A lady with OverDrive once told me that many librarians love DRM. Was it to get users to toe the line and behave? I don’t remember. Looking back, however, I think of the ultimate librarian stereotype, Marian in The Music Man before she succumbed to “Professor” Harold Hill (video snippet). Imagine a dour, uptight woman with bunned hair who finds joy in ssshing users—in rules of any kind.
Luckily the library world abounds with nonMarians, one of whom, the LibrarianInBlack, aka Sarah Houghton-Jan at the San Mateo County Library in California, has just written a nice, cogent essay on DRM’s endless vexations for librarians and users. In School Library Journal, she complains of issues in the area of device compatibility and technical problems for users (including the disabled) and people archiving. Meanwhile Sarah tells how librarians can cope or at least try to.
According to her, librarians should explain that the DRM isn’t the libraries’ fault; talk up collections that all hardware and operating systems can use; and tell why compatibility problems exist. They should also prompt patrons to object to incompatible DRM; in addition, they should mention sources of paid content for the incompatible devices. Finally, they can mention libraries’ continued investigation of DRM-related issues.
So what’s the long-term solution for libraries and publishers? If major content providers such as Random House want DRM, then, as I see it, they need much more interoperability among different “protection” systems. I’m heartened to see Nick Bogaty, executive director of the IDPF, reaffirm that this issue is on the group’s radar. If the technical issues can’t be solved, then librarians and publishers really do need to get serious about changing business models or perhaps trying social DRM (perhaps in combination with a different biz model). Of course, as a library user, I say: The best DRM is none.
"Amazon built its business not on books but on traditional tactics of destroying competition and creating dependency. However, many people here in Amherst, MA are ..."
A lady with OverDrive once told me that many librarians love DRM. Was it to get users to toe the line and behave? I don’t remember. Looking back, however, I think of the ultimate librarian stereotype, Marian in The Music Man before she succumbed to “Professor” Harold Hill (video snippet). Imagine a dour, uptight woman with bunned hair who finds joy in ssshing users—in rules of any kind. 
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