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By David Rothman

Is ex-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman about to change her mind on Digital Rights Management—and avoid it? Or maybe play it down in her new Open Read e-publishing operation?

“Do I really have to answer? I’m not sure,” Friedman told New York University publishing students after someone asked about Open’s position on DRM. “Initially, I was very against the idea of no-DRM. But now I’m not sure."

DRM as the Lysenkoism of big publishing

image Ideally she soon will be sure—of the negatives of DRM for consumer trade publishing. Among big New York publishers, the DRM ideology is a little like the old Soviet genetics. If you were a geneticist and wanted to get ahead in the Stalin years, you toed the party line and favored Trofim Lysenko’s brilliance over the shaky, unproven theories of Mendel (sarcasm alert).

Like Lysenkoism, DRM is a laugh—since it’s so easy to scan paper editions of bestsellers and put them on P2P networks; and as for typical books, publisher Tim O’Reilly is right on the mark when he says obscurity is more of an obstacle than piracy. If you want to discourage pirates, the embedding of readers’ names in e-books would be far, far more effective than the usual DRM.

Will the top people in book publishing ever wake up, given the Depression—yes, the D word, not the R word—that book publishers and other communications-related companies have been in? DRM isn’t merely an inconvenience for legitimate buyers of e-books. It just might be a job-killer—as a reducer of books’ value as a medium.

On top of everything else, DRM is a tax on readers and publishers. The technology tends to be proprietary and DRM providers need to charge for their services. In addition, DRM adds to the cost of publishers’ infrastructure and increases the compatibility challenges of the e-book industry. For now at least, reader gizmos from Amazon, Sony and B&N can’t read each other’s “protected” books. Sony and B&N hope to be able to play with each other soon, but then there are scads of other brands out there—not just dedicated e-readers but many other devices such as cellphones.

Smartly, Harlequin’s new digital-only imprint, Carina Press, tells writers that its contracts will not cover use of DRM. And O’Reilly, one of the most tech-hip of publishers, is shunning the technology in line with the wishes of the company’s founder.

For more information on Jane Friedman and Open Read: Read Sarah Weinman’s AOL Daily Finance article, source of the Friedman quotes on DRM.

In the DRM area: See The Pirates of Publishing: A view from the crow’s nest, by William Johnson, a Masters Candidate in the NYU publishing program.

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