I ordered a bunch of used physical books last night.

I don’t like physical books. I’d rather have the ebook. But most of the used books were $4 out the door shipped, while the ebooks were $12 and up with the added “bonus” of DRM. So why would I ever do that?

If publishers would price ebooks sanely I’d buy those every time. If the books I’d bought were $5 each in an electronic version, I’d’ve done that even with DRM (I can easily crack it).

But when I can get one version for $4.00 with no DRM and the other is $11.99 and up, no damn way.

And so the publisher gets nothing, the writer gets nothing — how again is this an intelligent strategy? (Not to mention the externalities of shipping, storage, etc.)

The whole idea that corporations are efficient or sensible in any way is deeply deeply delusional. This is just another example. They choose to hurt themselves and their writers and have done so for years and years now at the gain of everyone hating them even more than they already do.

That does not a successful strategy make.