Here at the TeleBlog, we love to beat up on DRM. It’s pretty effective as a sales-killer—no small reason why annual e-books sales of just $54M are just a speck of the tens of billions from p-book revenue.
For the second time, because I’m using a different copy of the program in the wake of a technical glitch, I need to write Mobipocket to get access restored for my legally bought books on my tablet. Mobi’s device limit is four computers, and I own seven. No “information wants to be free” reasons are at work here, regardless of my sympathy for Creative Commons and well-stocked free public libraries (with fair compensation to publishers and writers in the latter case). I’m just sick of Mobi micromanaging my lawful reading habits. Here’s to a variety of business models!
The “pro” side
Still, in case you’re curious what arguments the pro-DRM side is making these days, check out what consultant Robert Weber‘s Managing Rights blog says in response to the Free The BBC campaign (photo is of him):
“1. DRM doesn’t work. Like many others, they conclude that because if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t work. If it didn’t work, who would care?
“2. DRM is a poor business decision. Ain’t necessarily so. It might be an excellent business decision for content other than music and even in some cases for music (although I think that ship is mostly sunk).
“3. The industry has ditched it. Well, only in music, and mainly, in my view, to get Apple out-from-under potential anti-trust issues, especially in Europe. Apple sold a lot of music with FairPlay DRM, which did what it was supposed to do.
“Much of the anti-DRM sentiment comes from those who believe that ‘information wants to be free’ (often wrongly attributed to Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, but actually from Stuart Brand). To state the obvious, information doesn’t want anything. Ever. People don’t want to pay. Period.”
OK, gang. There’s the red meat. Go to it! My big response would be, “What’s the point—when P books can be so easily scanned, and when so many customers don’t buy e-books, given all the hassles that DRM inherently gives us? DRM’s better as a friend of proprietary of technology than as a protector of intellectual property.”
First, it’s pretty disingenuous to suggest that p-books are easily scanned. How many hours will it take a normal person to scan a single book? How many hundreds (or thousands) of dollars worth of scanner will it take? How easy, convenient, and comfortable will it be for the p2p bookpirate to read that amateur-scanned ebook?
This seques into a point you’ve really driven home with this blog, David. The biggest reason ebooks languish right now is that ebook reading hardware basically either a) sucks or b) costs too much (and still sucks, although not as much). Give us cheap and *good* ebook readers … and step back as they fly off the shelves! (Provided the ebooks are available, of course.)
Also there is another facet to Weber’s first point. DRM is inconvenient now … but suppose it were not? Suppose someone came along and really put all the finishing touches on it, making it easy and convenient? Wouldn’t most of you concerns melt away at this point?
Maybe DRM needs to get better. Maybe it can be done away with. But until someone proposes a workable solution that lets the market financially reward a popular author for his efforts, just waving your hands and singing ‘information wants to be freeeee!’ sounds a lot like wishful thinking. Yes, Doctorow can claim he’s selling well in spite of giving away etexts. But would he still be able to do so if a good ebookreader device were on the mass market … for $75?
The solution to the ebook problem? Get Apple on the case. Let them precisely duplicate their iPod/iTunes formula, this time with books and periodicals.
Bryan wrote,
1. “First, it’s pretty disingenuous to suggest that p-books are easily scanned. How many hours will it take a normal person to scan a single book?”
You don’t spend much time in warez groups. Check out alt.binaries.comics.dcp — people with enough time on their hands to have scanned in pretty much every comic book ever published. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of carefully scanned and edit pages.
In fact they do a better job in their spare time than the “professionals” do. You can go out and buy every Spider-Man comic on a DVD set (they’re scanned PDFs by a company with a license to do so). But the scans look like crap and there are other issues with them.
Never underestimate the power of someone with a nice scanner and too much time on his hands.
I’ve seen Torrents that have pretty much every scifi novel you could ever want to read, quite a number of them scanned PDFs or painstakingly corrected text from OCR.
It’s really not that difficult to scan large volumes of stuff at very high quality these days thanks to advances in scanners (cheaper, better, etc.)
2. “The biggest reason ebooks languish right now is that ebook reading hardware basically either a) sucks or b) costs too much (and still sucks, although not as much). Give us cheap and *good* ebook readers … and step back as they fly off the shelves! (Provided the ebooks are available, of course.)”
True to a point, but note that there are awesome MP3 players (i heart my video iPod), but that has hardly put an end to music piracy. If there were decent e-book readers there would almost certainly be a spike in e-book sales, but there would also likely be an attendant increase in e-book piracy.
3. As for Robert Weber — “To state the obvious, information doesn’t want anything. Ever. People don’t want to pay. Period.”
Well, he’s right, isn’t he? Sort of?
Obviously if I have two choices — pay or get something free — I’m going to choose to get it free as long as there are no hidden costs (if I have to drive to Chicago to get something free that I can buy down the street for $10, obviously it isn’t free to me, though if you live in Chicago maybe it is).
The problem that people like Robert don’t get is that DRM is an additional cost to the consumer.
I saw a novel I want to read on my Treo. I found a Torrent that has a cracked version I can download for free. Or I can go to an ebook site, pay almost as much for the e-version as the paperback version, and I can only read the ebook on my PC since the only format they’ll sell it to me is DRMed and not something there’s a decent reader for on the Treo.
Hmmm…tough decision there.
But you know what — just yesterday I paid $20 to download a 64-page PDF by a small publisher. It was completely DRM-free and the PDF was in a niche that no one else offers. I could have probably found the PDF for free but a) the publisher didn’t treat me like a crook; b) offered a fair price given the extremely niche market of the book.
I think one of the things that operates against piracy in that case is the personalization. I’ve written before that Cory Doctorow’s offering his novels free will not work indefinitely. But suppose at some point Cory decides he’s going to charge $5 for an e-version of his next novel and for $5 you get a completely DRM-free version in any number of file formats. At some point you think not only is that very reasonable (darn cheap), but you know I don’t want to rip off Cory personally — he needs the money to keep going, just as the small publisher I purchased from yesterday needs that money to keep developing those kinds of PDFs.
Brian,
True to a point, but note that there are awesome MP3 players (i heart my video iPod), but that has hardly put an end to music piracy. If there were decent e-book readers there would almost certainly be a spike in e-book sales, but there would also likely be an attendant increase in e-book piracy.
The underlined part of the above quote was my point. With good, affordable ebook readers, the balance swings toward the pirates. The economics of print publishing are apparently much different from those in the music industry, and this could very possibly drive a fatal stake through the heart of many beloved authors and publishers .
I’m not quite sure what my point was about the scanning of p-books. The notion that some scans exist out there still doesn’t change the fact that it’s orders of magnitude harder to do a good scan of a p-book (compared to ripping a CD). Maybe I was wondering if piracy will grow much easier if/when publishers make ebooks available.
It’s nice that you want to pay the author. I do too. But are there enough of us honest folk out there to keep food on the table for our favorite authors in a DRM-free world? Would the answer remain the same in 30 years?
If/when Cory decides to charge for his ebooks, he goes into competition with his prime customer: the publishing house. That’s got to be a game-changer for Cory!
Oops. The underlining showed in the preview of my text, but not in the final version. Consider the last 11 words of the italicized quote to be underlined.