I remain opposed to DRMed e-books, at least for nonlibrary purposes; but in the interest of fairness, here are thoughts from Adobe’s Bill McCoy, adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Civil replies, please. I myself liked a blog post Bill did where he personally championed social DRM. Let’s hope that Adobe will officially give the SDRM idea a shot—I see a little hope. – D.R.
Adobe’s interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a larger market, one that we can address with our tools and services on a level playing field vs. proprietary silos that give a choke-hold to players who have a strong position in the book distribution value chain. We don’t forecast revenue from e-book DRM even in the best case ever itself being a large material business for Adobe—large enough to pay its way and allow us to sustain and enhance the solution, but quite small relative to our other tools and services.
I’ve said before that Adobe’s open to evolving towards a non-proprietary ubiquitous DRM standard, even as we see obstacles to getting there in the near future (especially around IP enablement). What we don’t want to see is one proprietary solution taking over control, or fragmentation of multiple proprietary solutions. Publishers have already voted with their feet, so to speak, by requiring/letting Amazon deploy DRM. If the only reasonable cross-platform alternative for eBooks was to go DRM-free, then some publishers would distribute only through Amazon, leading to everyone else getting "iTunesd". So to me it’s pretty obvious that cross-platform eBook DRM that works with EPUB and PDF is necessary to ensure that the open, cross-platform alternative wins. But if every publisher were to choose to go DRM free, using PDF & EPUB but not DRM, hey I’d have absolutely no problem with that outcome.
If I’m reading his intentions correctly, he’s saying that Adobe’s using DRM only because the publishers are making them do it. He’s saying his hands are tied. If that’s so, then his comments of what he would and would not want to see are largely immaterial.
And the corollary is, if we don’t like it, we’d better find another ePub reading engine to rely on (like Zulu Reader).
I hope they consider social DRM seriously. I think it would very significantly expand sales and, if they do it quickly enough they might avoid the culture of piracy that these heavy handed DRMs always create.
There will always be people who get around these things and those people always find a way to do what they want to do. If the objective is fighting piracy rather than building choke holds for retailers (as the piece refers to. Surely not in the interests of publishers), then social DRM will be as if not more effective than anything else.
The majority of us just want to own what we buy without restrictions on our ongoing personal use placed on us by the rights holders.
No DRM that acutally allows someone to access the media they purchased can actually be that hard to break. Therefore DRM does nothing to stop piracy (This is doubly true in cases like books or music where old fashioned media exists that essentially can’t be encrypted). I could go into it in more detail, but essentially, given a reasonable amount of time, any competent programmer could break DRM.
That being said, it appears that the publishing industry is under an illusion that somehow, DRM will stop otherwise honest citizens from becoming ebook pirates. In reality, they would be far more effective at stopping ebook piracy if they took the following steps:
1. Make their entire book lists available as ebooks. Yes, there are authors like J.K. Rowling who don’t want their books as ebooks. Its time for the publishers to explain to them that it is ultimately a question of them publishing it as an ebook or the pirates doing it
2. Get the prices down to a reasonable level. Publishers need to stop trying to justify prices that everyone but them finds to be outrageous. If Baen can sell ebooks for $4-$6 then any of the others should be able to as well (We will make allowances for new books, but comeon, $15-20 for a book that has been in print for a year or more?).
3. Make sure buying and reading books is as easy as possible. Readers shouldn’t have to register every device they want to read on or enter keys, etc. Make sure that the epub standard is followed for as many ereaders as possible. Then the reader can download the book to the device or devices of their choice and enjoy.
BTW, social DRM is, in my opinion, worse than the current forms of DRM. Last thing I need is to loose my reader or computer with a bunch of my books on it. This is then found by a pirate who happily uploads the books, with my identifying information included, into the dark net. Next thing you know, I have to prove I wasn’t the one who uploaded the books…
Amazon was able to get music companies to jump on board with them without DRM because Amazon was the best viable competitor to Apple. The same might have worked for B&N but Amazon would probably have needed a bigger stranglehold on publishers (like Apple with music companies) before the move to non-DRM formats prevailed.
"Recently, an ebook publisher who actually liked what I wrote still wouldn't publish it because it was "too literary" for the ebook crowd. I think ..."
Adobe’s interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a larger market, one that we can address with our tools and services on a level playing field vs. proprietary silos that give a choke-hold to players who have a strong position in the book distribution value chain. We don’t forecast revenue from e-book DRM even in the best case ever itself being a large material business for Adobe—large enough to pay its way and allow us to sustain and enhance the solution, but quite small relative to our other tools and services. 
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If I’m reading his intentions correctly, he’s saying that Adobe’s using DRM only because the publishers are making them do it. He’s saying his hands are tied. If that’s so, then his comments of what he would and would not want to see are largely immaterial.
And the corollary is, if we don’t like it, we’d better find another ePub reading engine to rely on (like Zulu Reader).
I hope they consider social DRM seriously. I think it would very significantly expand sales and, if they do it quickly enough they might avoid the culture of piracy that these heavy handed DRMs always create.
There will always be people who get around these things and those people always find a way to do what they want to do. If the objective is fighting piracy rather than building choke holds for retailers (as the piece refers to. Surely not in the interests of publishers), then social DRM will be as if not more effective than anything else.
The majority of us just want to own what we buy without restrictions on our ongoing personal use placed on us by the rights holders.
No DRM that acutally allows someone to access the media they purchased can actually be that hard to break. Therefore DRM does nothing to stop piracy (This is doubly true in cases like books or music where old fashioned media exists that essentially can’t be encrypted). I could go into it in more detail, but essentially, given a reasonable amount of time, any competent programmer could break DRM.
That being said, it appears that the publishing industry is under an illusion that somehow, DRM will stop otherwise honest citizens from becoming ebook pirates. In reality, they would be far more effective at stopping ebook piracy if they took the following steps:
1. Make their entire book lists available as ebooks. Yes, there are authors like J.K. Rowling who don’t want their books as ebooks. Its time for the publishers to explain to them that it is ultimately a question of them publishing it as an ebook or the pirates doing it
2. Get the prices down to a reasonable level. Publishers need to stop trying to justify prices that everyone but them finds to be outrageous. If Baen can sell ebooks for $4-$6 then any of the others should be able to as well (We will make allowances for new books, but comeon, $15-20 for a book that has been in print for a year or more?).
3. Make sure buying and reading books is as easy as possible. Readers shouldn’t have to register every device they want to read on or enter keys, etc. Make sure that the epub standard is followed for as many ereaders as possible. Then the reader can download the book to the device or devices of their choice and enjoy.
BTW, social DRM is, in my opinion, worse than the current forms of DRM. Last thing I need is to loose my reader or computer with a bunch of my books on it. This is then found by a pirate who happily uploads the books, with my identifying information included, into the dark net. Next thing you know, I have to prove I wasn’t the one who uploaded the books…
Amazon was able to get music companies to jump on board with them without DRM because Amazon was the best viable competitor to Apple. The same might have worked for B&N but Amazon would probably have needed a bigger stranglehold on publishers (like Apple with music companies) before the move to non-DRM formats prevailed.
In my opinion, DRM is not popular jet but maybe it will be in the future?
To be more popular it should offer MORE than only to prohibit access or identifies the end user.
What does MORE mean? Let’s see at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv1LpAKXIO4
Regards,