An idiot’s guide to eBabel and DRM: UK’s Bookseller magazine brilliantly explains the mess

By David Rothman

Is it time for the Brits to re-colonize the United States? Absoutely! Bring ‘em back, Redcoats and all.

Some of the wisest utterances on topics like DRM and colliding e-book formats are coming from the British publishing community.

A gutsy PW equivalent in the U.K.—far braver and smarter than the wimpy Yankee variety, which zapped my anti-DRM, anti-eBabel blog—has just published a memorable article on the very problems that so many American book people are sweeping under the carpet.

In eBabel on and on, The Bookseller explains the mess in terms that even the dumbest blockheads on our side of The Pond ought to understand. And it does so without ignoring the nuances.

"It’s the DRM, stupid"

Under a subhead that might have come from the TeleBlog—"it’s the DRM, stupid"—Features Editor Tom Tivnan warns: "…Even within format, different publishers’ DRM can vary, affecting device readability. Files wrapped with DRM also contain a variety of restrictions, such as whether a customer can print or not, if the file can download to other devices, or whether it can be emailed.

"Even within formats, DRM continues to evolve. As Martyn Daniels, vice-president of sales and marketing at digital content management specialist Value Chain International, explains: ‘Mobipocket, for example, has gone though several incarnations. If you are using, say, a Mobi 3.0 file and the device you are using reads Mobi 6.0, it will still be able to read it, but there will be subtle differences that affect performance.’"

Tivnan even provides a glossary of formats—from ePub to eReader. Guess which he lists firsts? Nice priorities, Tom.

The Moi angle: My opinion—and perhaps yours, too

While PW has made me a nonperson in the best Orwellian tradition—the cowards at PW actually killed the online archives of my E-Book Report blog—the Bookseller has the nerve to quote me. Tivnan nicely sums up what’s on my mind and yours, if you’re like many members of the TeleRead community.

"David Rothman, an American writer who runs the e-book blog Tele-read.org, believes that DRM is anti-consumer and is relatively in-effective against piracy. He says: ‘DRM penalises legitimate owners with various restrictions, such as limits on the number of devices. If a book is truly popular and big money is at stake, then both amateur and professional pirates can scan paper copies, or even type them out, as happened with Harry Potter.’"

Social DRM mentioned

The Bookseller goes on: "Rothman has called for publishers to agree to ‘social DRM’—an idea mooted by Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe’s ePublishing business—no technical restrictions other than stamping a file with ‘This e-book is the property of . . .’ Social DRM, Rothman believes, would open up the e-book market, and prohibit one dominant player such as Amazon from elbowing others out. He says: ‘The real irony with Amazon is that they have been doing wonderful things with music MP3s and anti-DRM on music downloads. The damaging thing is that Amazon is using DRM to herd customers into the Kindle away from other devices. This is not good news for publishers.’

"Most publishers have thus far been leery about committing to non-DRM. However, at this year’s London Book Fair, Pan Mac digital director Sara Lloyd, while stressing she was expressing a personal view, argued that e-books without DRM would boost the e-book market."

Detail: I’ll e-mail the Bookseller about that hyphen in Tele-read.org—which would prevent some people from reaching us. Hmm. This is obviously the Brits’ revenge for all the Americanized spellings I’ve inflicted on our much-valued contributors from outside the states. More seriously, as an old print guy I can understand what happened. The online edition was probably picking up the spelling from the print side, which wouldn’t be so sensitive to such things. I’ve just bought tele-read.org, and a forward to teleread.com should soon kick in.

Where I’d respectfully disagree with a Bookman writer: U.S. Correspondent Gayle Feldman defends Michael Gorman, the not-so-open-minded past president of the American Library Association. I can appreciate Gorman’s concern over cut-and-paste and the E medium’s lack of permanence. But the transition to E will happen, whether he and Feldman want it to or not; and that is why I keep pushing the idea of a well-organized national digital library systems with provisions for guarding the integrity of e-books and other items and assuring trustworthy storage—and, yes, with standard formats to the maximum extent possible. Yes, E is a fluid medium. But, Wikipedia fashion, you can make snapshots and play up the more significant ones.

Related: Tom Tivnan’s separate blog post where he mentions ePub as an exchange format for publishers, but notes the need to make things easier for readers. I would have phrased things a bit different—to be exact, I’d emphasize that the Kindle and other e-reading devices need to be able to read an ePub file natively, without any need for translation—but that’s just a detail. Once again, the Bookseller has the right idea. Make e-books as easy as possible to use, and don’t just turn the industry over to Amazon (or, I’d add, Google even though I own a tiny speck of stock in the latter).