NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ on e-book DRM

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By Chris Meadows

The FTC was not the only three-letter acronym to address its fellow three-letter acronym, DRM, today. NPR’s All Things Considered weighed in with a four-minute audio report and accompanying text news story on e-book DRM. Laura Sydell interviewed Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire books, on her travails buying a DRM’d Isaac Asimov novel, and her concerns that her fans might not be able to make full fair use of her own novels because of DRM.

Sydell also spoke to Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press and Ian Freed, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, both of whom are very DRM-positive. On the DRM-negative side, publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin talked about how Cory Doctorow gives all his books away free as e-books and sells more print books because of it. Then Novik weighed in again that she is much less worried about piracy than obscurity.

It is interesting to see NPR take notice of the e-book DRM issue. However, one crucial failing of the report is that it falls into the false dichotomy that books must either be sold with DRM or given away completely DRM-free. The reporter never spoke to or even mentioned e-book sellers such as Baen or Fictionwise who successfully sell all or part of their catalogs in DRM-free formats.

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