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DRM: Just when will authors and the publishing establishment get it? Listen to Smart Bitch Sarah!
May 14, 2009 | 8:30 am
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By David Rothman
I wanted to run a pro-DRM post that a book biz insider made on an e-mail list. He wouldn’t let me. Feared it would just stir up bad feelings against him and his employer.
But meanwhile I was pleased to see another insider, Calvin Reid over at Publishers Weekly, note the following in his writeup of the IDPF’s Digitial Book 2009 conference: “More than ever Digital Rights Management—and even the notion of e-book piracy—was portrayed as more of a problem to the developing e-book market than e-book piracy itself.”
Exactly, Calvin. Perhaps someday you won’t just note the discontent with DRM but publicly share it. This is a revenue-drainer. Speakers such as Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches / Trashy Books were right on the money about the damage DRM is doing. What we have is a major disconnect between insiders and outsiders. Here’s a Reid excerpt illustrating this:
“Harlequin director of digital content Malle Vallik said Harlequin publishes more e-books (140 titles) each month than print books, though she admitted that Harlequin authors demand DRM—to a display of dismay and mock weeping by Wendell. ‘Our readers want e-books,’ said Vallik, “whatever sells in print sells just as well in digital. Backlist is big and half our sales each month. Readers want interoperability, more titles, nicely designed devices, adjustable fonts and blurbs for fiction.’”
Hey, Malle, perhaps it’s time for Harlequin to begin an intensive education program to remind writers that DRM is a laugh in this era of scanners. And how about Social DRM, which makes widespread interoperability and other amenities a lot easier to achieve with ePub books than with traditional DRM in use? Harlequin is leader in e-books, home to many good things, and perhaps you can experiment with social DRM in a major way—that is, embedding the names of readers in books to discourage copying. Give it a shot, if you aren’t already! No need for Smart Bitch Sarah to weep.
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Comments:
I agree that many authors ask for DRM. They see the widespread availability of pirated works and know how hard they’ve had to work to create their novel. Piracy is a problem–it’s just that I don’t see DRM as the solution.
Rob Preece
Publisher
There’s a lot of wisdom on this issue in Eric Flint’s introduction to the Baen Free Library.
Unfortunately there’s a gap between older authors and newer authors. I suspect a lot of older authors will always want DRM (and their estates afterwards will insist upon it, locking down a lot of valuable work into DRM hell; we’ll probably never see Lord of the Rings unattached to DRM for over another half-century), but newer authors will eventually no longer want it.
Doesn’t help that, up until one or two years ago, SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) was trying to lead a war against piracy (and, of course, ebooks). SFWA. Fortunately they’re under good new leadership now and no longer tilting at windmills.
Of course, the Author’s Guild is still without a clue. And I’m afraid a lot of the other writer guilds and groups are right behind them.
The problem with DRM is that the pirates already know how to strip it. So DRM doesn’t stop them at all. All DRM does is stop people who legally purchased the eBook from exercising their fair use rights. And if DRM does get in the user’s way, all that will happen is they will go off and look for illegal copies. So what DRM will have done in this case is cause the very thing the publishers are using DRM to try and stop. Well done!