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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.'"
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.
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)
Certain publishers are DRM free to keep their pricing low. While not my cup of tea, I happen to know that Entangled Publishing http://www.entangledpublishing.com/ is DRM free (fiance is interning there). I'm sure there are other smaller publishing houses that do the same... as with most things it's the big companies that have forgotten their customers.
Precisely. I only buy DRM free eBooks. If I want a book that is not available in a DRM free version, I either pass entirely or buy a dead tree version. For the record, I have spent some 300 Euro on eBooks in the last year, and maybe half that on dead tree versions. It really irks me that many vendors do not display clearly if their books are DRM encumbered or not. Kobo is one of the few where it is easy to see in the results list. Are there others?
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
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...
In the other hand, taking your ebook reader is a bit more comfortable that carrying a heavy book (or several), no need connection, and could pass a month between charges.
I call BS.
Consumers put up with DRM, in exactly the same way they put up with exorbitant prices for gas, "convenience fees" and other corporate tactics to sink a sump into their wallets.
When I buy movies, books, or music, if I can't jailbreak them, I don't buy them. Period. End of story.
Everybody I talk to either hates DRM or thanks me for telling them where the picklocks are.
But NOBODY "doesn't mind" DRM.
My main gripe with pdf ebooks is that they do not adapt to my screen. It also means that if I want to change the size of the fonts, I will have to manually zoom in and move the visible area around. And given that eInk updates quite slow, it is not a nice and natural process. In my humble opinion, epub is the better format for ebooks.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Please stop spreading this myth about Amazon. Publishers are perfectly free to list their books without DRM - you can tell because the last sentence of a book's description will say "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied." You can also load DRM free books from other sources into the Kindle app. Of the 102 books on my Kindle, 49 are DRM free or in the public domain.
Google "epub download" and add some authors name and book title and you'll see why DRM doesn't work.
DRM doesn't change the availability of non-licensed download options.
There is really just one group of people that has to deal with DRM -- the people who actually are willing to buy your stuff. Anybody who doesn't want to pay will find the content DRM-free somewhere.
That's the lesson that the music industry learnt the hard way -- the people that aren't willing to pay are a lost cause either way, but DRM may alienate the paying customers. DRM hurts the honest customer. You know, the guy that you want to come back and buy more from you.
So not using DRM anymore didn't make the non-licensed downloads go away. But it increased the number of payed, licensed downloads.
So it's good for the bottom line.
The reason is, PDF and ebooks are really at odds with one another.
The point of PDF is to render the exact same on each screen. Like a physical book, each page should always look the same (only zoomed or not zoomed). An ebook needs to be able to reflow the text to support changing aspect ratios, font sizes, etc. When you do this with PDF, you can just zoom in or out. If your application is actually reflowing a PDF, that means it's not really displaying a PDF. Instead, it is taking the content, extracting it, and displaying it in some native format.
I love paper-books and wouldn't buy any DRM encumbered e-book because some 30+ year old books I'm reading once a while and I don't trust any DRM-server to last that long.
But if a paper-book would get me a download of the same as an e-book I'm willing to spend a little bit more to have a significant chunk of my 4 digit number of books during travel.
I'm considering to build a scanner linear-book-scanner to make my portable library but question my ability to build it ;-). This scanner seems to be able to scan a book without any human help. Start one book before going to work, one coming home and one before going to sleep gives more than 1000 books a year. A few years of minimal efford and all is done. If one could buy such a scanner for 1000-2000 eur I would start building my e-books tomorrow.
"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
I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.
So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I thought I preferred the real thing. Until a trip to Cambodia resulted in me reading 6 of the eight books I had on the flight over (I just couldn't sleep), leaving me trying to stretch two books over the remaining 14 days plus the flight home. That was an extreme example but any lengthy trip can result in not having sufficient reading material for the duration if you are a fast reader. At least with most trips I find myself in places where I can replenish, but Cambodia was an exception.
With my nook I never have less than a hundred unread books ready and waiting to be read, it lasts weeks without a charge and can charge anywhere I can find a USB socket and my laptop battery can charge it a couple times if I don't use it for anything else. I like owning books, but haven't cracked a physical book in months.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Are you suggesting that teachers and college professors receive kickbacks on book sales?
Are you high?
That would cut into the publishers' profit margins.
You only need that if the PDF is actually just holding un-OCR'd images, rather than text. If the PDF contains text you can just extract it (afaicr the text blocks are just Deflated streams of text).
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Advertisements work much better than word of mouth.
From what I've heard from advertising people, no they don't. Advertising can help people discover stuff that no one knew about before. Advertisement can keep a specific product near front of a potential customer's mind. But for actually getting people to make a specific purchase, nothing beats and endorsement from people you know and trust.
You probably don't have to build that book scanner. There's a company called BitLit (http://www.bitlit.ca) that's working on a system that would let you get the digital edition of a book you own in print for free or minimal cost (think $0.99-$2.99). Full disclosure: I'm the founder of BitLit... I'm at Book Expo America this week and I'm getting a hugely positive response from publishers. Most publishers understand that today's consumer feels that he/she buys content not an embodiment (cloth, paper, or bits)... Yes, some do want DRM on their ebooks, but many, including independents and "the big six" understand that DRM is as useful as a paper mÃché crash helmet. There is also growing understanding that ebook DRM allows device makers to wall in readers. And once the garden is walled, those ebook vendors can start to set unfavorable terms on publishers. Amazon and Apple's dominance in the device world is likely to doom ebook DRM in the long run.
Audible is great for a lot of people, just not people like me. I agree the reading is generally high quality. On Android, the speed-up feature used to totally suck, but lately, they've copied my pitch-synchronous algorithms from libsonic, which I can tell from the new and improved sound quality. It's perfectly legal for them to do that: I give the software away as public domain software.
For around half of blind people, Audible is wonderful. For people like me, Audible is almost useless. First of all, their software only lets me go up to 3X speed up. I listen at about 550 words per minute when listening to fiction (3.5X), and 600 wpm (4X) on my computer. To learn to listen that fast, you have to train your ear to the voice. If the reader on Audible were the same for every book, that would be possible, but unfortunately, it's a different reader more often than not. With a text to speech engine, it's the same voice all the time, making it far easier to train for speed listening. The most popular voice with blind speed listeners is Eloquence on Windows, which is the same as Voxin on Linux. I prefer the Mary TTS artic "rms" voice because it's free software (no connection to RMS... probably). I also read far too many books to afford Audible, and Audible's selection is too weak for me.
However, Audible does rock... except that they are owned by evil Amazon! I've never seen the blind picket any company other than Amazon. It's pretty funny. They can't read the signs they carry! If you remember back when Amazon turned off their crappy built-in text-to-speech feature in Kindle for most e-books, you may recall Amazon claiming that the Author's Guild made them do it. That's total BS. No other e-reader company caved in this way, including Apple and Google. Amazon just used the Author's Guild as an excuse to stop their kindles from competing with their highly profitable audio book products at Audible. Amazon's company motto: Be Evil.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell