Tor DRMless Books Have Started

John Scalzi's Red Shirts is the first Tor ebook without DRM to be sold. You can buy it right now from the usual suspects, including Nook, Kindle and Apple iBooks stores.

Some early purchasers were given DRM'd books from Apple's iBooks book store, but Tor will make it good if you email a receipt showing purchase and a preference for Mobi or ePub format to: redshirtsdrm@macmillanusa.com


And in related good news, Tor will be launching their own ebook store in addition to those currently carrying Tor books, sometime this summer. 


I <3 Tor. 

Tor Goes DRMless

My very favorite publisher Tor Books, the premier SF and F publisher, has gone DRMless.

Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free. “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.” DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books. About Tor and Forge Books Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, is a New York-based publisher of hardcover and softcover books, founded in 1980 and committed (although not limited) to arguably the largest and most diverse line of science fiction and fantasy ever produced by a single English-language publisher. Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, is also the home of award-winning Forge Books, founded in 1993 and committed (although not limited) to thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction and general fiction. Together, the imprints garnered 30 New York Times bestsellers in 2011.

Obviously, I think this is fabulous news. I think Charlie Stross, one of those authors I'll be buying in ebook form from Tor, has typically smart, thoughtful things to say about Tor dropping DRM. I think Stross's earlier analysis of the relationship between Amazon's Kindle, ebook dominance, and DRM are also cogent. On a personal level, my eyesight is failing rapidly; this isn't a heartbreaking surprise, I've expected it, and I'm still way ahead of where anyone thought I'd be in terms of my vision and my ability to read print. But printed books are getting harder and harder to read, so ebooks are extremely important to me.

Ebook Pricing vs Print Pricing

It really isn't that much cheaper to produce an ebook. The binding/printing costs are depending on the book and the binding and the numbers printed somewhere around 1 to 3 bucks a book, for a Robert Jordan Hardcover with foil. The costs up to the point a file is sent to an ebook producer or to a printer are identical—and that's where most of the costs to make a book occur. Author's advance is often the single largest item in terms of genre fiction. Then you've got designer, cover artist, editor, copy editor, proofer, typesetter—and there may be other costs, depending on the book (indexer, rights licensing, compositor). The ebook has to be formatted, and done properly, it's not just a matter of running scripts. It needs to be created in multiple formats, usually, with administrative costs related to licensing images, cover art, DRM, and QA. There are additional production costs in terms of staff and software/hardware, and in terms of archiving. The initial costs up to the fork are shared. Honestly, for genre fiction, there's reason to base the price ebooks pretty closely on the prices for the equivalent paperbacks.

 Now, what I'm not sure of is how much angst there is from publishers about day-and-date release, and issues of libraries buying hardcover in preference to softcover. Book prices at the point of a printed codex book are of three sorts:

• Raw cost in labor/materials/costs to the publisher.
• Price the publisher sells the book to retailers/distributors/wholesaler (discounts of various sorts).
• Price the retailer sells the book to a customer.

Keep in mind that frequently the author is paid putative royalties on some version of 3, after the publisher has recouped the advance—at which point the publisher may still be trying to (and probably won't have succeeded) recoup their costs and generate profit. If publishers don't profit, they can't pay advances, or make more books.