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A comment on Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales. Parent comment

Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by marcosdumay on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @01:27PM (#18763678)
DRM has turned the e-reader market into winner takes all, so now we are dealing with the natural consequences: market consolidation, lack of innovation, lack of price competition, anti-consumer features. And at the user side, people are now vested on their platforms, and thus want them to be the winner.
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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by Eridrus on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @04:22PM (#18765043)
I don't think your argument here really follows.

DVDs have DRM, streamed content has DRM, and yet neither of those markets have monopolies.

The fact that Amazon has a proprietary format has more impact on market structure than the fact that the format has DRM.

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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by shakna on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @06:35PM (#18765827)
Your DVD doesn't lock to your DVD player with it's DRM, and streamed content doesn't lock to your browser.

eBooks DRM locks it the reader, however.

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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by Eridrus on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @08:43PM (#18766547)
Hence my point that the issue is not DRM.

Even DRM that locks content to your account, e.g. iTunes did not result in a monopoly.

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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by marcosdumay on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @08:58PM (#18766643)
> e.g. iTunes did not result in a monopoly

I'll have to disagree.

Well, technically, when there is more than one it's called an oligopoly...

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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by pkaye on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @10:54PM (#18767161)
There are many books (atleast technical books) that come in pdf format with watermarking but no DRM.
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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by marvindanig on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:32PM (#18767321)
PDF is a file format that is largely meant for enterprise documents. Books aren't files to begin with.
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Re:Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales by pkaye on Thursday December 27, 2018 @12:52AM (#18767661)
Those same companies (Informit by Pearson, Manning, Packt, etc) also provide the files in epub and mobi format. Again with just watermarks.
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