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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.'"
I disagree. I rarely if ever will pick up book anymore. I can't do it while I'm driving, while I'm jogging, or while I do a host of other things. Living in the greater Seattle area, a commute that takes an hour is common place. If you can figure out how to get back a useless hour of your time, I think that it is very profitable.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
How often does a company actually get the queue and do something right? The fact that they tested their assumption and made a move based on evidence is praise worthy. Not that they will give up, but at least they figured out how they aren't going to win.
Maybe these books that everyone talks about actually do make you smarter.
Since the only ebooks I've purchased are Role-Playing Game modules, I'd have to disagree. Going cover to cover: yes, I enjoy physical books much more. But searching for a tidbit of information (for school projects as well, in which Google Books is quite the useful tool), I prefer the ability to search through an entire text for a single word instead of flipping through a book for the page I need.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
that so many people listen to audiobooks in their cars? Who would have thought that poor transportation and urban sprawl lead to appreciation for literacy? Then again... automotive accidents are always on the rise, and surely most of them are due to distractions. Yet if we fix this problem, the economy fails! Efficiency is a bitch...
Publishers really need to pull their finger out and adopt a common book file format with no active DRM. The consequence of not doing so is ebooks languish. People who want books in an electronic format will just grab them them anyway through P2P, IRC or wherever and the publishers will get nothing at all. Once an industry standard format appears, the format has a good chance of taking off.
I also think the experience of ebooks and music should be a lesson for digital video downloads. People would have to be stupid to *buy* digital movies from Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix or whoever when the content is locked to a handful of supported devices and you are at the mercy of the provider to manage your collection. I don't want to have to own two or three software players, or only be able to play some movies on some devices. Just like with ebooks most people will just turn to P2P instead.
Drop the DRM. Piracy happens whether DRM is there or not. Dropping the DRM just means more people will buy their direct download videos rather than get it on P2P or copy it from DVD.
Actually, $400 is basically free, if you are a heavy reader. Kindle books seem to be uniformly, and significantly, cheaper than the non-Kindle editions. A heavy reader will make up that $400 in a year or so, and then start pulling ahead.
As the unwilling DRM expert in the school district I work for, I've told all the Librarians to NOT buy from either the Apple iTunes store or Audible.com, to instead buy the books as CD's or even Cassette Tapes and then make their own DRM-less MP3 files for use on the players the district checks out to students.
We don't do this to get around copyright law, we buy as many copies as are made available, but it is simply NOT WORTH THE TIME AND TROUBLE to deal with DRM.
My take on ebooks and readers:
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/11/ereaders-and-ebooks.html
Summary:
You need a great reader at a great price.
eBooks should be way less than regular books people.
Have every regular book come with an eBook in a sleeve in the back or have a code printed in it that allows for a free download of the book.
A bit more at the link and a place for more permanent comments.
all the best,
drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Your comment ignores the plethora of free content for ebook readers. Never heard of Project Gutenberg? And it's not the only game in town, lots of publishers are trying to raise interest by free giveaways, at least in the science fiction / fantasy genre (Tor, Baen).
> if you are a heavy reader. -----> if you are a heavy reader of expensive enough ebooks.
There, fixed that for you.
Unfortunately, for the some of same reasons an ebook is perfect, it also is lacking.
1. Searching instead of an index - I've stumbled upon countless, worthwhile side tracks while flipping to a particular page. It's sort of like finding a hidden treasure right there in the book you've used hundreds of times. You're digging through your perl book, looking for how to parse a string and you stumble on some database function that is EXACTLY what you need for some other project. That just doesn't happen when you search. It's serendipity at its best.
2. Commenting - buying a used book with someone else's comments is both entertaining and incredibly helpful. I don't think I would have made it through some political science classes without some of the notes scribbled in the margins of my text books. I had no idea what the hell I was doing and some of the summaries in the margins really helped me along. Today, when I borrow a cook book from someone and find all sorts of notes in the margin, it's like a gift of insight from a much more talented chef.
3. Bookmarks - On that one, I agree, bookmarks in dead-tree books suck. They fall out, they're not at all transmittable between copies.
What I'd really love to see is some sort of hybrid Ebook. A book with REAL e-paper pages and perhaps an input pad that you could write on with a stylus. You could write notes on the pad and insert them INTO the "margins" of the document where ever you wanted. I enjoy the act of turning a page; that could be simulated with a 4 page epaper book with some sort of ADVANCE> button that would display another set of pages. It wouldn't satisfy my desire for skimming, but the portability would be phenomenal.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
its better than that, they're saying DRM encourages piracy, which makes a funny kind of sense, since even if you buy DRM'd stuff, you then have to turn to the file sharing networks to get the non DRM stuff.
I've made a three-stage theory on DRM:
1) DRM is introduced, many bold claims are made about it, manufacturers are very excited about it, cracking efforts begin.
2) The DRM starts to get cracked, new schemes are introduced with equally bold claims, many legal threats are made, but it starts to become clear that this isn't working.
3) Investigations are done into how beneficial DRM is, and the results aren't favourable to DRM. The DRM is deemed to be costly and useless, and is promptly abandoned.
e-books seem to be moving towards stage 3 right now. Of course, there is the possible stage 4 to be concerned about.
4) Stage 3 is somehow forgotten, DRM is re-introduced, many bold claims are made about it...