Simply put, by the time you want to print or make a pdf the majority of the processing has already been done. And they get away with all that ordinarily resource hogging processing by spreading it out over the execution of the program.

The only thing stopping the books and movie businesses going the way of the music industry is the technology. When bandwidth is ubiquitous, movies will be shared as widely as MP3s. When decent readers come along, books will be shared just like MP3s. As music has shown, if you offer a legitimate, non-DRMed version of your product, people will buy it.

If those industries want to save themselves from completely missing out on the opportunity to open up a new market – digital – they need to look at what happened to music and point their ship o’ strategy in exactly the opposite direction.

You said: The correct term is “IP theft”.

Wrong. The correct term is “copyright infringement”.

The recently made-up term “IP” promotes sloppy thinking, as people apply it to patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other things, each of which have different properties.

And infringement is not theft, despite a depressingly successful effort by RIAA and MPAA to mislead the public and the politicians.

Oh, wait, that’s already been done!

And, yes, I can testify that O’Reilly got more business from me after that decision … and because of it!

For those on the side of “remove DRM” there is no financial reward to say “DRM is not helping, get rid of it”.

For those on the “DRM is good” side, if they did do a study and it showed DRM was bad, they would lose out. The only thing they stand to do is gain, but that’s predicate on DRM being good, and why test something out when you can just claim it’s true and people will believe you?

It seems to keep growing.

So if the removal of DRM did not have an effect in book sales, it also seems to be logically consistent that the previous inclusion of DRM did not increase book sales by preventing piracy.

So,O’Reilly saves themselves the cost of implementing and maintaining the DRM system, I don’t have to worry about DRM in the books I buy, and hopefully the books become cheaper or the authors get paid more. Everybody but the DRM makers are happy.

Second, doesn’t anyone think that ebooks could be more popular precisely because there is more non-DRM content available? Correlation isn’t causation, but correlation is certainly a reason to consider causes. Look at emusic, for example — there is a lot less sales resistance when one doesn’t need to depend on a DRM server to keep one’s music, or deal with some idiot’s restrictions on how one can play it.

And then there’s the notion that each “pirated” copy represents a lost full price sale. Nonsense. Most wouldn’t have been purchased, and in fact in the music world copying has been shown to increase sales. While I think that everyone should pay for what they read or listen to, the situation is a lot more complicated than calling it “piracy” makes it appear. The correct term is “IP theft”.

That they have removed DRM means that people that can’t afford to buy it, can ‘borrow’ the current edition. In the future, if they are making money and enjoy the author’s books, they will buy it in order to support the author.

It’s good to see that there is such amazing growth but in absolute terms this increase may not actually represent a very large number of books sold.

People can’t be trusted to manage their own data, and EULAs and DRM are in place to make sure our purchases are protected.

And just a little more rambling on the formatting of RPG e-books. I don’t want a PDF! I want to read it on my computer! If I print it out, I’m going to be printing on my shitty home printer. I don’t need a completely full color book. Give me a basic black and white PDF if you have a print version, but make another version that’s in a more scalable format so I can read it on something digital like a laptop or my phone or whatever.

I think it’s more likely that O’Reilly’s customers were well ahead of the curve on adopting ebooks, but my point is that this single statistic doesn’t really show anything useful.

Can we dare say it doesn’t seem to hurt sales to ditch DRM? And.. there’s less overhead when you ditch DRM so even more profit, eh?