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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.
...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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Correction:
Is stopping the pirate bogeyman worth punishing only the paying customers?
That's the problem with DRM. It doesn't punish those who download illegal torrents, it punishes those who obtain legal copies. I think everyone would see that jailing those wh did not commit murder in order to prevent them from murdering is not a good strategy to fight murder. However with DRM, somehow people don't see that.
Make it less painful to obtain and use legal copies than to obtain and use illegal copies, and you'll see most people use legal copies (well, unless you seriously overprice them).
I've got a DVD player and bought DVDs, but I'll probably never buy a BluRay player or BluRay disks. Why? Because with a DVD player, I can be sure that the DVD will play, and will not stop playing at some time in the future because someone revoked some key because some third party I don't even know about made an unauthorized copy (or maybe for some other reason, after all, how could I check that it really is due to piracy, and not because some government decided to censor that disk and eliminate all uncensored versions that way, or the company got greedy and just wants everyone to buy that disk again?).
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.
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.
Oh that's right, its a pro-piracy story
Being anti-DRM and being pro-piracy are not equivalent things.
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.
--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