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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.'"
Provides just more than that. Syncs reading all across tablets, e-readers, cellphones, and desktops. You can even put your own (or purchased elsewhere), DRM free book, send to kindle, and read in whatever device you have, in all of them if you want. That is a killer feature in a world where you can use a lot of different device, for different environments, to access your books. A service like that is needed, from Amazon or other players, but what matter is the broad reach across devices.
That books are DRM free is somewhat orthogonal with that. You must own what you purchase, DRM, in the other hand, is turning it into renting in practical terms.
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.
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.
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.