We’ve heard a lot of people arguing that publishers should fight Amazon by dropping DRM. However, in The Scholarly Kitchen, Joseph Esposito has written a long and thoughtful piece looking at the possible drawbacks of this approach. Esposito first looks at the question of whether unauthorized sharing of e-books increases the market for them. His own guess is that infringement helps sales when there is sufficient friction—i.e. the free copy is harder or more annoying to use for some reason—but hinders them when friction approaches zero. And since free e-books are getting easier and easier to find, publishers...

Here are a couple more interesting points of view on the DoJ’s anti-trust lawsuit against some publishers and Apple. On ReadWriteWeb, Joe Brockmeier points out that for all the noise around the suit, it really isn’t going to change the major problems with the e-book industry right now. He points out three such problems: the rampant proliferation of DRM and platform lock-in, the perpetual copyright implemented by Congress and backed by the Supreme Court, and Amazon’s problematic relationships with publishers (including those who aren’t the Big Six). If you're taking sides in the DoJ vs....

Ever since the Department of Justice first made noises about suing over agency pricing, interest in Amazon’s, the publishers’, and Apple’s pricing practices has revived, with everyone and his brother expressing an opinion. Just over the last few days, I’ve starred a couple of dozen commentary posts on my Google Reader trawls, which is a bit much to cover here, at least all at once. But I’ll hit a few high points. First of all, John Scalzi is a little grumpy about “consumers who apparently think the current drama surrounding e-books is like a football game.” He reminds readers...

As long-time readers know, we carry plenty of stories about how DRM is harmful to consumers, preventing them from fully using the products they paid for. (And we have plenty of commenters ready to go even farther about how terrible DRM is!) But one thing you hear about less often is how DRM can be harmful to e-book stores as well. Ruth Curry, chief operating officer of independent e-bookseller Emily Books, has written a piece on PaidContent discussing the effect that DRM has had on the store she runs with her friend Emily Gould. Major publishers were not willing...

Could Hachette take a hatchet to DRM? That’s the suggestion Laura Hazard Owen makes in a piece on PaidContent covering remarks by Hachette SVP Maja Thomas at the Copyright Clearance Center’s OnCopyright 2012 event. Thomas reiterated some of the same points that DRM opponents have made, pointing out that DRM is a speedbump rather than a preventative for piracy: There’s a misconception that somehow the digital format of books has made piracy increase, or become logarithmically more serious. But piracy was always very easy to do, because scanning a physical copy of a book [takes] a matter of minutes. A physical...

Well, the Harry Potter e-books are out, and they’re making a splash. There are a number of reactions being reported on the web to various aspects of the announcement, and it interests me to look at some of them. For starters, Tim Carmody at Wired calls attention to the fact that Amazon and Barnes & Noble are both unprecedentedly referring customers to Pottermore to register and buy the books, then automatically adding them to their respective e-reader accounts. (And both of them are promoting the Potter e-books on their respective front pages as if the sales were their own...

On FutureBook, Philip Jones posts a summary of the first episode of his new podcast, The Naked Book. This episode had to do with DRM, and featured talks with people including Anobii chief executive Matteo Berlucchi (who I’ve previously covered for his presentation stating that publishers should bite the bullet and drop DRM so they stop helping Amazon build its walled garden) and author Nick Harkaway on the matter. Kobo director of merchandising Nathan Maharaj pointed out that DRM that restricts books to one particular class of device runs up against the mom problem: non-tech-savvy moms are an important...

I just noticed that an e-book I reviewed here some time ago, Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is currently being offered as a free Kindle e-book. (Barnes & Noble and Kobo do not appear to be following suit; the book is still $8.19 for the Nook or $7.69 for the Kobo (or $9.99 DRM-free from Kobo. Is this new, offering a DRM-free book at a higher price?). But if you want to buy it, you should get it for $6 DRM-free from Baen instead.) The book is the novelization of the first part of...

That The Oatmeal strip I mentioned a few days ago has stirred up some controversy. A post on TechDirt links to both a rebuttal from Andy Ihnatko decrying the culture of entitlement that leads to people thinking they have a right to download content just because they can’t buy it, and a post by Instapaper’s Marco Ament that takes a more pragmatic stance. Ament uses the example of a public restroom where people kept throwing wadded up paper towels on the floor by the door because they wanted to use them to avoid touching the restroom door handle and...

A MobileRead thread reports that the Requiem FairPlay DRM-cracking app now removes the DRM from Apple’s iBooks EPUB e-books, in addition to the music and video DRM-removal that it already did. Follow-up comments express skepticism that Apple will let it stand for long without changing their DRM to block it, or that it will make much difference where people buy their e-books since most people don’t care about DRM. For myself, it would make me a touch more tempted to buy e-books from Apple if I knew I could then render them platform-agnostic—except given that most nonexclusive e-books...

The “artifacts rule, digital drools” crowd rears its head again. This time it’s Greg Kumparak on Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, who opines that nobody will care about inheriting digital content (the post is about music, but the same arguments should apply to any form of digital media) from their parents because they’re only bits, not things. Passing your iTunes collection down to your kids isn’t the modern day equivalent to your dad passing his vinyl collection down to you. Once you take away the physical element*, there is no sense of...

In a slightly odd reaction to the public anti-SOPA backlash, movie studio Paramount has decided to try to open a dialogue discussing copyright infringement.  The odd part is that they chose law professors to dialogue with.  Details are in the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article suggests that the strategy of talking to law professors, as opposed to tech experts (or, possibly, average students) will not result in anything useful: “I don’t understand why, if they truly wanted to engage consumers, they would approach law professors, especially those at the most elite schools,” Mr. Goldman wrote in an e-mail...