If Hachette books were DRM free, the company could announce an "Amazon-refugee discount" of 10% of all its ebook titles at Google Play, Ibooks, and Barnes and Noble, and offer a tool to convert your Kindle library to work on one of those other players. Meanwhile, Hachette - publishing's most ardent DRM advocate - and Amazon continue to duke it out in a ghastly and abusive public spat in which Amazon is attempting to extort deeper discounts from Hachette by de-listing, delaying and obfuscating its titles. Doherty's philosophy is that books get sold by being part of a wider context in readers' lives - being something they talk and think about and share, and that DRM just gets in the way of that.
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Doherty spent some time talking about the business outcomes of life without DRM (in short, there's no new piracy of Tor books as a result of publishing without it), but really focused his talk on the community of readers and writers, and their conversation, and the role Tor plays there.
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Two years ago, Tor Books, the largest sf publisher in the world (and publisher of my own books) went DRM-free yesterday, Tor's founder and publisher Tom Doherty took to the stage to explain why he dropped DRM from his books.