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drmfree tag campaign on Amazon picks up steam: Endorsed by Cory Doctorow and home-paged at MobileRead
April 12, 2009 | 10:52 am
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By David Rothman
Boing Boing, the popular group blog from novelist-activist Cory Doctorow and others, has endorsed the drmfree tag campaign started here last week for books at Amazon and other stores.
And MobileRead has just put Steve Jordan’s related post on the home page.
“I’m with David on this,” Cory says in the blog, and he goes on to raise pesky questions. “I’ve been trying to find out for weeks, for example, what the story is with the ‘DRM-free’ option for Kindle… Is there a patent or contractual term that prohibits owners of Kindle DRM-free books from moving them to competing devices, or patents or other claims that prevents competitors from creating readers or converters for these books?” And what about DRM-related flags? Cory sensibly wants answers. Amazon will be using DRM to shut off text-to-speech when publishers request; what other DRM-enforced flags could be out there? And couldn’t Amazon turn them on after you buy?
“The point,” writes novelist Steve Jordan, a contributor to both MobileRead and TeleRead, “is simple: Let consumers see what is DRM-encumbered, and what is DRM-free in the Kindle strore, and vote with their wallets. Their hope is that eventually, Amazon will get the message and dump DRM from the Kindle store altogether, or at least wherever possible. They also advocate independent sellers using the tag. I’ve already added it to my website’s keywords, since all of my novels are sold DRM-free. I encourage any other authors of DRM-free material (and sites like MobileRead) to do the same where applicable.”
“The tag campaign is an interesting concept,” MobileRead editor Bob Russell adds in an e-mail to me. “If DRM becomes a prominently visible ‘wart’ that comes with locked-down e-books, it will certainly help to move the choice into the hands of the consumer. It’s hard to imagine that people will put up with e-book DRM any more than music DRM after they know what it means to them.”
Thanks, everyone! And similarly thanks to Steve Windwalker for his original tagging suggestion. Say My Name, his technothriller set in Boston, already has a drmfree tag. My Washington newspaper novel, The Solomon Scandals, will soon be getting one.
May your own book follow, with the standard tag! If you’re an author, add the tag if you can or ask your publisher to, as long as the book is free of DRM taint. If you’re a reader, tag books drmfree if you know they’re “safe.” You’ll can simply use the tag blank on the page listing a book. Takes less than a minute!
DRM is anti-consumer since it interferes with genuine ownership of books.
A tag for DRMed books
Meanwhile people are wondering what tag to use on DRMed books. Solution? Just use the tag drm. It’s nice and short.
The consensus here at TeleRead is now to avoid the defectivebydesign tag, so people won’t mistakenly think it refers to books’ contents or casts aspersions on the authors. I’d suggested that existing tag. But I’m won over by the objections to it.
And tags for reDRMed books
Let’s hope that writers and publishers will appreciate the risk of backlashes if they reDRM books with the drmfree tag. If not, there could be a tag for that situation. Maybe drmback or drmback-12april-09? What’s more, Amazon customers could issue “DRM back” warnings in the comments areas associated with books.
Plus, tips on creating DRMfree books for the Kindle
Christine wanted to know “how authors can put their books on Amazon DRMless.” From what we’ve heard, the default for Amazon’s Digital Text Platform is actually, No DRM.
The FAQ for DTP is here, and one section actually says: “Amazon DTP will handle .mobi file formatting and images very well. Please note that only unencrypted mobi files are supported.” (Update, 12:30 p.m.: Wait—Amazon might be contradicting itself about mobi and DRM.) Other supported formats include HTML, zipped HTML, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF and plain text.” See a DRM-related discussion within a DTP form. One poster notes that Amazon legalese says that “we will be entitled to utilize DRM technology in connection with the distribution of Licensed Digital Content but are not obligated to do so.” I’ll welcome any corrections from Amazon or TeleRead readers if I’m wrong here on any detail.
You bet Amazon could be clearer about the DRM! The perception of a good part of the publishing world is that all Kindle books are “protected.” Wrong!
(Updated at 1:15 p.m. Washington, D.C., time to reflect the post’s presence on the home page at MobileRead.)
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Comments:
David,
I contacted the Amazon DTP support folks a while back with the question on DRM and got back this response:
“Using Amazon DTP, publishers have the ability to add or omit DRM from their submissions. If you use the DTP conversion, the default will be DRM-Free. You can, however submit a mobipocket file through DTP, which can have DRM when it was created. If this is the case, then DTP will honor the DRM.”
As for creating DRM-free content for the Kindle store, any file that is not a DRMed Mobipocket file (.prc or .mobi) will be published without DRM. That means that the large majority of books published through the DTP are not DRMed, because most authors and publishers are not making Mobipocket files.
Joshua Tallent
http://KindleFormatting.com/book
eBook guru and author of the complete guide to Kindle formatting
Many thanks, Joshua. I’ll add a link to your comments. Clearly Amazon has a bit of clarification to do re DRM and .mobi. David
Thanks David.
Just checking on this, David. Amazon says that if you use the DTP conversion, the default is DRM-free. But I’d like to check before tagging my books as such, and I don’t have a Kindle. How can I do that? I submitted all of them as HTML.
Hi, Paula. Here’s how you can tell if a book is DRM free. I’ll be surprised if your HTML-originated books are tainted. Thanks for caring! – David
Thanks, David. I’m afraid I still don’t understand. How can I rename an Amazon Kindle book .mobi if I don’t have a Kindle? Don’t I have to download the book from Amazon first? And also, is a .mobi reader open source software? Do I just download it free?
I really feel like a dummy about this.
This is a great campaign, and I’ll be participating in all my reviews and Kindle activity at Amazon. Thanks, David, for spreading the word.
A commenter at Boing Boing made a good point – the DRM issue is important for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the control of information they thus gain; and the more control Amazon gains, the more their apparent discrimination against gay/lesbian-themed books matters.
Paula, not to worry. Sensible questions. Here’s reply that others can correct if need be, or otherwise improve.
1. To download your Kindle books, you may need a K machine. Borrow one and use the USB cable to copy over the file to your desktop. A memory card might work in the case of the Kindle 1. Please note that another approach would be to test-create a file and examine it if Amazon will let you do so before it goes on sale. Almost surely, since you used HTML for creation and presumably fed them into the Desktop Publishing Platform, you’ll find that files are not DRMed. Check out Joshua’s assurance in the first comment above.
2. Use your desktop machine to rename the files to test ‘em with the .mobi extension. Use a right click on a file list to call up the rename command, at least if you’re using a PC.
3. To try to read the .mobifiles, you can use Mobipocket on a PC at least. It’s not open source but is a free download from Mobipocket.com.
I invite others to point out errors in the above or come up with better or more appropriate ways for Paula, especially if she has access only to a Mac.
Best of luck, Paula, and keep us posted!
David
David,
Thanks so much for these instructions. I have to say it seems inconvenient at the least to have to borrow a Kindle in order to tell if my books are DRM’d. That would mean every author and/or publisher who posts stuff to the Kindle store would need to have one (if they care about DRM).
When you say an alternate method is to test create a file and examine it before it goes on sale, you’re not talking about the preview function, are you? You upload a file and see if it’s formatted the way you want. When you’re happy with it, you press Publish. But once you do, you don’t have access to any of your data until the book actually goes on sale, so you can’t get to the file anymore.
No worries about the PC vs. Mac thing, though. I’m a lifelong PC girl. I’m happy to help other authors who only have Macs, though. Just let me know, and I’ll see if I can open your .mobi files on my Win XP machine.
Please note the unfairness of the drmfree tag for publishers and authors from outside the US. Unless you have a US bank account AND a US postal address AND a US Tax ID, you cannot publish through the Amazon DTP platform. The only option is to publish via Mobipocket, which means that the ebooks have DRM whether we want it or not.
Other platforms, such as Content Reserve and eBooks.com, currently do not allow a publisher to publish DRM free ebooks, AFAIK. Perhaps we should start another campaign to encourage these to allow DRM free books.
Martyn
Well, Martyn, since Jeff has supposedly claimed to be DRM agnostic, we need to work toward that a DRM-free option for Mobipocket books as well. But within the Kindle area, the drmfree campaign should go on.
By the way, I wonder if the enforced use of proprietary DRM might be an area for the European Union to investigate. What do you think?
Thanks,
David