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WSJ’s Digit Blog understands the Adobe DRM problem
August 14, 2009 | 3:27 pm
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By Paul Biba
The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey Fowler understands the issue of DRM, even if the New York Times’ Brad Stone doesn’t. Here’s an excerpt from the Journal’s Digit Blog entitled Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon:
Thinking about making the leap to digital books? First, you’ll need to add a jumble of new lingo to your dictionary: .epub, pdb, BeBB, and Adobe Content Server 4, just to name a few.
The burgeoning marketplace for e-books is riddled with inconsistent and incompatible formats. That means there’s often little guarantee that an e-book you buy from one online store, like the new Barnes & Noble store, will work on popular reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader. …
But Sony’s Epub announcement belies another problem: publishers still want to add digital rights management, or DRM, software on top of most new books. Epub files can’t contain DRM on their own.
For DRM, Sony’s online store will turn to a service from software maker Adobe. Technically, the files are in .epub format, but they can only be opened after getting a green light from Adobe’s Content Server 4 software.
Adobe’s software for adding DRM to books is — no surprise — proprietary …
Of course, there’s an even more elegant solution for all of this format confusion: Publishers, stores and e-readers could just switch to plain-old .epub format books, and let readers do what we want with them. The recording industry eventually dropped DRM from many music stores — although, admittedly, under circumstances in which they had few other options. Apparently, book publishers aren’t yet that desperate.
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Comments:
Look, I hate DRM and I strip it off whenever I can just on principal even though I never share my ebooks, but this uncompromising attitude toward Adobe epub DRM may do more harm than good.
An ebook newbie reading the NYT article would likely get the impression that epub books could be read on a wide selection of hardware and that would be true despite the misleading use of the term “open”.
An ebook newbie reading that WSJ blog entry would likely get the impression that if you buy an ebook there’s no telling what hardware it will or won’t work on and the whole thing is just a big mess and it’s safer just to avoid ebooks. That, as we know, would be false.
Personally, I prefer the article that’s encouraging if slightly misleading to the one that’s overly scary and discouraging.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Murray.
“Personally, I prefer the article that’s encouraging if slightly misleading to the one that’s overly scary and discouraging.”
But for people who want to own books for real, the NYT article was more than just slightly misleading. What if Amazon does ePub and uses its own DRM and people throw out their Adoble-DRM-capable machines and get Kindle-DRM-capable ones? Books lost! Look at the current mess for BeBook owners who sank a fortune into Mobipocket books and now want to be able to read Adobe-DRMed ePub.
What’s more, although I’m a big e-book booster, I’d rather people be discouraged than misled. I see TeleRead’s main job as not to talk up e-books but to tell the truth about them–whether it be on consumer issues or otherwise. I just happen to be believe that the truth will inherently serve the cause of e-books. But truth first!
Thanks,
David
I think Murray is correct. But a more important point is being missed here: Amazon’s DRM works only on the Kindle, Adobe’s DRM overlay works on multiple (13?) devices with more coming. The problem is less one of DRM than one of DRM babel. As an increasing number of device manufacturers adopt the Adobe DRM, the more that DRM will become a standard. With both a standardized DRM and a standardized format, combined with a multitude of devices capable of accessing those standards, the less of a problem DRM becomes. Yes, it would be better if there were no DRM at all, but between the current two extremes, I’d rather compromise on standardized DRM and formatting.