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Another look at DRM
February 16, 2009 | 2:44 pm
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By Paul Biba
Not another article about DRM! Sorry, but I found a good one this time. Kassia Krozser over at Booksquare makes some excellent points. She feels that consumers don’t really care about DRM unless it interferes with their reading their own books. I agree with that. I couldn’t care less if an e-book has DRM provided that DRM allows me to read the book on whatever devices I own, or may own in the future. For example, eReader’s DRM has never bothered me very much. It’s easy to enter my credit card number into the book when I change devices.
Kassia deals intelligently with the DRM and the entire ecosystem: readers, authors, publishers and booksellers. Go take a look.
I’m not naively calling for the death of DRM (a girl can hope, though), but I am trying to find ways to lessen its negative impact. People who buy books hate DRM. They may not know what to call it, but they harbor ill will toward the concept. We’re seeing incremental increases in ebook sales each quarter. It’s small potatoes now (which is why the next post will about pricing. Again.), but it’s a growing market.
The advantage of this slow-but-steady growth is that the book industry has a chance to get it right from a customer point of view. There are a lot of interests to balance, a lot of needs to consider, many perspectives to view. You can’t please everyone and you’re going to get some stuff wrong.
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Comments:
The fundamental problem with drm is that however easy to use is, it guarantees that the book will be unreadable at some time in the future, much sooner than a print book. CC numbers get lost in time, ereader may not survive in 5 years from now and so on…
For a short time frame it does not matter, but considering that I own books published 50 years and longer ago, I inherited a 1000+ volume library from my father and I want to pass books to my son, this matters a lot to me.
I very rarely buy non-removable drm ebooks, and do so only when the price is very low compared to print, but unless a non-drm copy from the wild makes it to me I consider those just like library books, to be enjoyed for some time, but not mine.
For non-drm ebooks, many backups, universal formats and tools to convert, and you will stay ahead of the curve whatever devices or file formats come around, however many computers or hard drives you crash…
So DRM of any nature means rental not possession and if people are fine with that, so be it, but let us not kid ourselves
Until now commercial ebooks were just for aficionados, but with the Kindle popular with the non-tech, non IRC crowd, I predict a huge outcry when Kindles go out of warranty and they start breaking on a large scale as all electronic devices do sooner or later.
Is like you read my mind! I was thinking the same, now with the kindle, and other devices.
Ownership is a legacy concept associate with physical media such as DVD’s, CD’s or paper books. These all have a package that you purchase. E-books are transmitted without any physical media. You cannot own a package for each purchase.
The impaired e-book ownership is blamed on DRM but that has nothing to do with the un-ownable nature of a non-physical medium. Paper books are owned by the paper and screen books are owned by the screen.
Paper is cheap and durable, screens are not.
Whatever form, perpetual guaranteed (with minimal precautions like backups) access to what you buy, until you decide to give it away or junk it, is essential for me and quite a few other people in any multiple use content like books and music.
Movies, games, magazines, newspapers are not multiple use by and large so one shot/limited time access is more acceptable, though even there people like to “own” them.
I completely agree that things can go differently and acceptance of limited time access for music and books starts dominating, but as of now the utter failure or at best marginal acceptance of drm, music subscription schemes and such does not show any hint that things will change soon.
“I couldn’t care less if an e-book has DRM provided that DRM allows me to read the book on whatever devices I own, or may own in the future.”
Seems to me you’re trying to have your cake and let the DRM-fans eat it – the whole point of a DRM scheme is to stop books playing on any device. This may or may not slow piracy down, but it’s inevitably a pain in the arse for consumers.
Gary has a good point about legacy concepts, and I would include privacy as a legacy concept. It seems like an invasion of privacy when some company plants software on a device you own that keeps you from doing what you want with it. My gut reaction is to reject the content AND the device, but I guess that’s my legacy concept of free will talking.