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Cory Doctorow: Authors Guild worrying about wrong thing
March 31, 2009 | 6:05 pm
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By Chris Meadows
In a new column he has penned for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow suggests that the Authors Guild has “lost the plot” in their fight against the Kindle’s text-to-speech function.
After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been shipped.
Writes Doctorow:
If I were running the Authors Guild, this would be my number one issue: we can’t afford to allow our books to be used to lure readers into purchasing devices that can turn against them. Because whatever bad feelings arise from this, some of them will surely be visited upon us.
While Doctorow writes with his usual cheerfully blatant hyperbole, he does point out an issue that readers of all DRM-locked e-books should bear in mind: the e-book seller, or the company that manages the e-book format if they’re not one and the same, can potentially do bad things to you after you invest in their product.
For example, the MobiPocket forums are full of posts like this one, in which a long-time MobiPocket user plaintively demands some way to read the expensive DRM-locked books he bought years ago on his new iPhone:
As you all should know – I am now unable to read my ebooks on my new device. I am very sad about this. Remember – I paid for them and now I can’t use them.
Would you please offer me a solution for this problem.
Everybody who ever bought protected Mobi books while owning a Palm but later bought an iPhone or Nokia Maemo tablet or Android device is in the same boat.
Ironically, the probable culprit here is also the hypothetical villain of Doctorow’s piece: Amazon.com. And if Amazon should ever stop licensing the Mobi DRM format to its competitors, everybody’s DRM’d MobiPocket books will vanish entirely
The same dangers exist for every DRM-locked format, no matter how benevolent its present owners are. As Doctorow points out in his article, even a benign DRM-owner might be replaced if the company goes bankrupt or is sold to a new owner (as MobiPocket was bought by Amazon).
In the end, caveat emptor rules. The e-book buyer should beware, and reduce his dependency on and vulnerability to all DRM’d formats however he can. Otherwise, he may end up unpleasantly surprised.
Technorati Tags: Cory Doctorow,Doctorow,Amazon,Kindle,Authors Guild,MobiPocket,iPhone,Overdrive,Fictionwise
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Comments:
Why not just remove the DRM from MobiPocket books with MobiDeDRM? It’s incredibly simple and then you have your ebooks for life. I don’t quite understand Teleread’s non-stop criticism of DRM when practically every major DRM scheme has been reverse engineered and the others are sure to fall sooner or later. As someone who regularly purchases ebooks in a variety of formats, I can say DRM is simply not an issue for me.
I can’t speak for the editors of this site, but I really want ebooks to succeed and be supported. I encourage people to keep beating the DRM drum because I feel it is one of the most significant factors holding back the market right now. People should be able to own, not rent, their books.
And then there’s the fact that DRM is ineffective (as you point out). So, DRM stops no one from pirating, it’s easy to strip for the technically-inclined readers, and it discourages people from paying for content.
Robbie: Perhaps because removing the DRM, even on books that you purchased and “own”*, is illegal in the USA and many other countries?
Sure, nobody will ever know if you do it if you do it in the privacy of your own home and don’t do something foolish like blab about it on a public forum. (Certainly, if I did remove DRM on books I buy, I’d never admit to it!)
But it’s not really a solution because telling people how to do it, or indeed even telling people to do it, could be considered “trafficking” under the DMCA. (Paul Biba yells at me whenever I dare to go into too much detail about how other people are doing it in an article.)
So we do, and indeed we must, continue to criticize DRM, because if people want to do the sensible thing and remove it on the books they buy, the DMCA turns them all into lawbreakers. We can’t even talk openly about it because of the chilling effects the DMCA has on free speech.
Until and unless those aspects of the DMCA are overturned, the sensible thing is just not to buy DRM’d books at all—or at least buy them as little as possible. It removes the need to break the law, and does not support the purveyors of DRM schemes with our money.
(Not that I’m necessarily one to practice what I preach. I buy some eReader-DRM’d books because I like the interface of their reader app and don’t find their style of DRM as onerous as MobiPocket’s. But I will absolutely not support MobiPocket DRM with my money when there is any possible alternative.)
*”Own” being in quotation marks because, of course, you don’t actually “own” DRM-locked e-books, you just “license” them. (Puts me in mind of how they say you don’t “buy” beer, you just “rent” it for a while.)
A good shot across Amazon’s and the Guild’s respective bows.
Cory’s intelligent about the backlash that will come from readers who are cheated by DRM. Revoking Kindle’s text-to-speech feature is such a doltish, imperious step, it kind of unpleasantly sets the stage for further antagonisms for ebook buyers. This isn’t the way to start a relationship, let alone a technological revolution.
My hunch: the book industry doesn’t have long to avoid repeating the mistakes made by Hollywood and the music biz in the file-sharing age. Setting out to be a better jailer isn’t going to work, so why bother?
And if Amazon should ever stop licensing the Mobi DRM format to its competitors, everybody’s MobiPocket books will vanish entirely*
Um. Small correction: those copies of MobiPocket books that are infested with DRM will vanish entirely (well, become unreadable). DRM-free Mobipocket books, like those sold by Baen Books or Fictionwise’s Multiformat books, will be completely fine.
Which is a good reason to prefer them over DRM-infested versions, IMO.
Carry on.
Don’t get me wrong, I dislike DRM and wish stores stopped using it but with deDRMing tools so easily accessible and the risk of punishment for using them so incredibly low (assuming you are removing the DRM for personal use), I just don’t see it is a big issue. As your recent contributor, Stephen Windwalker argued, DRM will die out when the time is right. For now I would like the maximum availability of ebooks at the lowest cost. If publishers need the reassurance of DRM to convince them to release their books digitally then I’d prefer ebooks with DRM to no ebooks at all.
In regards to Mobipocket DRM, I think it is wrong to say that your ebooks will “vanish” if Amazon stops supporting Mobipocket. Provided you have backed-up the ebook and still have the device with the corresponding Mobi PID you should be able to open it, right?
Cat: Correct. But given that I was careful to mention “DRM’d MobiPocket” everywhere else I was assuming they’d get it from the context. I guess I’ll just add a “DRM’d” in there to make sure.
Robbie: Did you not see my footnote saying that very thing?
My apologies Chris, I did overlook your footnote.
In that regard DRMed mobipocket ebooks are the same as paper books – you are stuck with one format and if you lose or damage it you might not get the book back again. This is definitely an unfortunate way to treat digital information when the customer could instead be guaranteed lifelong access to their purchase if they were able to back it up in a DRM-free or social-DRMed format.
Cory’s article is funny and smart, and well worth reading. His conclusion is that the Author’s Guild’s opposition to reading ebooks aloud could ultimately cause harm to guild-ed authors (“authors who oppose this [read aloud] feature look like grasping, greedy jerks and will alienate their readers.”). And Kindle owners may suffer, too: they may wake up one fine morning and discover that their Kindles can no longer read anything aloud.
Doctorow’s article is another strong argument in the growing movement to raise consumer awareness about the effects of DRM.
Last week, a 91-year-old woman, working to save our enviroment, told me:
“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”
Readers everywhere should be concerned about DRM, which is most commonly known as Digital Rights Management, but for ebooks might instead spell: Don’t Read Me.
Ebooks without DRM are ebooks with their full range of capabilites enabled — the ability to print, to copy, to read aloud, and to share the ebook on other devices. Ebooks without DRM can be sold cheaper. Without DRM we would have better ebooks at lower prices.
Adding DRM isn’t free. Spending on DRM systems (for all media, not ebooks only) is now a 1 billion dollar industry, and it will reach almost 2 billion dollars by 2012. (See http://drm.info/node/93 )
Who pays for DRM? … Surely, the dollar-cost of DRM is not coming out a publisher’s lavish lunch allowance, or from the profit margins of the online booksellers. … DRM robs creators and consumers: Content creators receive lower royalties, and consumers pay higher retail prices.
Yes, it is childishly simple to crack these DRM schemes (a python script is all it takes to unlock the DRM-ed mobi books). And what can’t be cracked can be circumvented in other easy ways. Publishers and booksellers using DRM are either foolish or naive, since by adding DRM they are paying for nothing.
Can someone please send a message to publishers — maybe via skywriting, or as a full page ad in one of the remaining print newspapers — that explains the fact that DRM does not work? … And why it is dangerous to have a false sense of security: the bomb shelter in the basement is not going to save you from a nuclear holocaust.
Taking DRM out of the equation will be a big win-win-win for consumers, for authors — and for publishers, too.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
What I don’t get is why Cory thinks that it is a sinister Amazon (or DRM) thing. The ability to disable read-aloud is part of the Mobipocket standard, and always has been. It’s not a secret, and it’s not just a Mobipocket thing, either.
Go to Fictionwise, pick any book, and look at the details. You’ll see a format list that lists whether each format can be printed, or read-aloud. The list is not the same for all books, and applies to both DRM and multi-format books. All the formats can have read-aloud disabled (not that I’m sure all the formats actually have a read-aloud function in their readers).