How hard is this to learn?
John Scalzi recently had a post discussing the fail-factor of a publisher sending him an eARC* that required a pile of hoop-jumping in order for him to get it. He noted that at a particular point they were just asking too much, and he stopped hoop-jumping and decided to do without the ARC.
This is akin to a theme I've blogged a few times. If I go to buy an item online, and the retail website is poorly designed and annoying to use, I won't use it. I would rather drive fifty miles in a blizzard to pick up an item in-person from a competently run brick-and-mortar store, than reward an e-tailer who makes me spend ten or fifteen minutes fighting with their cack-handed system.
When people want something from you--whether it is a potential reading and promoting of their book, or if it's simply to sell you something--they need to remember who is doing whom the favor.
If you want my money or my time, you need to make it easy for me to give it to you.
This relates to the whole business of ebooks in another way: the fear of piracy.
People are perfectly willing to pay for things if you make it easy for them. The trick to avoiding piracy is to make it easier to just buy a legal edition. I buy music from iTunes because it's easy. It's easier than sniffing around torrent sites that are forever rising and falling, going into hiding, doing what they can to make their wares not entirely findable.** Heck, it's easier than even asking a friend to loan me their CD or rip a copy for me.
Booksellers need to do the same. Make it easy to buy and use their books. Don't DRM legal copies. Stomp on the pirate sites to keep illegal copies difficult to find and hard to use. People will follow the path of least resistance, and it is in the publishers' power to make that path lead to a place where the reader pays for the book.
*An advance readers copy, in ebook format.
**Let me add that I also mistrust the folks running such sites. If they would willingly, deliberately, and systematically commit piracy, how trustworthy are they? I can't help but wonder what else they download when you open your computer to them. How are they making money?