DRM folly in action: Clinton book already pirated online
Bill Clinton’s My Life is already being pirated. So reports Blackmask, one of my favorite e-bookstore sites. Very possibly the piracy is happening from an edition in Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader or Palm/eReader, all listed on the Random House/Knopf site and all very hackable.
But guess what. All the Digital Rights Management in the cosmos won’t do a bit of good in preventing the usual suspects from scanning the paper version. Piece of cake. Let the publishers use DRM if they want to try to keep honest people honest–that’ll be the OpenReader approach–but don’t ever expect perfect DRM. Software companies have conned the publishers royally. No way that even Draconian protection will work completely.
Main effect of DRM: Lost sales
DRM’s main effect is to drive down sales, since readers hate the hassles. Along with the Tower of eBabel, resulting from the e-book format wars, DRM is a big reason why global e-book sales are just $20-$30 million a year. Yes, I know. Larger publishers say they want to protect their big, valuable properties such as the Clinton book. But those are the very works most promising as candidates for scanning from the paper editions.
The best solution? Fair prices, convenient distribution and a willingness to modernize business models. TeleRead-style national digital libraries in the States and elsewhere could at least reduce the incentive for piracy by putting many thousands of free books on the Net–with provisions for fair compensation to content owners. And, yes, I favor aggressive prosecution of big-time pirates. But let’s not destroy America’s high-tech prowess by confusing crooks with the technology they use, especially when so many are overseas.
Update, 5:12 p.m. Eastern Daylight: I see that the Clinton book is also available in Microsoft, Adobe and Mobipocket formats via RandomHouse.com’s e-commerce operation. The price? A whopping $28, just $7 less than the $35 list price for the hard cover. So far–I haven’t looked in all the logical places–the lowest price is $22.40 at ebooks.com, which offers the book in the same formats.
I mean e-book prices, of course. As I write this, you can patronize an Amazon partner and buy a hardcover in new condition for just $9.75 except for shipping. No DRM, either–or proprietary format to worry about! That means you can keep the dead-tree book forever without worrying about a software vendor going out of business or sticking you with an eventually obsolete format. See why I don’t buy DRMed e-books? Much prefer the used p-variety for obvious economic reasons.
Others, of course, rather understandably, prefer to read pirated editions. Bottom line? All too often publishers’ prices make suckers of honest e-book buyers, and if this keeps up, you’ll just see more piracy. Gouges are a great way to train customers to be pirates rather than grow e-bookdom from the present $20-$30 million in global sales.
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