Ed McCoyd, Association of American Publishers; Ronald Schild, MVB Marketing; Bob Kohn, RoyaltyShare Inc.
McCoyd: pirated books originate in 3 ways: scanned, commercially published ebooks with security broken, production files. Don’t know enough about impact on publishers’ bottom lines. GAO report concluded that there is no reliable way to quantify impacts. Textbook publishers say they have been able to connect massive returns of textbooks when a pirated has appeared online. Magellan Media studies find that there is not an impact on the titles they looked out that were pirated. However convinced that sheer number of uploaded and downloaded books is large. Attributor Report of Jan. 14, 2010 reported 9 million illegal downloads of books in 2009. Major pirating websites of interest: truly-free.org, 2,300 titles; 4shared.com; rapidshare.com, believed to be the number one infringing site; textbooktorrents.com, finally shut down. Scribd and Wattpad both working with publishers to filter out infringing material.
Schild: runs libreka! which is the joint ebook platform of German publishers and booksellers. Industry initiative to market digital content, enables a competitive ebook market, committed to open standards, open to all retail channels, open to all reading devices. 1,300 participating publishers, 600 booksellers, 2,000 websites using their services, 130,000 titles with 24,000 being sold as ebooks. Very difficult and tricky to make DRM user friendly so they went to social DRM. Read on any device, freely use and print. Integrate watermark in the Epub file and also insert invisible watermarks that can’t be removed (for example do image alterations or blanks or spaces). Developed with Frauenhofer Institute who invented the MP3. Is a transactional watermark integrating customer’s name and watermark. Can track and trace pirated copies, cross platform compatible. Started tracking program on all DRMed books sold since January and covered 600 known for piracy. Found that most pirated books were scanned, very few hard DRMed books and no watermarked ebooks.
Kohn: had to leave so missed his presentationhgj
Schild sounds like a guy who gets it. Social DRM, read freely on any device — as open as a book. I’m curious about how they prevent their watermarks from being removed from the epub files. Images I can see, but what if the book is a political memoir, howto, or straight fiction? Only the text matters then, and is there a way to watermark that?
I’d be interested in a followup post here looking into libreka!’s model, and whether it could be sold to US publishers.
— asotir
Watermarking, etc. will work if you have a non-editable file, which plain EPUB is not. Even so, what is to prevent a would-be pirate from printing out the file and scanning it all back in? Any DRM scheme must be able to survive the electronic->print->electronic transition.
Ultimately the best DRM is to provide the book without DRM, at a price which makes piracy an inconvenience. See O’Reilly and Associates, who now sell 1/3rd of their books this way.
As far as textbooks are concerned, I think publishers need to sign a “site license” of some sort with adopting schools, so students have the cost built into their tuition. Then, there would be no incentive whatsoever for piracy.