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By David Rothman

image “I recently e-checked out a book from the New York Public Library, and it was such a frustrating experience I would not do so again. I’m warning you this is a rant, but there must be a better way to distribute electronic materials. Here’s why it drove me crazy.” – Wormbook blog, written by a booklover named Ellen—thoroughly fed up with Adobe’s DRM-infested software.

The TeleRead take: Libraries care about the interiors of their buildings, such as the NYPL‘s, shown here. I hope that librarians at the forthcoming IDPF conference will care just as much about e-book usability; this year, may they imagepush hard for alternatives to traditional Digital Rights Management! One sort-of-fix would be to let patrons browse individual books online for X number of days, either through straight browser-based approaches or an online reader like eBooks.com‘s. Or maybe even a toaster-simple online ePUB reader someday? Yet another approach would be the use of “permanent checkouts”—the use of social DRM and letting patrons keep books forever, just so they didn’t share them. Patrons could still rely on traditional DRMed books if they wanted. But at least they’d have choices.

Better than today’s nightmare

Granted, there might have to be quotas for individual patrons’ access to SDRMed library books since libraries would be paying for more than conventional lending rights. But that would still be better than the present nightmare. I can think of other models, too, such as TeleRead-style library consortia offering lump sums for some books for national and maybe even global rights, so no one need worry about shackling the titles involved. I’ll have more to say on business models later.

Meanwhile some advice for Adobe…

adobe More immediately, I’ll be curious to see if Washington actually does act out of character and study Adobe and other DRM-related companies for possible failure to provide necessary disclosure to consumers. Might there be legal risks in the future? Adobe would do well to read E-book DRM among Federal Trade Commission’s targets? And how about Adobe in particular?

Also check out my earlier complaint against the Rube Goldbergish Web pages that Adobe uses to try to get people going with Digital Editions. Guys, don’t you ever learn? Nothing against Adobe’s people, including Bill McCoy who, at least at the personal level, has bravely pushed the social DRM concept. It’s the user horrors I hate. May Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen listen—which would help the shareholders, not just the Ellens!

image Just remember, Shantanu. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday Amazon made a push in the library market and tried to sell its closed-system approach by focusing on the Kindle’s ease of use. Or what if Amazon, which has promoted DRMfree music and has people reading this blog, actually follows my suggestions on how to wean libraries off over-reliance on traditional DRM? Not to mention the real action, in the retail sector.

So fret less about your past DRM investments, Shantanu and friends, and look to the future. The same for other companies. I’m picking on Adobe for now, though, because your DRM is so widespread—for commercial reasons, not user-related ones—and is thus so toxic to e-books. Any system that users loathe won’t won’t be sustainable for the long haul. I’d hate to see DRM contribute to another e-book bust, the way it did before. Especially now that the U.S. and a good part of the world are in a recession, profits should come ahead of techno-ideology.

Related: Ficbot’s earlier TeleBlog post in a similar vein about library DRM hassles. See? Ellen has company. Lots.

 
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