The unspoken giant in the digital book space is our old friend DRM (Digital Rights Management). This is the set of technologies by which someone who sells you an ebook prevents you from copying the book and posting it on the web.
But it also causes a host of related problems, the key ones being:
* DRM’d ebooks work on only one, or some devices (eg a Kindle) but not all
* You can’t share DRM’d books the way you can paper books
* DRM’d files can stop working, and unless the vendor wants to fix the problem, you’re up the creek (unless you want to break the law).
Everyone seems to agree that readers hate DRM – it puts too many restrictions on legitimate uses of ebooks.
And what’s more, it’s not clear that DRM does a good job of doing what it’s supposed to do:
a) preventing piracy
or
b) protecting sales for publishers
And yet the publishing business by-and-large has trouble imagining a future without DRM – otherwise, they fear, all the investment they put into content will disappear into a million torrent files.
Michael Bhaskar, of the PanMacmillan Digital group is the first publisher I’ve seen who has raised a hand to write a lengthy defense of DRM – as essential to the long-term viability of the publishing business. He ends with some sensible suggestions:
So DRM is not great, but neither is it evil. There are a few things that need to be done by publishers and others to ensure though that DRM really isn’t evil. People do hate DRM. We have to make this better. My suggestions:
- interoperable DRM is a must. Seriously, until we have decent interoperable DRM then it will always be a huge and unnecessary barrier to adoption of new technologies. Getting this in place should be a priority for everyone in the content industries.
- more flexible DRM. I should be able to lend my file to people – just not torrent it at will.
- more choices and granularity of DRM available. As a publisher we don’t always want to slap the heaviest DRM on all our titles. Yet this is what we have to do. Some titles could have lighter- or no- DRM while others have more restrictive controls.
- more social DRM. Watermarking and the like could be very effective, but as far as I am aware this technique is not yet widely used.
- an acknowledgment of the different uses and situations people might find themselves in. This means recognising that an inherent give in the system will make peoples experiences better.
- giving something back. If we are going to use DRM then we have to make sure that what we are offering really is great. This means harnessing digital delivery to add content and experiment with new forms of content to really make the offering attractive.
- be open to new business models. We cannot cling to just DRM; at the same time we should start earnestly evaluating other alternative means of distribution.
This might not make everyone turn round and start liking DRM, but it should make life easier for the most important people of all: our readers. [more...]
The comments are a hotbed of (so-far one-sided) debate, with web luminaries such as reknowned anti-DRM guy Cory Doctorow, O’Reilly Publishing’s Andrew Savikas and a host of other names you might recognize chipping in their 2 cents.
For the record, I fall on the side of those against DRM. It penalizes your paying customers, and from what I can tell, it does very little to stop piracy.
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Not just about consumers. DRM causes serious problems for for educators, researchers, libraries, and archivists — those who benefit from “privileged exception” — as well as for library users who are accessing collections remotely or poor souls who are confronted with a broken printer (serious! there are rules on how many times you can print so if your printer dies part of the say through you’re screwed).
This is according to a report by Patricia Akester, from the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at Cambridge.
She found that the “evidence shows that some beneficiaries of privileged exceptions are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and practical solutions are required.” Her conclusion: “while the nightmarish vision of digital lock up has not materialised … significant problems do exist, and others can readily be foreseen.”
A sample:
Akester’s research is apparently the first empirical study of DRM in the UK. It’s over 100 pages. I blogged a summary of it last May. Download the full report: Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.
Great work, Hugh and Christine.
I am tracking this pretty closely – spoke with Kirk Biglione yesterday and have interviews set with Brian O’Leary, Andrew Savikas and Richard Nash in the next week for my talk at SFU’s Digital Publishing Workshop next week – and feel that maybe the book publishing industry will never be without some kind of DRM, especially as it becomes more pliable and transparent to the consumer.
That said, the era of big, easy one-stop solutions may be a thing of the past -egad! – and I think that decisions on DRM are going to be made on a title by title basis with varying degrees of protection going forward.
We are still very much at an experimental stage and need to collect more data. If the industry embraces the uncertainty with confidence and avoids piracy-hysteria it should figure it out just fine.
Keep up the great work.