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By David Rothman

image As author of six nonfiction books and one novel, I’m curious if the Authors Guild has looked into the issue of e-book standards. I’m also interested in the related DRM issue. I’d be grateful if you would respond to the questions below, so I can reproduce your answers at TeleRead.org, a news-and-views site that covers e-books, digital libraries and related topics. We have readers at major publishers (Random House, for example) and tech companies (Adobe and others).

idpf 1. Are you pro-ePub, and if so, what are you doing to encourage its use? Would you request Amazon to support ePub on the Kindle, as a native format, not just one to be translated to? Have you studied ePub? On the open part of the Guild site, I cannot find one reference to ePub. So you’ll know, ePub is a standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, in which major publishers participate. The idea is to reduce production costs and simplify e-book purchases when ePub is used at the consumer level. As a writer I love the idea of genuine standards since they’ll make e-books more durable and contribute to the seriousness of the medium. Proprietary "standards" come and go, just as companies do. In my opinion they are not as trustworthy as the nonproprietary variety.

2. Also have you investigated the complexities that all the clashing e-book formats can bring to the production process—a mess aggravated by proprietary DRM? Small presses, especially, can suffer. Not all publishing happens at Random House; and the little publishers provide R&D, in effect, for the majors.

3. I’m also wondering if the Guild agrees with me that writers and publishers should enjoy the right not to have their books DRMed. I don’t want "protection." My publisher will sell more copies of the e-book version of my novel—also a trade paperback—if readers can own it for real. Via the e-book I’m reaching a different market from the traditional one. As I see it, we need both media.

4. If nothing else, if Amazon can make text to speech optional for Kindle books, shouldn’t the Kindle Store and the Mobipocket distribution system do the same for writers and publishers in regard to DRM?

5. Would the Guild support a law banning major stores and distributors from requiring DRM for writers and publishers not wanting it?

6. Has the Guild ever found any legitimate scientific studies that prove that DRM advances the bottom line? Citations? Isn’t it possible that DRM actually encourages piracy by punishing legitimate owners, who can do less with their legitimately bought copies? And what’s the sense of it when popular books can be scanned or group-typed for spreading on P2P?

7. If you’re worried about "keeping honest people honest," how about the alternative of social DRM? What is the Guild’s position on it? Would the Guild be interested in encouraging Amazon to offer a social DRM option for publishers and writers? In case you’re not familiar with the term, piracy would be discouraged by embedding books with the owners’ names and/or other embedded information. Books with social DRM could be displayed on a variety of systems and would be more likely to be readable many decades from now than books burdened with conventional DRM. Archives cannot always be trusted, especially with the risk of mass deletions by government censors. If writers truly want their works safe from the government forever, then, as I see it, readers should be able to preserve their own reliable copies and even pass them down to their children and grandchildren.

8. Do you have any reply to commentary at Booksquare, where, in my opinion, Kirk Biglione (cc’d) correctly worries that Amazon’s partial backoff from text-to-speech could boomerang against writers?

Among other things, he says:

"It’s unfortunate that the Authors Guild chose to make an issue out of Kindle’s TTS feature. If the Guild really wants to do well by authors, it would lobby Amazon to support industry-wide standards like epub, and encourage the development of an open and interoperable marketplace for digital content. Instead, the Guild has given Amazon the perfect excuse for creating a closed system that will limit consumers’ options and fragment the industry."

What is the Guild doing to encourage the development of the marketplaces Kirk Biglione hopes for? Are you in favor of an open approach, as opposed to one dominated by Amazon, Google or both?

Thanks,
David Rothman
Editor-Publisher, TeleRead.org | 703-370-6540
805 North Howard St., #240, Alexandria, VA 22304

 
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