Why eBook DRM Has To Go

Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross was recently put in the position of offering his thoughts to book publisher Macmillan on why eBook DRM is a terrible thing — not just for consumers, but for publishers, too. He makes a strong case that the removal of DRM, while not an immediate financial boon, will strongly benefit publishers in years to come through increased goodwill from users, greater leverage against Amazon's near-monopoly on distribution, and better platform interoperability. "Within 5 years we will be seeing a radically different electronic landscape. Unlocking the readers' book collections will force Amazon and B&N and their future competitors to support migration (if they want to compete for each others' customers). So hopefully it will promote the transition from the near-monopoly we had before the agency model, via the oligopoly we have today, to a truly competitive retail market that also supports midlist sales." Users have been railing against DRM for years, but it appears the publishers are finally starting to listen.

Comments

Re:"increased goodwill from users"?

[cdrguru]

I believe we have explored quite throughly the populations of "will pay", "will pay if you make me" and "won't pay". It turns out about 5% of the world belongs to "will pay" when they do not have to vs. around 90% belonging to "will pay if you make me".

iTunes dropping DRM was pretty meaningless - they account for 1-2% of music downloads and it exists to support the iPod platform. The rest of the people are just downloading for free. Sure, you might find a Napster (new version) customer now and then, but by and large nobody is buying music any longer. Amazon dropping DRM would have a much, much bigger effect as they are arguably a huge portion of the ebook marketplace - I would guess at least 30% and maybe a lot more.

So what happens if you take 30% of the ebooks in the world and remove DRM restrictions on redistribution? Well, I am sure you would get a heck of a lot of redistribution. Today it is possible to strip the DRM from a Kindle book from Amazon - it is just complicated enough that nobody is doing it on a large scale. So the redistribution of Amazon ebooks is pretty low. Open it up and I suspect you would easily see that the 5% that will pay will continue but the 95% that suddenly do not have to are going to be exercising their abilities to not pay.