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Book Publishers Abandoning DRM
tmalone writes "The New York Times is reporting that book publishers are beginning to phase out DRM-protected audio books. This month the world's largest publisher, Random House, started offering DRM-free mp3s; Penguin has announced that it will follow suit. Their logic? DRM just doesn't work. 'Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to DRM out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the DRM-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or DRM-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.'"
ebooks are an example of technophilia overwhelming common sense. they haven't yet succeeded, and they will never succeed. ebooks are NOT, repeat are NOT superior to wood pulp. sure you can use them in low light situations, but they aren't as durable and they require batteries
every new technology satisfies a need that was not satisfied before. there is no need to improve upon wood pulp when it comes to book. a paperback book beats an ebook in any way, any day. technophilia informs some people that they are an improvement, but they aren't thinking like a consumer does. a consumer looks at a paperback and an ebook and he or she chooses a paperback, every time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the blindingly obvious usually will win out in time.
From the article: "Our feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy," said Ms. McIntosh of Random House Audio.
:-)
Wtf? A business person actually seeing whats been f...king obvious for years now?
Audible insists on DRM, so I won't use audible.
Whenever the free, pirated version is technically superior to the costly commercial version, the business case is on pretty rocky ground.
There are an increasing number of examples showing that people will pay real money for products that can easily be obtained for nothing, but it must be worth their while. Well presented, high quality, DRM free recording, perhaps accompanied by supporting extras, such as maps and illustrations will sell. The recent experiment by the Nine Inch Nails is an excellent example of people being prepared to pay for a premium product.
I think you and the parent are talking about different things. eBooks SHOULD be digital books, text documents. You are talking about AUDIO books, books being read by someone. Note how he talks about low-light, while you talk about driving.
Granted, the original article gets pretty confused about it as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What the publishers need to do is make an agreement with a few distribution channels to get their books out there in PDF format incredibly cheap. If I could buy a typical $8 paperback book on the iTMS and sync it to my iPod Touch for $3, I'd buy a lot more books. Not only that, but if you got it down to around $3, the publisher would have much fewer worries about piracy because it'd be clearly discounted for internet sales. One of the things that is just asinine is that most ebooks cost as much as the printed copies!
I've debated a few IP expansionists on a subject that would do much more to hamper piracy: bringing IP under state property laws. You catch someone making a business off of your IP without you releasing it for free? How does grand theft sound instead of "copyright infringement" if it's really property? You want to get rid of serial piracy, especially the for-profit kind? Throw the punks in with the guys who commit real felony property crimes.
Of course that's assuming IP is real property...
7. Variable type: With an ebook reader, you can zoom the font size to suit your needs and/or abilities. Invaluable.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Since the watermarks survive, as the content plays indistinguishably with them in there, but don't prevent copying, why don't they just watermark everything?
If they charge your credit card when you download the watermarked content, they can just watermark the content with your card ID. Then if they catch a file out there in the wild, they can see who it came from, and investigate the cardholder and the contentholder with violating copyright law.
If it's even worth the bother. They'll realize that people distributing some of the content for free to their friends the best advert for more content. And even if they give all the content away free, they'll realize that the content is just a way for people to connect to its author, so the content is advertisement for all kinds of other products: presubscription premiere releases, physical copy collector's items, schwag like T-shirts/posters/actionfigures, personal appearances, "author's picks" compilations of other content, recommendations of other authors, branded SUVs with the author's signature...
The audience has already moved into the 21st Century "free content" economy. These dinosaurs are still selling CDs as if they're still in the business of selling plastic discs, that they emboss with content-encoded patterns as a marketing stunt. Well, they can't custom-watermark CDs so easily, and the costs of trucking them around is more than they "lose" on free downloads. They should get with the program before they're nothing but an obstacle.
--
make install -not war
I was briefly excited until I realized that this had nothing to do with multi-format eBooks.
Guess I'll stick with Fictionwise and Baen for a while more.
would it have been that hard to prefix it with 'audio'? I don't care about audiobooks
Who would have thought that poor transportation and urban sprawl lead to appreciation for literacy?
Er, what? My idea of "literate" isn't having someone read to you.
You normal people should pity the poor hyperlex. There is no way that someone like us could enjoy a book while driving a car. When we read a novel by a good author, we become totally immersed. We are there.
When the literate drive we must unfortunately concentrate on piloting thousands of pounds of steel and avoidiong the fucktards that are paying attention to the machine that's reading to them instead of the task at hand, which SHOULD BE driving the damned car.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Both Audible and iTunes audio books support CD Burning out of the box. If it is your prerogative, you can then rip the CDs to DRM-free mp3s or oggs, or whatever. The DRM is annoying, but not invasive, but using these services is really about the instant gratification. (You can also authorize your audible account on a seemingly endless number of computers and devices. There are also apparently some tools to strip the DRM in pure software.)
She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF
I'm sorry, but thats a pretty narrow minded view...
You can quite easily drive a car while having a coversation. Quite a few people do it every day. People listen to the news on the radio in their cars. There are constant trafic announcements and none of this increases the chance to have an accident. So why are you so hostile towards Audio Books? If people should drive in total silence then why don't we have single seated cars with no audio devices?
It's quite clear that a majority of drivers enjoy having audio of some sort in their cars otherwise *all* cars would not be sold with speakers as standard. In todays world where safety is God, do you really think audio equipment in cars would still be there as standard if it significantly increased the risk of having an accident?
Now you could argue that it diverts attention significantly enough to cause an accident... But then so do police cars and speed cameras... Maybe we should not have those on the roads too hmm? After all, I could be glacing at that police car instead of putting my breaks on one day...
The computer software industry generally realized twenty years ago that copy protection schemes cause more problems than they solve. (When was the last time you had to look up a word in a printed manual, or attach a hardware dongle, in order to run a piece of software?) Copy protection is rarely difficult to circumvent, adds to the costs of media distribution, provides no benefit to the legitimate customer, and often drives legitimate customers to become illegitimate for the sake of convenience.
It's nice to see a sign of hope that other digital content industries may finally be coming to the same conclusions.