Slashdot Mirror
DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry
Presto Vivace writes "In a blog post, danps explains how the music industry initially thought that the Internet meant that people wanted their music for free. In 2003 Apple persuaded the industry to use an online music store with DRM. But DRM just does not work for consumers, so by 2011 online music stores were DRM-free. Sadly, the book industry has not learned these lessons. And there are larger lessons for the gadget industry: 'The tech industry right now is churning out lots of different devices, operating systems and form factors in an attempt to get the One True Gadget — the thing you'll take with you everywhere and use for everything. That's a lovely aspiration, but I don't see it happening. What I see instead is people wanting to only carry around one thing at a time, and rotating through several: Smart phone for everyday use, tablet for the beach, laptop for the road, etc. If you can't get the book you paid for on each of those devices, it's a pain. As a reader I want to be able to put a book on everything as soon as I buy it so I always have a local (non-Internet dependent) copy — no matter which thing I run out of the house with.'"
There are an increasing number of books that are available without DRM. The last 7 books I have bought (novels and technical) have been DRM free.
Fortunately O'Reilly seems to learn the lesson... as long with some "bundles" that happen from time to time... unfortunately there's too much to change regarding mainstream books.
One of my biggest gripes about a certain hobby publisher is that they seem to have exclusive deals with three different companies. Their hobby books are only available on Nook and Win8. Their magazines are available via Kindle and a third party company, however, only magazines bought via the third party seem to be available across all devices. The Kindle-bought magazines are only readable in the Kindle and not in the Kindle app for the PC or the one for my cell phone.
It's like the browser wars all over again: "Sorry, this document is only viewable in a Lynx browser. Download one now!" ;o)
What an awful format for ebooks.
Sorry, you must not go to the beach much. E-ink owns. I like everything on one device too, but for lounging around in the sun all day, I love my kindle and will leave my ipad at home or in the safe, depending on which beach I'm at.
And what does this have to do with dRM anyway? The multiple device situation is exactly what DRM was set up for, just not multiple individuals.
The textbook market is just as bad small updates all the time to kill resale, paying teacher X per book (some even rip pages out and try use a used book you fail)
I don't like DRM, and as a result I don't own a Kindle, but at least with Amazon, you still have Kindle apps on IOS, Android and for Desktops which allow you to read your Amazon ebook purchases on other devices. While the average Slashdot user, like me, would prefer DRM free ebooks so they could use any app on any device to read their books, the average Joe is going to be quite content with buying via Amazon and using the Kindle apps across devices. Using the same app across multiple devices to read your ebooks is a lot easier than juggling DRM free ebook files between different devices and apps (for the average Joe)
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
With good OCR, books can be transcribed even faster.
Some people will read your book without buying it. You can't stop that. A lot of people are going to check your book out from the library and read it free too.
So DRM especially just prevents your legal readers from reading your book.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The mainstream music industry has and will never have a part of the internet profit pie. Meanwhile, we have victory snaggers such as OReilly who are seemingly catching on to what DRM actually means , and what people actually want.
Heres to the internet.
If you're taking your tablet to the beach then you're doing it wrong. You can survive unconnected.
If you want to sell your books through Amazon, they must be in DRM-"protected" Kindle format. If you want to sell your books through iTunes, they must be in ePub format; with or without DRM is up to the publisher. If you buy from both, you end up with books in two incompatible formats which is just a pain. But it's not up to the publisher really.
Google "Free MP3 Download" and add the name of any well known rock band and you'll see why the publishing industry doesn't trust that model.
Instead of wording the summary in such a way that if you disagree, you must be some kind of moron, or silly person, why don't you guys (including moderators) welcome give and take discussion?
The general success of iTunes shows that consumers don't really mind DRM as long as it's not intrusive. Going DRM free was great, and DRM still exists for movies/TV shows on iTunes...and for most downloadable movies, etc. Audible still uses DRM as well, and they're not slowing down any.
At some point Apple's going to have to increase the device count on what's left of the Fairplay infrastructure...but until then, whatever's left of Fairplay really is fine.
As a note, what the OP wants already exists: it's called Kindle for XXX, and it's not a pain at all, from what I've been told by kindle users.
I bought a couple of books on iBooks until I figured out that they were crippled by DRM. Naturally I couldn't view them on my Nexus 7, so I did two things:
1. I found torrents to decrypted copies of the books I purchased.
2. Never bought another book from iBooks.
I still buy DRM-laden books from Kobo, but I can still decrypt those with ePUBee. The minute I can't do that any more, I won't buy from them either.
As a bit of a kudo, any SF nuts out there, head over to Baen, who has a big chunk of their catalog available as non-DRM ePubs (along with other formats as well).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Given the choice between copying a song for free and paying 89 cents for a song legitimately, many people will choose the purchase, if it's easy enough.
Now, take a college student who can copy a textbook or purchase an eBook for $350.
That's why publishers want DRM - so they don't have to face the real value of their products.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are sites where one can get literary millions of books for free courtesy of Russians
For example the Library Genesis project @ http://library-genesis.com
I want DRM free ePub with associated metadata I can load into any device of my choosing (including a 'cloud' if I so desire).
I also want unicorn ponies that fart rainbows and smell like kettle korn.
First, I have to agree that DRM really gets in the way. It is unreasonable to make it nearly impossible to share books that I have finished reading--even with my wife. The books/readers also leave a lot to be desired. No index, no reasonable cross-references, and no easy way to communicate locations with readers of physical books--as one does in a book club, for example.
I don't find myself changing font, or point-size, or orientation (intentionally) so often that I appreciate the on-the-fly recomposition of the book. The trade-off ain't there.
Lastly, there are many books that I would like to add to my library (the room) but also have availble to read anywhere, anytime. I should think that publishers could take a cue from the film industry and offer a print edition along with a digital edition for a few dollars more.
If you buy only DRM free ebooks (let your wallet speak) you can convert those ebooks, manage, and use them on just about any ebook reader made to date. You can also convert other document formats (text, html,pdf, etc) to be compatible with your ebook reader of choice. Its free, open source, and fairly portable. http://calibre-ebook.com/
Look people, corporations are greedy bitches that only care about making a profit. Because they are greedy, they think everyone else is out to rip them off. Why? Because they rip us off every chance they get. They except people to pay full physical book prices for ebooks, when it cost way less to make a copy of an ebook then it does to make a physical book. They know they are ripping us off, thus they want DRM so they can gouge the stupid people that actually pay them for the ebooks.
Me? I've been downloading ebooks since the 90's. Way before the publishers got on the bandwagon. Sure, I might get some spelling (OCR errors), but I don't care. It's free. So why should I go from paying nothing, to paying over $10 for an ebook? Seriously, explain that one to me. The corporations do NOT care about me, they only care about is how much profit they can make off of me. Well, fuck them.
Bring old ebooks to the $2-3 price, and I'd consider buying them. New ebooks $5, max. I'd never pay more then $5 for an ebook, ever. Why? Because I can't sell it used. A physical book, I can take to a use book store and sell for some dollars, or trade for credit. That is value. Ebooks? Don't have a value and I sure as fuck ain't paying the corporations to fuck me over.
Be seeing you...
At least on the internet.
As long as a book has DRM, it better be cheap ($2-5), or I'll find a free alternative.
Why are people sharing blog posts like it's news. I read that whole thing and it sounded like one long whine. How about some real news /.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
That the only DRM free publisher is also named Tor.
Several of the big DRM schemes are also broken; I'd rather buy DRM-free ebooks, but when I can just go to Amazon, drop $7-$12 on a Kindle copy of almost anything I'd want and 30 seconds later, feed it into the Calibre and have a DRM-free ePub copy of the Kindle book, hunting down whether the book is available on one of the handful of DRM-free bookstores just ain't worth it.
If Amazon ever makes the Kindle DRM truly effective, I'll stop buying from them.
The general success of iTunes shows that
...is bloated unpleasant licence abusing (they made a south park episode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad) itunes still relevant with the death of the iPod...and the decline of the iPhone, ironically it has several DRM free competitors that work through...a web page.
What is quite hilarious though is that DRM something Apple support as they currently benefit from it...will start to hurt them as customers are restricted migration to their platform.
Smart phone for everyday use, tablet for the beach, laptop for the road, and AN E-INK READER FOR READING. I've been reading ebooks regularly on a handheld computer since the Apple Newton. e-ink was a huge game changer. My kindle keyboard gives me so much less eye strain compared to laptops, tablets, iphones etc. Use the right tool for the job. As much as I hate the idea of DRM, having one device specifically for reading means it rarely gets in the way.
If your doctor told you that you have a disease that make you cough incessantly and will kill you in 3 months, and he gave you a medicine that would stop the cough but not the kill, when there are medicines out there that cost less and do both, would you be happy you got the cough-only medicine?
Calibre is the Robitussin, sure--it makes you feel good, and at least lets you talk without sounding like some sci-fi monster, so it can be used if the other medicines are out of stock--but not adding the bloody DRM is the cure.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
What's particularly hilarious about these three particular businesses (books, movies, music) which dabble(d) in DRM, is that in all three cases, non-DRM was already proven to work. And with books we're literally talking about CENTURIES of evidence. Centuries. And some snake oil seller comes along and waves his hands and publishers close their eyes to the evidence. Seriously, this shit is right up there with astrology and its people should be given about that much respect.
At least the software guys didn't have lots of data about their market, when they dabbled in this back in the early 80s or late 70s. Books: centuries. Recorded movies: a few decades; from a retail-sold recording, they're arguably contemporary with the software market (if you ignore sold film and start with videotape, which I think is fair; film's market was never big enough). Recorded music: a few more decades (nearly coming up on the first century mark now, I think?). In that light, the software dudes and even the MPAA, could be forgiven. They'll catch up soon enough. Music sellers eventually saw the light and switched back to a pro-revenue approach. But books! Books! You simply have no excuse for the stupidity and confusion, at all. Book sellers saying no to customers really is dumber than movie makers saying no to customers. MPAA's business incompetence has been out-dumbed!
The music industry situation was different. At the time the market went to drm-free by a landside, music playback devices by and large had no wireless or cellular radios. They were fixed-function devices that could only consume non-executable content (mostly). In that ecosystem, supporting multiple platforms was difficult to the point of being unfeasible. For the no-name cheap devices, DRM was completely out of reach. Customers more keenly felt the pitfalls of DRM given the state of the ecosystem. Even if each publisher *could* put their content into walled garden apps, the nature of how music is consumed suggests back to back playback of arbitrary selections from a customers library over the course of minutes. Also, ripping CDs was trivial for even casual users.
The state of devices used for reading and movie playback are generally internet connected and companies can deploy their own content management application. Having to navigate and switch between the applications is less disruptive relative to how much time the consumer is going to spend in one specific work. Scanning books in is in no way feasible as a casual endeavor comparing with CD ripping. All the 'no name' devices that are available are android devices meaning DRM is feasible.
I'd like to think that the music industry went mostly DRM-free because they saw it as the non-evil way to go, but it was more about feasibility and the CD market pretty much leaving the barn door open, rendering it a silly exercise to DRM protect content that is trivial to rip in other ways.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When I buy books, I am able to do that. I can put it on my computer, tv, xbox. I can also put it on my bed side table, on my desk, in my car on the dashboard, in my rucksack to read it on the train.
I can sell it and buy it new or second hand. The variety is immense,
But perhaps they are not talking so much about books as they are talking about text files.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Your analogy is bad and you should feel bad.
When I strip the DRM from my purchased ePub documents, it's gone. There is no lingering death. There's nothing else to "cure". It's gone. I can access the contents of those files on any platform that can read ePub and I can convert the content to any other relevant format if I've got some weird device that can't read ePub.
It's only been an issue for me when I purchased something and wanted to use it. It's pretty much like the onion wrote an article on DRM and they ran with it.
Not sure what illusion the author is under - many mp3 files from Amazon are DRM'd with a personal identifier. This creates a legal trail that puts you on the hook for who uses your file, with or without your permission. And their cloud storage solution will add personal identifiers to the personal music files you store there. Music took a big step forward, and now in stealth mode, they are moving right back to DRM and streaming models. Not to mention their controls on the number of devices you use, and their tracking of your devices. If music is the role model, then ebooks are not on a good course. Or course, the Amazon personal identifier is a little bit more friendly than storing my un-encrypted credit card number in the ebook files on my Barnes and Noble Nook. The ebooks folks may eventually look to Netflicks as a winning model - which is completely DRM based and you consume it all but do not own any of it.
"But DRM just does not work for consumers"? I don't buy that. The scores of DVD and Bluray players and discs that have been sold suggests otherwise, as does the number of Netflix subscribers and the number of Kindles sold.
DRM did not work for music for two reasons. First, network access was not as ubiquitous in the Napster days as it is now. Back then, if you wanted to listen to your music on the go, you needed a local copy. Now you can get one over a cellular network. Second, there were no business models around digital music back then. Now there are. Apple of course did big business in DRMed music tracks before finally removing the DRM.
Further, if you want to put your Kindle book on everything, you can. You can read it on a PC, iPhone, Android, or Kindle.
Penny - plain text accounting
The music industry has yet to learn its lesson(s)
Kudos is a singular noun.
My personal feeling is that book piracy is much less of an issue compared to music/movies.. Almost everyone I know seems to have no qualms with paying for books.
In 2003 Apple persuaded the industry to use an online music store with DRM
Not quite. There were already online music stores before Apple got into the mix. The big 5 record companies already had their music online for listening and purchase because they were persuaded by others before Apple. Rhapsody was one of them. I doubt Apple was working on behalf of other music stores 1-2 years before they released their own.
Unfortunately, by buying the books anyway, you support the continued existence of the cancer that is DRM.
Everyone I know shares hard drives filled with tens of thousands of books.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The way Amazon does it, DRM isn't a problem. The book you buy can be used on your PC, Phone, Tablet and Kindle if you have one. Even if you get a different device, put the Kindle App on it, you just download it again. Their system knows you have it. Works brilliantly.
Also PDFs aren't reflowable eBooks. They are different things, and don't work well on your smartphone, whereas an eBook does.
I have published my own book on Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CN305BQ ) The price is fair for the time to produce it and the number your I'm likely to sell. Around the cost of a cup of coffee! I set that price, not some greedy corporation 8^) There is an option to put DRM on it when it is uploaded, it is all up to the author.
I which the process of releasing music tracks and albums worked as well as the way Amazon has done it. Apple, and everyone else could learn a thing or too.
But if you want to see stuff for free, without the jokes, visit our website: http://www.artandtechnology.com.au/
or youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/adriansbruce
Our just listen to the music: https://soundcloud.com/megacurve
And I do know about BandCamp too http://megacurve.bandcamp.com/
The one thing that has angered me most recently is that I can't read purchased books from iTunes on my laptop.
I downloaded free books from iTunes for my iPad (Anne of Green Gables, The Tale of Tom Kitten, etc.) and DRM'd paid books. I wanted to read them on my Mac laptop since for this particular trip I don't want to be traveling with two laptops and an iPad just so I can have something to read, and I have to take both laptops (one's a work laptop and there are things I need to do on each during this trip, so don't say "leave the mac at home and bring the iPad" - that doesn't solve my problem). But I can't read books I licensed through my account on iTunes when I'm logged into that same account on my laptop. The laptop made by the same company that made the device I normally read them on and that made the software I used to purchase the license.
It can't be a multiple copy thing (my son uses the same account for his iPod and he can be reading the same book I am, at the same time). It can't be a permissions thing (I'm logged into the same account). It has to be either a publisher thing ("our terms only give you a license for 'mobile devices', where a laptop isn't a 'mobile device' ") or a corporate thing ("we're not going to build and sell our iBooks app for our computers because. Just because. And if you build software to let people do it themselves, we'll force you to take it down"). You even have to connect an iDevice to your computer to preview an iBooksAuthor book before you publish it.
If it's a publisher thing behind this, then the story is absolutely correct - publishers have learned nothing from the music industry.
But if it's Apple behind this, we need giant ninjas hiding in closets at Cupertino, ready to jump out and dope-slap executives and managers that come up with this crap. Ahhh. Negative reinforcement learning.
There's a smell to books but you need a lot of them.
Go to a library, the bigger and less "modernised" the better.
And sniff.
Now think of ANY location that smells like that.
A Solicitor's office, maybe. MAYBE.
You can't even play two games on your account at the same time.
Not if you're running a sims on one window and popping out to do a MMO grind on the other.
Not if you're playing on one computer and you have a second computer and your S.O. wants to play a game.
And worse still, to the Steamers YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED to not like steam. They're often worse than the iFanBois.
In the 80's-90's era, book prices were rocketing. In the 2000's, newspaper prices skyrocketed.
Why?
At the time they said that it was the cost of the paper and printing that had gone up immensely and that is why the price of the book went up, because a large part of their costs were the printing.
But now that the price of the paper and printing is gone, apparently printing is no longer a large part of their costs.
Another internet moron who thinks that the Official Line (tm) from the publishing industry must be true and too damn young to have lived through the history of price hikes.
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
If you can read it, then you have physical access to the encryption keys/algorithms used to protect it, so it is nigh-on impossible to stop someone, somewhere cracking the encryption.
Some people will read your book without buying it.
...and if they like it, many of those people will go on to buy your next book.
Seriously - look at your bookshelf, look at your CD collection. How many of those purchases happened because somebody previously lent you a book by that author, or gave you a MP3 or C90* of an album by that artist? DRM throws a spanner in that, while doing nothing to prevent large-scale organised 'piracy'.
Of course, although word-of-mouth is good news for artists, I'm sure that publishers/record companies would rather we made our decisions based on their expensive publicity and fake-viral advertising - since that's the only real service they can offer in an age when anybody can cheaply publish anything on the internet. Maybe that's closer to the real motivation for DRM.
(*Kids - a C90 is how we used to copy CDs before MP3 came along. Now get off my lawn).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Do NOT purchase ANY DRM-encumbered products, music or otherwise! The only way to change this cruft is to vote with our pocketbooks... So, I have refused to purchase ANY such products for many years, although commercial DVD's are so encumbered, so I rip them to an un-encrypted (region 0) backup disc. The original stays on the shelf. The backup is what I use. If it gets munged (scratched, or otherwise disabled), then I use the original to make a new copy. Cost for a 9GB DL disc? About 50 cents (in US dollars). A lot cheaper than purchasing a new commercial copy! Yes, this is illegal - how absurd is that?!
I think the worst difference between the music industry and the idiot editors is no one at all in the music industry was saying "People aren't listening to music anymore."
Seems to me everyone in the publishing business was saying "People aren't reading anymore" when what they meant to say was people aren't reading newspapers and magazines and books anymore. Instead, they were reading (and writing) those billions of web pages the clueless editors and publishers were whining about.
Another big difference is that the music industry doesn't act like it is more important than it warrants. They know they are selling top 40 trash.As an industry, we let yahoos from the New York Times make ridiculous claims about the importance of reading. Uhhhhhhh, the number one top selling mags/newspapers of all time have _always_ been rags like the National Enquirer and News of the World.
The publishing biz makes all of its money on Top 40 trash. If they talked about it realistically instead of talking academics using absurd assumptions, then perhaps their business wouldn't self-destruct. If you want to talk about business itself, start with the balance sheet and don't waste time lauding fancy literature that wasn't even popular in its own day (such as Moby Dick).
If the book I want doesn't have a print edition, I don't purchase it. On the road I like the tablet, but for normal reading I want a real book.
I started with an iPhone, then went to an Android phone and an Android tablett. Of course, the books I bought from Apple I couldn't read on the Android devices. So I got the Kindle app. Then I upgraded to a newer phone. Now, when I click on an link or something in a Facebook post that takes me to a Kindle link, it takes me to Amazon's site, where I have to purchase the book through their site, and then it asks me which device I want to send it to, and gives me a list of like 7 devices (apparently wiping your device and reinstalling the app or the app store creates a new device name with Amazon). IF you are lucky enough to choose the right one, the chances are still pretty low that the device will sync up and download the book. Supposedly when you sign into the Kindle app, it is supposed to sync up. This seems to work better with newer versions of the Kindle app, but its still pretty much hit or miss. I had so much trouble with this, that I finally started downloading the books from torrents or other pirate ebook repositories, and using Calibre to manage them.
I finally ended up buying a Kobo eInk reader, because I wanted better battery life, and easier outdoor reading. I tried buying books through it (and through the Kobo app). It's even worse than Kindle - there will be like dozens of copies of the same book, ranging from free all the way up to $10 or more. If you are able to actually get a book to download at all, and then manage to somehow get it on the device, the book will only stay authorized for about a week or two, then says it has to reconnect to authorize the book. However, the books refuse to reauthorize. You have to go in and browse the device manually, kill out the ebooks, the SQL database, and some file that contains all the ebooks you have purchased (which can be several meg), then dump your e-books back on there, and have it recreate the database (which can take an hour or more if you have hundreds of ebooks). If you are lucky, the books will stay authorized for a few days before breaking again.
I have NEVER been able to get the Adobe eBook DRM to work on any device, so forget checking eBooks out from the library.
In the end, I download some books, scan and OCR books I own, and say "Screw it" to buying books. I gave it a shot, multiple times, on multiple devices. DRM is what lead me, a person who tried to legally buy his books, to piracy.