Last night I bought a GPS device for $99 at Radio Shack, and it just worked.
I didn’t have to spend much time on the complexities, at least not for simple navigational needs. No wonder GPS devices are catching on among the masses. I’ll have more to say later in another post.
Now contrast my happy GPS experiences to complexities and horrors of e-book DRM. Mike Cane has a hilarious post comparing Adobe DRM documentation to the hassles of puzzling out instructions for a zero-gravity toilet. Guess which is worse. Natch. "Really," Mike concludes, "it turns out it’s easier to take a shit in space than to deal with Adobe DRMed ePub eBooks!" And to think that Adobe is hoping to help create a DRM standard for the IDPF.
Beware of "seamless" achieved the wrong way
That’s not all. The more companies involved, the great the risks of driving off shoppers. But then again the last thing the industry needs is to revolve around Mother Ship Amazon, just to keep things "seamless." The best solution to DRM complexities is to skip traditional "protection" in favor of none, or to use social DRM, which would be far, far more interoperable than DRM in the usual sense. DRM is a joke when it’s so easy to scan paper books and put them on P2P nets.
Why isn’t the IDPF encouraging experimentation with social DRM–the inclusion of names or other identifying information in e-book files—which would be far less of a technical challenge than the usual DRM? Didn’t Bill McCoy of Adobe push social DRM earlier? Have his bosses shut him up? Bill had a great idea—borrowed openly from the Pragmatic Programmers site—and I hope Adobe will encourage him to position the company as a leader in this area. Bill, it isn’t Adobe I’m against. It’s the Zero-Gravity Toilet Syndrome.
