How U.S. publishers differ from Europeans on DRM issues: The Yanks are tougher
Do U.S. publishers demand tougher DRM than Europeans? And why? Over at the Brave New World blog, Martyn Daniels, a British expert in business strategies for publishers and others, has written about “hard” and “soft” DRM.
“Hard” means the encryption-based variety (although, as I see it, many a hacker would say the real word should be “easy”).
“Soft” means such things as watermarking. Of course, many would dispute whether the word DRM is right to use about “soft.”
Whatever your word choices, Martyn has come up with a fascinating little two-part series (Part I here, II here) called “Hard and Soft DRM”; and in it he compares American publishers with European houses on DRM issues:
“An interesting twist is that we are increasingly being asked by European publishers for soft DRM and by UK and US publishers for hard DRM. We started to wonder why? Many Europeans stated that it was probably because they were behind the US and UK markets and lacked the sophistication and issues faced by other markets. However we believe that Europeans were less interested in the eink readers and more aware of online and mobile opportunities. They appear to be more focused on digitising their own indigenous market than merely opening the flood gates to a US invasion. The US and UK markets on the other hand are blindly obsessed with the eink gadgetry and chasing digital rabbits.”
He concludes, by the way, that “the question of DRM is more about why, than technology for technology sake and blindly playing ‘follow my leader’. Music and audio have clearly moved but books appear transfixed in the headlights and glare of DRM and piracy.”
My own preference—and, yes, I’m a red-blooded Yank, just one who thinks the tough-guy approach is wrong—continues to be either no DRM or, as a compromise, social DRM.
Related: Hart to Hart on eBooks, where Martyn sides with Project Gutenberg’s Michael Hart in the great format debate. I myself think Gutenberg should worry a lot more about formats and the usability of Gutenberg.org, whether for cellphones or Kindles. In fact, if you go by Michael’s past thoughts, he himself would tend to agree with me about the importance of accessibility, at least in a cellphone context (thanks, Raymond). Helps to expend that extra one percent of effort!
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