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By David Rothman

imageConsultant Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical is a veteran book guy who sees the whole picture—e-books, p-books, brick-and-mortar stores, you name it, based on his decades in the business.

So I’d hope that Random House, S&&, Hachette and others using traditional DRM would pay special attention to his thoughts on social DRM, which would discourage piracy by embedding names of e-book purchasers.

Mike and I don’t always agree. But we certainly do on the basic idea of social DRM. In an e-mail exchange with me, where among other things I asked about that approach, Mike writes:

It seems to me that social DRM—placing the purchaser’s name and perhaps other data (most aggressive: their credit card number) on the files they buy would be adequate to suppress the piracy people fear. I have heard it said that these watermarks can be erased, but then it is also said that all DRM schemes can be hacked. The advantage of social DRM is that it doesn’t interfere with the kind of sharing uses (between one computer and another of mine; or letting my wife read something I’ve bought) that most reasonable people should find acceptable.

image No DRM would be even better, as I see it. But social DRM, despite negatives such as privacy risks, is far, far better than traditional DRM which makes it impossible to own e-books for real. I’d buy a lot more e-books if they came with social DRM rather than the traditional variety. The longer Kindle owners own their machines, the more likely they’ll feel like me.

Look, big publishers, it’s too late to slow down e-books by hobbling them with DRM. They’re your future market—a way to reach people who would never step into bookstores, now dwindling in number.

On the issue of Amazon’s new iPhone/Kindle-format initiative and the company’s refusal to do ePub, Mike tells me:

There is no question that Amazon’s proprietary system presents them with the key advantage of lock-in. I’m sure that’s why they do it. I agree that it is something publishers should fear, but a) I’m not sure why Amazon should act in anybody’s interests but their own and b) it undercuts the argument that open standards are necessary to achieve useful device interoperability.

Separately but in a very related vein, Nick Bogaty of Adobe says as quoted in a Stanza Twitter: "There is no technical reason for Amazon not to support epub."

In other words, Amazon is less interested in openness than in herding people into its format.

Detail: eReader is already using a credit-card-number-based system—with the numbers scrambled—to discourage piracy. Alas, this still means that different versions of eReader are required to read the same file on different kinds of devices. But at least eReader is less obnoxious than, say, Mobipocket. Random House and other majors are letting books appear in eReader former. But they might want to consider working with Fictionwise (eReader’s owner, recently bought by Barnes & Noble) on a version without credit card numbers involved—just straight ePub files embedded with owners’ names.

Related: Social DRM vs. traditional Mobipocket-style DRM: Time for a switch?

And speaking of Mike: See his thoughts and Adam Hodgkins’ on biz models on Google, Sony, Apple and Amazon. Key sentence from Mike: "…as Hodgkin sees it, Google and Apple are pursuing directly opposite strategies to bring the ebook business to themselves. Google is betting that the future is licensing whole libraries in the cloud and Amazon is betting that it is buying ebooks one at a time to download to your device."

Image credit: CC-licensed photo by caseywest.

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