David Pogue explains his hesitation to e-Publish his book:
Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and both times, it was all over the piracy sites within 48 hours, free for anyone to download.
He goes on to point out that the “pay what you like” model really only works well for creators with an established name.
So the choice appears to be: lock a work down in a physical publication / DRM, or go for broke… what’s an author to do? It’s a tough question–and one that Pogue admits he’s glad not to have to address for readily digitiz-able media like music and film. I won’t pretend to have any answers, but one other counter to the “Slashdot argument” is that arguably the majority of downloaders wouldn’t pay full price (or sometimes anything) for a copyrighted work. Exposure from free downloads might be worth something, even if it doesn’t put food in your family’s mouth. Naturally this view files in the face of the law and norms of publishing.
When everyone opts for the pirated download version and authors can’t make money from those of us who can afford a legit copy–then we have a problem.