. Seems like they made it worse. So thanks for that. Now, if they took the next step and regulated the format of books, and that all readers had to be able to read books from any seller, then it would make sense to be able to sell the same book at whatever price they wanted. But there's device lock-in and DRM to worry about. So what am I going to do? Probably just eat the cost and buy from Sony because it's the cheapest Adobe DRM that I can easily strip so I can then put it on all the devices I own. I'm paying for the ability to commit a crime more easily. Ugh.