On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

Gizmodo reprints an article from Maximum PC about “seven ways to stop piracy without DRM”—aimed at computer game developers, but also mostly applicable to other media that are traditionally DRM’d, such as movies, music, or e-books. The suggestions combine the sorts of things that folks like Valve’s Gabe Newell have been saying for years with some other creative practices that game studios have been trying lately. The suggestions include things like built-in deterrents, waiting to release games until more bugs had been worked out, giving paying customers extra content, and engaging with the community. Some of these solutions...

An interesting thing about the latest post from publishing-industry observer Mike Shatzkin, highlighting what he feels were the most important points from the Digital Book World conference he helped run: it largely focuses on DRM. Aside from Matteo Berlucchi’s call for publishers to drop DRM (which I covered here and here), Shatzkin also brings up a point about the relationship of DRM to sales at romance e-bookseller All Romance Ebooks. Shatzkin notes three interesting statistics that came up in All Romance’s presentation at DBW: Only 20% of All Romance’s readers strongly resist e-books with DRM....

On FutureBook, Anobii CEO Matteo Berlucchi has posted an essay expanding on the points he made in the Digital Book World presentation I mentioned the other day. Berlucchi proposes that DRM is not helping the fight against piracy, and may even be driving people to piracy as they want to be able to do more with their e-books than publishers are willing to let them. However, the vendor lock-in promoted by DRM is giving additional power to e-tailers like Amazon, since customers are reluctant to switch away from the vendor who has sold them most of their e-books. Berlucchi...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

On PaidContent, Bill Rosenblatt looks at whether we can ever expect a universal format for e-books, equivalent to “MP3” for audio. He doesn’t think so. For one thing, he points out that MP3s aren’t actually used all that much in digital music sales. Apple uses AAC, which has generally better sound quality. The only major commercial market for MP3s is Amazon, and it only has 10% of the music market. And whereas MP3 had a number of advantages over the competing CD format (in particular, it was much smaller and easier to transfer digitally), EPUB doesn’t offer...

When you go DRM-free, sometimes you can be successful in ways you couldn’t have dreamed. A week ago I mentioned comedian Louis C.K.’s experiment in posting a comedy special DRM-free for $5 download or streaming. He’d made just over 110,000 sales in 4 days. Well, his sales rate has slowed a little, but he’s still surpassed $1 million in total sales in just twelve days, and has a PayPal screenshot to prove it. (Personally, I’d be really reluctant to leave a million dollars in their hands for any longer than I had to.) He’s going to use $250,000...

Pottermore has a 17-question survey for Harry Potter fans, asking about what Potter books they’ve read and own, what e-readers they use, and how interested they would be in buying Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. As Laura Hazard Owen notes at PaidContent, one of the questions asks what could keep fans from buying the Potter books, and one of the choices is not having a credit or debit card. This suggests that Pottermore may come up with a way of letting parents add money to children’s accounts so they can buy the books they want. But I...

One more person has discovered, like Baen, that if you release your content inexpensively and without DRM, you can beat piracy at its own game. Comedian Louis CK recently tried an experiment in which he made a full-length comedy special available for sale from his website, to stream or download with no DRM, for $5. He asked that people be considerate and not pirate it, so that he could afford to offer more material in the same way. Now Louis has posted some results to his website. (Though as a web designer he makes a better comedian; I had...

So says a blog post by Charles Stross, and it makes a lot of sense.  An article in Gigaom picks up on this: This kind of insistence on DRM and incompatible platforms, as well as the tangle of rights and often competing interests of publishers and authors when it comes to licensing copies or sharing, makes e-book buying a snake-pit of complexities — and only reinforces Amazon’s hold on the market, since it offers a simple end-to-end solution. This makes sense for the retailer, and its focus on launching new platforms like the Kindle Fire make it obvious it plans to extend that...

The Swiss government commissioned a study on the impact of copyright-infringing downloading. The independent study concluded that downloaders use the money they spend to buy more legitimate entertainment products. So they've concluded to maintain Switzerland's extant copyright law, which makes downloading for personal use legal. It's a rare victory for evidence-based policy in a world dominated by shrill assertions of lost jobs and revenue, backed by funny-number "statistics" from industry-commissioned researchers. The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money...

Even as Gabe Newell of Valve continues to lecture that piracy is brought on by companies offering poor service rather than an unwillingness to pay for games, some game companies seem to have a hard time learning the lesson. Zachary Knight at Techdirt reports that last week, Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Stanislas Mettra seemed to imply that a PC version of the game I Am Alive would not be coming out because there were too many pirates and not enough customers on the PC platform. “If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he...