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By David Rothman

ereaderstore eReader.com, one of the biggest e-book stores on the Web, will be picking up 17,000 nonDRMed files from Fictionwise.com—a major setback for “protection,” a silly concept in this era when it’s a cinch to digitize and upload paper editions of best-sellers.

Remember, eReader is the flagship outlet for books in the old Palm format. It carries 23,000 titles.

Some of the 23,000 already come in nonDRMed flavors elsewhere. But now DRMed titles will have to compete on the eReader site itself against books without shackles. Let’s hope the big publishers notice and at least start to experiment with nonDRMed titles in the eReader format. Just like big players in the music industry, will they have the wits to back off from DRM?

Pendergasts long hip to DRM as a sales-killer

Steve and Scott Pendergrast, the clueful brothers who own Fictionwise and recently bought eReader.com from Motricity, have long urged the giants to stop worshipping at the DRM altar—based on the most telling evidence, the sales figures. NonDRMed books by obscure authors at Fictionwise often trounce DRMed titles by star authors published by such majors as Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.

Many and perhaps most small publishers already understand what a sales toxin DRM can be—how much their customers loathe it, including the honest ones who resent not being able to move books among their gizmos, an inconvenience not shared by owners of pirated editions.

A fun note from Lida

In fact, last night’s welcome news reached me from a small publisher named  Lida Quillan, who, as the savvy and author-friendly owner of Twilight Times Books, is beloved by many in the e-book community. Lida is a passionate enemy of DRM, just like the late Jim Baen of Baen Books, which, via the subscription model and others, has turned a nice buck off e-books without “protection.”

“I wrote to Fictionwise to request that all Twilight Times Books titles uploaded to eReader.com be offered for sale ‘unencrypted,’” Lida e-mailed me. “Below is the reply I received.”

Here it is:

Lida,

We are creating unencrypted eReader files for all 17,000 MultiFormat eBooks at Fictionwise.

When we are finished, all partner publisher titles will be available as unencrypted eReader files at ereader.com, and the eReader format will be added to the available MultiFormat download options at Fictionwise.com.

Partner publisher titles should start appearing at ereader.com in the next few weeks.

Cheers!

Daniel Jorissen
Director of Publishing
Fictionwise, Inc

Kudos to the Pendergrasts and to Daniel, who, Lida reminds us, “has been with FW for years, working behind the scenes.”

I hope that that the .epub standard from the IDPF will catch on, but meanwhile the addition of the 17,000 titles to eReader.com will be a nice boost to the eReader format. The DRMed version, which lets owner-specific information be embedded, as opposed to restricting book access in the usual sense, can be simultaneously used on all of your gizmos without the same hassles of, say, Mobipocket or Microsoft Reader or “protected” Adobe format. In major respects the eReader approach overlaps with the idea of social DRM, which I’ve advocated as a compromise between the DRM zealots and “protection”-hating consumers. With social DRM, a name can be embedded in in a human-readable way; it’s the approach that Wowio, the ad-supported service, uses. The best DRM, of course, is none. Even eReader, which encrypts credit card information, means some extra paperwork for readers.

Amazon questions

From here, the obvious question is, Will Jeff Bezos and Amazon colleagues follow Fictionwise’s lead and stop inflicting DRM on publishers who would prefer that Amazon not require it for  inclusion in the Mobipocket and Kindle stores? And what about the next step? When will big-time publishers follow the examples of so many of their smaller brethren and spurn a technology that is better at siphoning money into the pockets of certain tech vendors than it is at protecting intellectual property?

In fact, DRM not only reduces sales, it also encourages the proliferation of proprietary formats, which in turn, by linking novels and other works to specific commercial products, detract from books’ value as a serious and permanent medium. You can’t love literature and DRM both, if you know all the facts; they are inherently at odds. Granted, some excellent publishers use DRM, but even at that, they regard “protection” as a necessary evil and have mixed feelings about it at best.

Yes, some publishers may be deluded by the “protection” claims of DRM vendors and actually revel in the DRM-linked proliferation of formats—rejoicing that such arrangements force readers to repurchase the same books when they switch machines. Actually, however, the mix of DRM lockins and a proprietary approach just enrages readers by making it less practical to own e-books for real. I myself rarely buy DRMed books; instead I favor used p-editions—when I’d much rather buy E and see the money go to authors and publishers.

A DRM and eBabel time bomb for Amazon and others

E-book novices may not understand the nuances immediately. But wait until, say, certain Kindle owners want to move on to new machines from different companies without having to repurchase their Kindle-format titles all over again. A time-bomb is ticking away, Jeff, at least if you want to make money off content, not just hardware. You need to defuse it now and, within your Kindle and Mobi stores, encourage the move away from DRM—just as you laudably have done through Amazon’s DRMless MP3 store. If anyone has the ability and clout to educate publishers and turn them around on the DRM issue, you do, Jeff. Reliance on DRM, just because Amazon now sees it as boosting Kindle and Mobi profits, is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous in the long term—sooner or later the public will wake up. Your rivals at Fictionwise already have. They know that fixating on DRM is more risky, not less.

Even the IDPF‘s hope of creating a DRM standard to accompany the .epub format—an effort I support, as a compromise–is not without risks. Will the IDPF be able to develop a standard or some other form interoperability without increasing the risks of cracks? The jury is out on that one, as it is on the issue of how much genuine compatibility there will be with a DRM standard in place.

 
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