TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

NetWorker on the folly of today’s DRM

By David Rothman

NetWorker, a DRM-hip techie, treated the eBook Community list to another behind-the-scenes look at “protection.” The foolishness has actually reached the point where pirates love Microsoft’s DRM because it’s so easy to defeat. Amusing. Microsoft Reader simultaneously is a cakewalk for pirates and a virtual torture chamber for honest customers. Slightly adapted, here’s NetWorker’s post.

When someone talks about Digital Rights Management, what s/he really means is Technical Protection Measures, which are technological means used to prevent access to the content of an e-book, and are only orthogonally related to any actual rights in the book.

For all major e-book formats which provide TPM, there is a software tool to remove the protection.

I have been monitoring the alt.binaries.e-book newsgroup for several years now (and occasionally offering aid and comfort to the enemy). While I have not kept any statistics, it would appear that un-TPMed e-books are shared about as frequently as commercial, non-TPMed e-books.

I am fairly certain that the most recent posting of Michael Crichton’s newest book, State of Fear, was derived from a Micro$oft Reader format. And now that I think about it, I can’t recalled any un-TPMed work posted that was not derived from a M$Reader format.

This is probably because the M$Reader format (frequently, if erroneously, referred to as .lit) maintains the original, complete XHTML markup, and thus is the most useful once the TPM has been removed. If someone is going to buy a TPMed e-book with the intention of sharing it, it makes sense to buy the version that has been least degraded in the conversion process.

However, of all the e-books I have seen shared in this particular forum I would guess that 98 percent + are derived from paper books. This is even true for recent bestsellers, such as the DaVinci Code which seems to be posted about twice a week for the last six months.

I can only speculate as to the reasons this may be the case. Most important is probably the fact that the books people want are not available in any e-book format. It is not unusual for e-books shared in the newsgroup to have higher production values than those of commercial e-books, so it may be that book lovers do it to insure higher quality e-books. And I also believe that, as Tim O’Reilly said, in general consumers want to do the right thing.

I don’t think I have ever seen an e-book shared which was originally acquired as an open format e-book from Fictionwise, and when someone requests an e-book that is available as an open format e-book the response is usually a referral to the Fictionwise web site. When someone
requests or posts an e-book from Baen books s/he is usually pretty thoroughly flamed, and it doesn’t happen often. On the other hand, when a publisher disrespects its readers enough to try and encumber an e-book with TPM, people usually disrespect the publisher enough to break the encryption and share the e-book.

While I have not observed the alt.binaries.e-book.technical newsgroup nearly as carefully, it would appear that the rules are somewhat different there. I would guess that 90 percent + of the e-books posted there are commercial e-books, which are not encumbered with TPM.

It would appear that most of the e-books posted there come off CDs which accompany the actual DT versions (some years ago I purchased a book on NT server administration which came with a CD containing not only a digital version the book I had just purchased, but about 8 other e-books on the same topic). Most of the e-books posted there are in PDF, CHM and HTML formats. When password protected books are posted the password is posted as well.

So, if you really want to protect your book from “piracy,” your first step should be to write a book that is bad enough that no one will want it. Next, pick a format that is not very useful; I suggest PDF, as it is limited in practice to being read at a desktop computer, and most “pirates” feel that the easiest way to convert a PDF file is to go through the OCR process just like it was a paper book. Do not allow printing of your e-book. Password protect each book you sell with a unique password, and keep records of the purchaser and his/her associated password; even better, use the purchaser’s credit card number or social security number as the password on the assumption that a buyer will not want to share such personal information, and if you discover a pirated copy you can identify the scofflaw and extract your pound of flesh.