O’Reilly drops ebook DRM, sees 104% increase in sales

It’s been 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O’Reilly’s ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there’s always someone who’ll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so wired and online, why wouldn’t they just copy the books without paying? They’ve all got the technical know-how.”

So much for that theory.

Instead, expect to hear DRM apologists (either DRM vendors or technologically naive people in publishing who believe what DRM vendors tell them) now saying, “Oh sure, it works for O’Reilly, but those are tech books. Regular trade books can’t possibly work the same way!”

I love stories like this. DRM only makes it more difficult for paying customers to use their digital purchases and has no effect on piracy. The funny thing is, piracy probably helps sales. The more people who download it, the more people talk about it, and then more people buy it. DRM needs to go away and content creators have to concentrate on producing great content and giving customers a reason to buy.