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Why Ken Brooks—ed publishing exec and IDPF board member—is sticking with DRM
March 9, 2009 | 9:46 am
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By David Rothman
"For publishers the potential upside of removing DRM is pretty limited and the potential downside is huge: that’s the reason it’s not moving." – Ken Brooks’ Tweet last month.
The TeleRead take: Ken is a senior VP with Cengage Learning—an education-oriented publishing conglomerate—as well as an IDPF board member and a speaker at the recent Tools of Change Conference. He’s spent years on the production side of the book business.
In a civil way, how would you answer Ken? He and others are talking of DRM and game theory. Could it be used to justify or argue against DRM?
The biggest arguments against DRM, as I see it: It’s a sales and literary toxin. People want to own books for real. Maybe they won’t articulate it, but that’s in back of many a shopper’s mind. Also, the moment you link your eternal ownership of books to the survival of a particular company, books become less serious as a durable medium. Isn’t permanence one of the glories of books? I’d encourage DRM-oriented publishers to consider social DRM as a compromise, as well as new business models—so that, for example, students’ tuition could include payments to publishers of books they were using.
Another perspective: Check out TeleBlog regular Chris Meadows’ anti-DRM statements to the FTC on TeleRead’s behalf, as well as his post headlined FTC DRM comments: Industry groups speak up for, against DRM.
Related: eBooks 1: Business Models and Strategy, which Ken used at TOC.
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Comments:
How would I answer? Well, let’s go back a few days to a post that said something about publishers wanting DRM to avoid what happened to the music industry…
Exactly.
They insisted on DRM, and look what happened. Lots of music was stolen, everyone hates them, and millions of dollars later in lawsuits, what happened? Hardly anyone sells music with DRM now.
And that’s not even to mention the Tower of eBabble problem.
The way I see it there are three major school of thought about ebooks:
1. most publishers are not interested in them, hate them, but need to be seen doing something – so drm, high market killing prices, Babel tower, and soothing words, red herrings, and justifications.
Listening to their words is a waste of time, better look to their actions which speak louder; so any publisher representative should be taken as lying through his/her teeth about interest in ebooks *unless* proven otherwise.
2. some publishers and authors use ebooks smartly to prop-up their print business (mostly smal/medium genre houses like Baen, even Orbit recently, and many authors). For them drm is unimportant, and while some offer e-books for free, many recognize that there is a revenue stream there to be exploited, and especially for smaller houses that adds nicely to the bottom line; print is still king though for their business models, e just subordinate but smartly
3. the unpublished POD authors with high print prices, and some small all-e startups who try to make an all-e business and for them drm is most of the time an enemy, but so are “free” ebooks
For me the right attitude for now is 2) with experiments in the direction of 3) to see what may work to generate lots of direct e-revenue or e-revenue enabled. Everyone that does 1 only is fighting the current, while everything doing just 3 has a very hard time keeping their heads up in the current so to speak, since the digital revenue is just not there outside very special, isolated cases – and as E. Flint noted in a good article on this subject trashing a Time article on “new publishing”, basing yourself on that instant success is like buiyng a lottery ticket – some win the lottery after all
Mr. Brooks seems to be of opinion #1 and as such he is not really worth listening to, since he/his company truly has no interests in ebooks and will just throw all this red herrings with a straight face to show, “oh man, we are trying, but….”
I would suggest that they need to re-define the question. The issue isn’t really just a stark, all-or-nothing DRM VS No-DRM.
The real issue is what are consumers actually buying? Are they buying a book, a file, or a lease?
The question the industry needs to answer for itself is “how badly do they want to squeeze user functionality”. Because actions breed reaction; the more restrictive the form of DRM imposed upon an item, the more incentive and the higher the payback for breaking it.
There are literally dozens of technologies available that can be used to seek a balance between author’s right, publisher’s rights, and consumer’s right. The problem has multiple solutions (social DRM, on-the-fly encryption, locking files to storage cards rather than unique devices, etc) that can make sure everybody is covered.
They just need to make sure that everybody’s interests are considered and don’t simply shovel the stuff out on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Because the guaranteed reaction is going to be: neither.
The publishers need to settle on a *system* where there is no incentive to break whatever sort of controls they feel (in their paranoid nightmares) they need. And they need to remember that books are not music and not all books are the same.
The proper answer to the question of whether to DRM or not is really: it depends.
Some books will do best with no DRM, others will honestly need the strongest dRM known to humanity. Most, however, can get by with the lightest forms, if any. However, any system built around a one-size-fits-all solution will inevitably lead to the harshest, most anti-consumer solutions, and inevitably make the breaking of the system most compelling.
In other words, the stricter the DRM the more it demands cracking.
You don’t need game theory to figure that out; just look out your window.
I think the correct answer is that the upside of removing DRM is a lot higher than he thinks (including better customer satisfaction and lower ebook production costs), but that there is no downside to removing DRM from retail ebooks.
What downsides could there be?
* Without DRM, people will use torrents to share ebooks: Ummm… DRM doesn’t stop that. Even not having an ebook published at all stops that.
* Without DRM, people will give ebooks to friends and neighbours. Ummm… DRM doesn’t stop that.
* Without DRM, people won’t need to buy the book again in ten years time. Umm…. yes. This is a potential downside. But publishers constantly claim this isn’t the intention of DRM, so it’s hardly a downside is it?
* Without DRM, time restricted ebooks can’t be provided to libraries. A genuine downside to removing DRM. So keep time-limited DRM for library ebooks, but don’t use it on books you sell. This has the added advantage that if the only DRM is on library books, there’s much less incentive to crack it. After all, if you’re going to widely distribute copies, it’s a lot easier to do it with purchased copies without the DRM.
There’s no downside, and considerable upside, so game theory says you should not use DRM on retail ebooks.
Cengage is a textbook publisher and both of their major delivery methods, CourseSmart and iChapters, are exclusively time-limited DRM i.e. 1 or 2 semesters.
When you consider the percentage of (paper) textbooks resold, it seems to me that there might be a case for DRM in conjunction with textbooks. Charge less but make it non-resellable. Better for the authors, the publishers, and the students. Worse for used bookstores which I don’t have a lot of sympathy for. If you sold non-DRMed textbooks, I believe it highly probable that you’d sell very few and that sharing would be very high.
For fiction, I agree with most of the points about DRM adding to complexity without providing sufficient protection to be worthwhile. DRM doesn’t make sense when you can give a customer a legal choice for a few bucks or an illegal choice for free. If you have to charge, say, $50 to recoup your costs (or $150 for a hardback textbook), the illegal choice looks a lot better.
Back in the day, when I switched from being a lit major to an econ major, my textbook bill went up something like 800%. You can’t get a job as a lit major, but at least your books are cheap.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com