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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.
You can't be serious.
No really he's right. If we can get rid of the DRM, there will be some really nice people who will loan out their book collection to a million or so of their close friends.
But it's interesting to see what some of the authors have to say about it. Here's a comment from Jim Butcher (Dresden Files, Codex Alera):
I literally receive notices every single day about available free downloads of books I put months if not years of work into, and that's from a simple Google alerts search. Over a three month period, I tracked over 22,000 total pirate downloads of my work, using the stats available from the various file-sharing sites which include a counter stating the number of times the files had been downloaded. Actual sales of e-copies during that same period? Just over 2,500. That's sales information taken from the sales reports I get from the publisher.
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,26233.msg1117676.html#msg1117676
He also has some interesting comments about the publishers and how they're being dragged into eBooks kicking and screaming. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
...Project Gutenberg has had more money from me (a few hundred Pounds in donations by now, easily, plus time spent volunteering as a proofreader and space and bandwidth given over for distribution which has got to be worth something) than Amazon, B&N or any other major online publisher/distributor ever has. Why? Because their ebooks aren't locked down to fuckery.
Call me cynical, or a pirate, or whatever you want to call me, but I'm not about to buy something I can't use. IF DRM PREVENTS ME FROM TRANSFERRING FILES FROM AN OLD DEVICE TO A NEW ONE WITH NO FURTHER OUTLAY REQUIREMENT THEN I AM NOT INTERESTED.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
At Bean (http://www.baen.com/) the books are drm free and in all sorts of formats. When I buy a book I make shure it will be readable in the future on any new device I own no even when the store drm server crashes or the publisher goes belly side up. The books I buy at Bean don't have to be cracked in order to do this. One little confession: only 2 books and 1 monthly bundle were bought at Bean by me (I still buy books because for reading pleasure, not DRM free-ness).
I think one factor which has really changed publisher's views in the past few weeks on this issue is the success that J.K. Rowling has had selling Harry Potter online. She deliberately waited a long time before allowing eBook versions, as much to get things settled out, but the result is very clean: even Amazon just directs to the Potter site, which then links back to all the DRM'ed eReaders as well as providing direct downloads in ePub.
So she's getting most of the money (well, her and her publisher), not Amazon, she dictates the price, and is no longer affected by the Amazon Monopsony that Amazon has gained by being the most common (but not universal) ebook platform. While a buyer no longer has to worry about DRM lockin: the books they buy will read anywhere, painlessly.
Test your net with Netalyzr
The only guarantee I want is that regardless of the DRM method used that the original provider of the material does not have to exist for me to continue to access the books I purchased. This would most likely require some form of public repository for the encryption keys.
Real books have their own DRM which is simply, whomever has it has access to it. Digital copies are simply to easy to give away. How can that one property physical copies have be replicated in the digital world without inconveniencing the end user and opening the publisher to loss by copying? Water marking doesn't seem practical, let alone enforceable.
I do wish that DRM protected works were a lot cheaper.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In the 90's, the distinction was popularly called Knowledge in the World vs. Knowledge in the Head. As our communication and recording systems improve, we externalize more of our knowledge. First we recorded knowledge in books rather than memorize poetry. Now we rely on Google instead of memorizing facts.
Every book we read, therefore, constitutes a portion of our externalized knowledge. Some of what we read might get memorized, but most of it gets absorbed as an awareness where we know we can look it up again in the future (moves knowledge from DK-DK to K-DK). By agreeing to DRM, eBook users place control of part of their knowledge -- part of their mind, if you will -- in the hands of corporations. The corporations are practicing mind control with DRM.
If he priced his stuff at $6 a pop I would have read the catalog. But $12? Now you're taking advantage.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I sense a mix-up between DRM and open/standardization of format. DRM alone doesn't create the kinds of problems outlined in this post. Perhaps we should be more uncomfortable about the lack of inter-operability or portability between purchased eBooks and apps that can display them. I think that DRM would be fine if it was implemented in an open/universal system.
You could also phrase it as "decreased bad will from users", because when I see DRM applied to something it can't possibly protect (e.g. ANYTHING) I get mad and I want the perpetrator to go out of business and I don't want to give them money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've bought a dozen of ebooks from O'Reilly and didn't upload any of them anywhere. They don't treat me as a potential thief and don't fuck up my reading experience and the prices are reasonable (especially when you compare them to apress or pragmatic). They are my friends. I want them to prosper and publish more DRM free books.
You can't be serious.
Well, to be fair he doesn't say how much it increases.
Let's look at examples where this has already worked for me: Bandcamp. From the start they offered music with no DRM at various qualities of lossy and lossless downloads. As a result, for a while I was trying to make it a point to only purchase my music through bandcamp or directly from the little guys. Because the option was there with a large enough volume I could actually do this.
Oddly enough I can stream all the music on Bandcamp when I'm connected to the internet through my computer and phone and I constantly send out links to friends via e-mail and social media sites (free advertising, more goodwill). So you might ask why I would ever pay anything for the music on Bandcamp but I do because sometimes the music is so good that I want something physical as well or I just want this unknown band from Sweden to have enough gas to make it to their next gig.
Am I a typical consumer? Probably not but Bandcamp posts their numbers so I know other people are using it:
Now, does this goodwill offset someone sharing all of Bandcamp's MP3s? Apparently you don't think the goodwill is worth anything compared to that piracy. Maybe you're right but I would be thrilled if there was a Bandcamp site for ebooks where I could read most if not all of the book before purchasing it. Apparently Stross agrees that something less encumbering than the current model will be a better situation than what they have. Unfortunately, there's no sure way to measure this or to speculate if it will work for small time authors but not for big authors nor can you tell if it will be similar to the music anecdote I listed.
So, he actually is serious, it's just the magnitude and trade offs that are unknown and scare publishing executives.
My work here is dung.
You can't be serious.
No really he's right. If we can get rid of the DRM, there will be some really nice people who will loan out their book collection to a million or so of their close friends.
People are fundamentally honest. If this were not the case then tell me why Itunes sells drm free mp3 ?
Its just as easy to record a music stream from some internet radio or download from your favorite warez sites. Yes you will find bad apples here and there but in the grand scheme of things people pay for things they want to OWN.
I am very glad that the publishing industry is going in the near term drm free. As an avid reader I've refrained from even buying an e-reader since I don't want deal with vendor lock-in. Yes yes I know its easy to strip DRM but thats not the issue. DRM free books means everyone can sell these, not only Amazon. Diversity in the supply chain is good for everyone. Good for the publishers that are not beholden to one buyer, and good for consumers that can choose the store/s from which to buy ebooks. Ebooks are important, the ipad and other tablets are just a means to an end. For a reader, for me what is important is the ebook. Knowing that in 10, 20 years time I will be able to go back a read these books without any problem even if platforms change, and e-stores go out of business. Just like a real physical book.
Now if we only could get the MPAA to understand this basic reality. Oh well we can't win everytime I suppose. 2 out of 3 is still good though.
It takes just one person to upload
And then people have to download the book. If it has DRM, they'll just bypass it easily. Either way, your book will get downloaded by people who don't mind downloading it.
Yes, and it only takes one person to crack the DRM, too.
> Butcher prices his Dresden files books at over $10 a pop
I don't know if it's at the link that I posted, or somewhere else in his forums (search through the "WOJ" -- "Words of Jim" -- I believe it's in his Amazon comments) ... but Butcher actually has an emphatic reply when someone says that to him. HE doesn't set the prices, the publisher does, and he rails at Amazon's pricing on EBooks all the time. :)
By the way, I should also point out a different view, namely from Eric Flint (www.ericflint.net), who successfully lobbied for the Baen Free Library. Flint is a leader AGAINST DRM and insists that free distribution actually *increases* sales.
Also, to be fair to Butcher, if you read all of his comments, he's not particularly enamored of DRM. He was just commenting on how the *publishers* view it.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I like the Rockfax solution for downloadable rockclimbing guides. You buy one for a few euros, and they generate the pdf on the fly, with 'registered to Bart van Deenen' in the footer of every page. Works for me.
Bart
To paraphrase Karl Lagerfeld, "People who buy knockoffs of my product are not my customers". In the same way, people who do not pay for ebooks are not customers of the publishers. I can understand the frustration people have when they see someone take their product without paying for it. But if they concentrate on the people who *will* pay for it, (i.e. their actual customers) they will be better off.
Correct. I would never pay EA or the like a single dime more for a game than I have to, and I usually give them what they ask for only grudgingly. OTOH, I have "overpaid" anywhere from 50% - 100% for every one of the 5 Humble Bundles I have purchased, not only willingly, but happily. A little goodwill earned by treating the customer not just well, but better than you have to, will go a long way in not only earning repeat business, but in the customer overlooking when you occasionally get things wrong, or being willing to patronize your business even when they may not need to.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
I just got on the e-reader bandwagon last Christmas and I can say that I have only purchased one book because I don't want to be locked in to B&N (yes I know it's hackable) if they can't withstand the Amazon/Tablet onslaught. I have 2 bookshelves full of books and choose to checkout library e-books instead of purchasing them. I'd gladly pay for an e-book if a) it is cheaper than the hard copy AND b) I could read it on any device at anytime without an internet connection long after [insert controlling entity] is gone. DRM is and always will be a short term gain because in the long run it will cost you more to maintain it.
e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.
That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.
That won't happen soon because of Amazon's pricing model. If you price a book for under $2.99, you only get 30% royalties (as opposed to 70% for $2.99 and greater if you organize your account right). If it were 70% all the way down, more authoris might be willing to price lower, but who wants to write a book just to give Amazon 70%?
You might as well go with the old guard publishers in that case (well, not really, they pay even less, but still, at leat they'll give you an advance, and some distribution muscle.)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There is a reason why the command to copy files is not: knockoff file copy_of_file
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Unfortunately, that's a reality that these guys are going to have to face. No amount of DRM or lawsuits or even infomercials has stopped it from happening yet, and likely never will.
DRM only punishes legitimate customers, anyway. It makes the pirated version of a work, be it an eBook, video game, whatever, a better product than the legitimate one. A pirated eBook works on any device that can read the file format. No stupid account tied to a particular store tied to a particular piece of hardware tied to a credit card number required.
I mean, you know it's bad when people are starting to buy legit products and still download pirate copies so they don't have to deal with the bullshit. I actually know people that do that, particularly with PC games.
The war on piracy is just as effective as the war on drugs or the war on terrorism. Something like 70% of people here in the states think that there is nothing wrong with sharing media between family and friends, according to a poll I read during the SOPA debacle. The general public is not on their side in this fight.
amazon already allows any publisher to select DRM or no DRM during the publishing process... it is a checkbox on a web form.
I know very well where to download them (and some of them, like 'Practical Postgres' are available for free anyway), but I still buy them, because I love O'Reilly Media. I also keep telling everyone how awesome they are and that one shouldn't be afraid of the prices: they are twice lower than they show.
It takes one person to upload, but everyone decides if he should buy a book himself.
I've read a bunch of comments and there are two things that I keep seeing:
1) "I hate DRM and I won't pay if there's DRM on a book! I'm definitely just going to download it!"
2) "DRM is so easily cracked, anyway! Why do they think it's going to stop anyone?"
Bonus:
3) "With DRM, how will I move my books to a new platform?"
We all know DRM is, at best, an inconvenience. I agree that it should be removed, and publishers should face up to the reality that people are willing to pay a fair price--even an inflated price, honestly--for a product as long as it's convenient. Piracy is only more appealing when it's easier than buying.
But if you're using DRM as an excuse to not pay for the book, you're full of shit. Seriously.
You should buy the book anyway and send an email to the company explaining why their system is counter-productive. Downloading books without paying shortchanges authors. These are the people that you're ostensibly trying to support.
iTunes ended up DRM free because the middleman (Apple, obviously) was convinced by consumers that DRM wasn't necessary, and encouraged the labels to drop DRM as a requirement. It became obvious to everyone that people are happy to spend their money to support artists they enjoy. I'm sure there's still quite an active music trading scene, but there's money changing hands, too.
Your positions on downloading and trading are inconsistent with your positions on supporting artists and convincing companies to remove DRM. You have to show them that the market is there and willing to pay (assuming they're not fleecing us) to convince them that DRM is unnecessary. In the meantime, you're just entrenching them further and making it harder for your favourite writers to do their work.
Buy books. Pay for them. If you can, buy from a publisher that's already DRM free and thank them for their decision. If you can't, buy the book and remove the DRM afterwards if you like and stop falsely complaining that you can't device-shift your collection. Then get off your lazy ass and write the publisher and remind them that you ALREADY paid for the book and that you'd appreciate it if they considered changing their policy.
Oh that's right, its a pro-piracy story
Being anti-DRM and being pro-piracy are not equivalent things.
Yeah, just like Lily Allen, who said she was giving up music for good because of all those filthy pirates.
Oh...I guess until her acting career didn't pan out, then it's back into the studio! Guess those pirates weren't such a drag after all.
And, just because I love it so fucking much, Dan Bull's response to her 'quitting music'.
I do the some with any EDA and development tools. They are all legitiate, but the first thing I do is get a crack for them so that I don't have to deal with the silliness. Who the heck wants to travel with a fistful of dongles in those times of checkpoint groping and think-of-the-children mentality.
PS. Now, moderate that, ha.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If only that was possible. There are no parametric 3D CAD systems without DRM. There are no professional-grade EDA tools without DRM. For many devices, the only development environment has DRM and there are no third party alternatives.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Watermarks can be destroyed by averaging multiple watermarked copies into a single copy.
EXACTLY! With four kids, I buy (or receive as gifts) a lot of kids DVD's. Disney, Dreamworks, etc. When we put a movie on in the car, I can't be juggling menus to skip past previews galore, and ultimately hit enter on a menu to get the movie to start. I regularly would use tools like DVDShrink to rip the movie to another disk so that it would play automatically when put in the player. Eventually, I got tired of the cat and mouse chase with copy protection, and began to download the torrents of the movies instead. Not to mention, ripping a movie would take close to an hour on my old computer, but I could download the torrent in 20 minutes! These were movies that I had on legitimate DVD's in my hand, but the pirates were still providing a product that was more convenient.
Yeah but who can read shorthand nowadays? Or did you mean steganography?
Please show me the free standard for Ultraviolet, or even one that is not free but I can develop against. I want to make an ultraviolet player.
I wouldn't care that much if DRM allowed me to actually use the files I purchased.
As an ex-member of Audible, in order to actually listen the books I bought, I'd have to get an mp3 converter, get it to accept the codec I pieced together from Audible's software, which then would change every few months, rendering the old "hack" useless. Now I just pirate everything and save myself a few hours of work.
I'm not that much into piracy and I wouldn't mind paying $15 for the privilege of having someone read a book to me, but going through all the hassle just so I can open the files on the OS I want in the player I want doesn't sound like a worthy investment of time.
Same principle applies to ebooks. When I want to re-read the tome on corporate marketing I bought seven years ago, I head over to the study and pick it up. If I buy an e-reader with its own proprietary format now, will I still be able to read the book after a decade has passed? I'm not too sure, I kinda envision myself browsing the web for a kindle-to-google-glasses-converter.
I had the same issue. Book one is $10 on amazon. Paperback is $6. Used is 40 cents. Why the hell would I pay $10 for a 12 year old book, than I can't loan to a friend when I'm done. It's pricing models like this that drive people to just download it.
--John Scalzi,
Tor/Forge To Go DRM Free by July
When Tor first got their site going a few years ago, they put all these eBooks for free. I downloaded a bunch of them, got introduced to some cool authors and got back into buying books, both e and hardcopy.
Same goes for movies and films. Sure, I can easily find any film or song out there but I purchase my stuff from Amazon and iTunes. All my friends (40-60 year olds) are the same way. Maybe I'm too old to be cool and scrape the web?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I found that it's trivial to crack the encryption on Barnes and Nobel Nook books, and I've done so on many of the books I've purchased there. Now I let the books float freely between my Nook and Kindle. There were a few Nook books that I was having trouble decrypting, and it turns out that they were already sold with no DRM - I haven't run across any Amazon books without DRM restrictions.
Conversely, I haven't had success at cracking my Kindle books, so I've stopped buying from Amazon. I try to buy non-DRM books (Google Books is a good source for mainstream books, many of their titles have no DRM, Smashwords is another great source for non-DRM books), but when I can't find a non-DRM title, I buy from B&N since I know I can strip the DRM even though I have no interest in sharing books with anyone, I just want to share them among my own devices.
The scenario I am often now faced with is with friends and family with kids who have spent hundreds of dollars on DVDs.. and bought some DVDs several times.. for the usual reasons.. mostly when the kids turn the DVD into a coaster but also when the DVD wears out.
In these cases.. what have you purchased?
In many cases these parents now refuse to buy the DVD.. they skip directly to the downloads and then burn disks as needed. These are not technical people. They are, however, quite annoyed at buying a DVD several times.
An obvious solution is to deliver content electronically.. but we are still a way off that. Still no solution to play electronic purchased material in the car... I wonder if someone will bring out a device equivalent of the current car DVD player screen devices which instead of playing from a DVD instead plays from a hard drive.. download from the net to the drive, put the device in the car and away you go..
I don't buy books online. I've been burnt with DRM already. I have had several situations where the ebook option would be great.. but the industry right now is not exactly in a state where I trust them.
Probably a good thing as I have hundreds of books I'd like electronically.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
People pirate books that were never legally released as ebooks too. Book pirating was around long before legal ebooks.
I see every pirate as a future customer or friend of a future customer.
There are a number of portable DVD players that will play off USB flash drives. Also you can put video files on a disc. You just need to make sure you use the right file type.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Sure, these books were OCR'd and have mistakes sometimes
I'm currently reading a book from Amazon on Kindle that was obviously scanned in. There are mistakes such as "a//" instead of the word "all", missing spaces, etc. And this is a book from 2002.
I've bought books e-books from both O'Reilly and Pragmatic as well and really like the way they do it-- the PDF has some custom printing on each page that identifies the purchaser and notes the copyright: "this e-book was printed for blah blah blah. copyight some year etc..."
I recently became an e-publisher (see my homepage) and will likely set up a similar DRM-free way for people to buy ebooks if that's their preferred format. The goal is to make it possible for the reader to read what they want, when they want, using the reader they want.
Your comments about Baen Publishing were very similar to what I was going to say, however I'd also like to point out that Baen also includes CD-ROM disks in some of their novels as well. For instance, I bought one of the 1632 novels in hardback. (The Baltic War I think), and it contained a CD that had the entire series on it. Printed right there on the label it said that you are free to copy and distribute the disk as long as you don't charge for it. Baen rocks, and really gets it. I've picked up several of these disks when I've purchased the hardbacks and have actually made a disk of my own that I keep as an archive of all their stuff. I can't tell you how many people I've introduced to a couple of their series' because all I have to do is point to their website and folks can download the first couple of books of a series and see if they like it.
I know for a fact that because they do not treat their customers as potential thieves, they have made sales they would not otherwise made.
This is an ex-parrot!
Just wanted to give a nod to GOG.com and point them out as an example. They sell games that are only DRM-free, and they seem to be doing just fine. I've been one of their customers since they started a few years ago, and I've only seen them grow. I haven't heard anything about their games being stolen and redistributed. I see no reason why it'd be different for (reasonably priced) ebooks.
I stopped buying PC games when DRM started to become irritating. Steam was the final thing for me - a bloated buggy piece of crap that insisted on downloading 1.4GB on my 1Mb/s connection just so that I could play a game I already owned. Apparently it's fixed some of the major bugs now, but when it was introduced it was shockingly bad.
Over the last year, I've spend more on gog.com that I did on games in the preceding 10 years. I have bought some games and not even played them - they're just sitting waiting for me to have some time to waste. I know that they'll still be working by the time I get around to playing them...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is a reason why the command to copy files is not: knockoff file copy_of_file
$ alias knockoff="cp"
There, fixed that for you!
People aren't inately honest they're inately lazy.
If the reason people don't pirate is because they are innately lazy, then to decrease piracy, you have to make it easier to purchase than pirate. This can be done by adding additional services on top of the book that just make things easier. DRM usually does the opposite.
I have no problem decrypting Amazon books with http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/hello-world/ Use Calibre to then convert to whatever format you want. I have a Kobo and always buy my books. But Kobostore sometimes does not have the books I want so I buy them from Amazon and then strip and convert.