Hand out the stuff DRM free it just speeds its' progress onto the P2P networks and newsgroups.
You can't compare Baen's works with music, movies, games or even more mainstream publishing, you can hardly say the following about J K Rowling:
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Most of the authors are brand new writers, who got their start as published authors in Baen's Bar.
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You think people will pay for an album or movie after getting the finished product for free?
The 'costs of production' in terms of physical media are a fraction of the cost of music and movies, the majority of the costs are those involved in producing the content itself and, yes, marketing it.
Much as I wish I shared your faith in humanity I very simply don't. I see very little benefit in offering full, finished products to people for free, I know I would struggle to justify paying for something I
already own.
---------- Post added at 19:05 ---------- Previous post was at 19:00 ----------
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Originally Posted by Lord Nikon
DRM is not present in the original source, it is included at the duplication / distribution stage. After all, the studios want to make multiple copies to send to the duplicators, the duplicators also want to be able to make multiple copies. to simply not include the DRM would be the easiest step possible and remove a stage of the duplication process.
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Remember how optical media is made. It's not with a great big bank of DVDRW drives.
DRM is an automated process, the content is delivered already encoded to the media producers to be 'pressed' onto optical media. There's next to zero overhead there in most cases.
Even PC games, the 'cutting edge' of DRM are usually protected automatically, the publisher sends the unprotected files to a 3rd party who return the files protected and ready to be pressed. Alternatively there's some integration on the part of the programmers, but hey it's what they are paid to do.