DON’T BUY THE BOOK!

What store owner is going to listen to a customer who threatens to break their window if they’re unhappy? They won’t listen… they’ll either close up for good, or call out the police to watch their goods and monitor every transaction.

(Hmm… sounds like what we have now, doesn’t it?)

So, instead of threats, just walk away. Buy from Baen, and anyone else that doesn’t use DRM. If they are successful, and DRM-using publishers are not, they’ll take the hint.

But for pity’s sake, stop the threats. They only serve to fan the flames.

Baen Books sells e-books without DRM and makes money. So the statement above is just flat out not true.

DRM hurts customers and it’s not necessary.

I’m perfectly willing to pay for my (in copyright) books. But the hour DRM punishes me for paying is the hour I learn to break DRM.

Theres some histirical evidence that DRM protected works will become unreadble on standard eqipment 5-10 years down the road because of the DRM something that never ever happens whith non drm based data.

Non activation based DRM is simply putting a license fee on the legit player manufacturers it have no other real life impact, look at DeCSS and the stuff they put on audio discs causing them to loose the right to call em CompactDisc’s if you doubt it.

You dont actually own the songs you purchase on itunes or books you download to the kindle, you cant resell em when you get bored with em, you cant take them with you when you cancel your amazon acount or amazon terminate the service for whatewer. when apple goes into red again

DRM have it’s uses but only in situation where your being honest about renting on a time limited basis!

1. The basic problem with DRM is that making information secure is always going to involve making compromises both in ease of use and in allowing fair use. In other words, the more secure a DRM technology is, the more likely it is to be inconvenient to the user and to limit their fair use of the material purchased.

2. DRM treats honest citizens like criminals that can’t be trusted. The simple fact of the matter is that most people don’t mind paying for their entertainment. It basically penalizes a user before they have ever had a chance to illegally share files.

3. DRM as a protective mechanism is essentially useless. The majority of lost revenue from illegal file sharing does not come from people who buy media and then decide to share it with a few friends. Rather, it comes from pirates who are incredibly technically proficient and for whom new DRM schemes represent little other than challenges. The fact that books that have never been legally issued as e-books have ended up on file sharing sites (often with-in hours of their release… if not before) shows how little effect DRM can have on stopping piracy of books.

4. I find it interesting that Mr. Bashkar believes that the ultimate end point of a DRMless world is a world where movie, books, and music all essentially come to a stand still. But lets take a closer look at what he really thinks will end… Specifically he mentions “door stopping best sellers”, “Hollywood Blockbusters” and “Epoch Defining Albums” and defines it in terms of mass culture. Well, to begin with, provided a good way is found to ensure authors are paid for their efforts, I see little reason why the world of literature needs to be hurt by the new world (Publishers are a different matter.. but we are talking about culture here, not business). The music industry has essentially given up on trying to stop file sharing by DRM (Amazon sells all its mp3s DRM free and Amazon now offers many titles DRM free)… so that argument is null. As for the Hollywood Blockbuster… well lets face it most of the best pirated copies of films actually come from inside the movie industry itself. I know people who often watch movies days or weeks before they are released anywhere in the world.

Of course, the most interesting thought to all this is that it is all about mass culture. But why is mass culture something that necessarily needs to be maintained? Mass culture is really a result of the 20th century… Prior to that, culture was regional, to country, region or even local town. Now we are reaching the point where many different cultures can co-exist across the globe. The problem is that these micro global cultures are harder to market too. Ultimately though, world culture will be enriched if we are all able to choose what parts of the whole we want to be actively be involved in as opposed to being told by mass media.

Anyway, the comments at the digitalist reflect:

- there is much justified unhappyness about DRM
- people do not buy the idea that p-books are “kind-of” DRMed (there are many ways of re-distributing and re-using books that do not generate revenue for the rights-holder)
- anti-DRM advocates suffer from wishful thinking as well

Let us look at that last point: It is often argued that DRM would hurt sales more than it drives. As computer games tell us, that is generally not true. Also, look at the AppStore:
http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/05/08/my-experience-getting-owned-by-app-store-pirates/

The problem is that indeed, many business models (such as text books) would be more or less doomed without some kind of effective DRM. (Here, even watermarking will not act as a deterrent, because the users come in groups, and the stuff is expensive.) Thus, without DRM, text book editing will have to become non-profit (paid for by schools and universities).

The same is true for content with extremely wide distribution, such as Harry Potter.

What about the titles inbetween? It would be very interesting to run a barrage of tests, for instance selling two different comparable novels with and without DRM, and repeat the experiments regularly and for different target-groups, author rankings etc. As it is, we still need more data to find out about the economic impact of DRM.

It is very understandable that Hollywood studios and Pan MacMillan do prefer a world where their business models work. Yet the cost of that might be higher than the damage that we as a creative and productive society were taking if the internet became seriously limited and monitored.

The economical criteria are not identical to cultural criteria. As a reader, I could very well live in a world where Joanne K. Rowling would not be a multi-millionaire. I believe that Harry Potter would have been written anyway, and generated a lot of income, too. And I can live in a world without Hollywood blockbusters, which produces many more worthwile indie movies.

I have the strong suspicion that the publishing industry benefits authors much less than publishers. Fully digital production chains might replace the classical publishers with labels, which means that authors can get a much larger share of the revenue.

Look at this: Currently, an author gets less than 10% of the price of a pBook. For eBooks, this figure can easily be 80%. Imagine a fully digital world, where people still buy as many ebooks as they get pbooks today, but at only half the price. Also, imagine due to lack of marketing and because of digital shelf-space abundance, we get only half the number of sold units per title (but we sell more titles than before). In this world of smaller and cheaper Harry Potters, twice as many authors could thrive, with double income!

I think the Harry Potter example is a good one. Sure there’s near-infinite availability of video free from YouTube but it does seem that the long tail still has a huge bump on one end.

Rob Preece
BooksForABuck

This article’s faith in the efficacy of DRM is touching, but seems to fly in the face of experience. How’s that working for the music industry?

The assumption that DRM is a necessary condition for a unit-sales business model is also (at best) unproven; there are several examples where unencumbered digital content is being sold in this fashion. Apparently, it can be done.

You don’t have to consider DRM to be one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to believe that it causes real harm to the customer. You just have to have “bought” a DRM-encumbered product, and lost it to a platform change or to corporate abandonment.

Yes, relying on less onerous DRM schemes (i.e. no device lockin, no built-in obsolescence) would go a long way to improving the customer experience. I have no objections to social DRM, for example. But if such permissive schemes are acceptable to the publisher, that suggests to me that the threat is not really serious in the first place. This is security theater.

Although I do not use it to sell my e-books, if it existed in what I would consider a practical format and application, I would likely use it. (So the difference between me and Pan Mac is that they started out with DRM, and I started out without it.)

Hopefully seeing more voices like this, from mainstream media and publishers, will accelerate what I believe will be inevitable: A DRM system for e-books that works, and doesn’t piss people off, resulting in a happy e-book culture and infrastructure… which, after all, is what we all want.