Why Is Tor Publishing: More Important Than Printed Books In Canada?

Aren’t restrictions on bought movies and music horrendous? Isn’t Netflix having less movies in Canada than the United States frustrating? What if the equivalent of these restrictions got removed for books by a publishing company? Tor Publishing is the biggest science fiction publishing company in North America and a few years ago it removed DRM from it’s e-books. DRM is what would prevent someone from buying a book in the United Kingdom if they live in Canada; it restricts purchasing and stands for Digital Rights Management. The article about “Why Tor Dumped DRM” by Andrew Albanese discusses DRM’s applications and piracy in general much like Renwei Chung’s book discusses DRM’s effects on us. Also discussing piracy is Sunny Freeman’s article

There are many differences between e-books and printed books, or are there? E-books seem cheaper to produce than printed ones to the average customer. Simply looking at e-books most consumers would be appalled at the prices which closely mirror those of print books. Some may wonder how companies could charge this price when there is no paper to print or ink to use? What could possibly justify this cost? Surprisingly enough, paper and manufacturing costs of printed books only account for a very small portion of the costs related to the book. As the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers pointed out “Manufacturing and distribution expenses account for only about 12% of a print book’s retail price, so eliminating these costs does not greatly reduce total publishing costs” (Besen and Kirby 5). As is shown by this quote there are many costs other than publishing such as content, grammar, character and final editors, there are graphic designers for the cover page, computer engineers who format the book for different platforms and many more (McMaken). To connect this with Tor Books, e-books usually cost nearly the same as printed books however come with a lot more restrictions that printed books. Someone who buys a printed book can evidently sell it, give it, lend it, burn it and do whatever he may want to however someone who buys an e-book may only read it on the device they bought it on from the store of the country they live in. Further on, there is no universal format for ebooks as Chung suggests in his e-book, there are many different ones for iPad, Kindles and other e-ink readers. As such, all publishing companies should follow Tor Books’ lead and remove DRM completely from their books as consumers expect to buy books not license