“Fifty percent of Fictionwise‘s gross revenue is non-DRM, and last month six of the top ten bestselling publishers on Fictionwise” were “non-DRM publishers.”
So said Nick Bogaty, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum.
In a PowerPoint presentation at BookExpo, Nick urged publishers to “experiment with or without DRM.”
Growth: $5M in ’02 to estimated $30M in ’07
This is just the detail that especially caught my eye. In “Digital Books: Why this time it’s real,” Nick actually covered a bunch of topics such as e-book growth—see his graph. While E’s still just a speck of P, the growth rate is still an attention-getter, eh? And it will be yet higher if publishers ditch or at least scale back the use and severity of DRM and work with techies to settle eBabel issues.
I hope that the IDPF will investigate social DRM, which, though it comes with some privacy issues, could be an alternative for e-book buyers who want to own books for real. Of course, the best DRM in most cases by far is no DRM, as I personally see it. Social DRM might actually count as “No” since you’re not restricting access to book—just introducing risks for spreading it around beyond your computer or those of trusted friends. Perhaps one way to deal with the privacy question is to give customers a choice. Of course, some might still avoid a book and go for one without any catches.
Related: Digital Rights Management: What are the options? or… Digital Rights Management: A Business Choice, another PPT from Nick. He quotes Fictionwise: “We have a significant number of regular buyers who NEVER buy any DRM title, and they tend to be among the best buyers.” The PPT also says: “This group accounts for 11% of total customers and about 20% of total sales at fictionwise.com. An even larger group of buyers greatly prefer non-drm books but will occasionally buy a big-name author DRM book.”
