Good Jeff vs. bad Jeff: Amazon needs to learn from Warner and its own MP3 side—and start up a DRM-free BOOKstore to boost revenue
Amazon’s DRM schizophrenia goes on. The Kindle e-book reader is DRMed to the gills, but sure enough, Jeff Bezos’s DRMless MP3 store is the first announced outlet through which Warner Music will sell music without “protection.”
The home page of the Amazon MP3 store tells it all: “Play Anywhere, DRM-free Music Downloads. MP3 Music Downloads for Any Media Player!” Meanwhile, of the big four music companies, as noted by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica, only Sony BMG is holding out on DRMless offerings. EMI and Universal succumbed before Warner did. Time for Jeff to join the crowd with a DRMless store selling books, ideally in .epub, the book world’s new MP3?
Here’s something for Jeff, along with Kindle-mesmerized publishers, to ponder about “protection.” Even if people can learn to love the Kindle’s DRM and its other proprietary eBabel—a long shot, if you consider the attractiveness of “Play Anywhere, DRM-free” books on laptops, PDAs and cellphones—Jeff needs to remember the tiny size of the Kindle market in the grand scheme of things.
Kindle-fixated Amazon blind to mobile phone potential for DRMfree E?
We’re not just talking about a tech analyst’s prediction that first-year sales of the Kindle could be a mere 50,000, or a fraction of the sales of individual multi-million-copy best sellers. Now consider the limited production capabilities of PVI, the E Ink supplier, for the moment. That will change. But then, as others have observed, the world will always have a lot more cellphones than Kindles—perhaps even billions of phones in time, capable of displaying e-books. Better and cheaper versions of roll-out displays, like the one shown here, ultimately will address the screen-size issue for phones. Simply put, even if Amazon can successfully hawk millions of Kindles, that will still be just a fraction of the potential e-book market.
Uh-oh. If I owned Amazon stock, I’d wonder if Jeff was really watching out for my long-term interests, given the opportunities that DRM and other forms of eBabel could cost him if he builds his main e-book business model around such a widely loathed technology. Doesn’t his own MP3 store treat the lack of DRM as a key selling point?
However hard Jeff can try to make DRM gentle on Kindle users, cellphone owners will still face hassles if he and publishers insist on inflicting proprietary approaches on them when they buy from Amazon or use books in his Mobipocket format. And how about users of other kinds of hardware? What if the OLPC machine and other linux-based laptops catch on and sell by the millions? Do Jeff and the publishers really want to kiss off this market? The music companies won’t. Because they’ve dropped DRM, their offerings will work just great on many platforms, including music-enabled phones. Jeff’s music store most likely will thrive, its sales leaving the the Kindle side in the dust.
Toward a DRMless MP3 for e-books
The bottom line? Both the Kindle and Amazon’s Mobipocket software shouldn’t just be able to read, without conversion, the new .epub standard, an MP3 for e-books. Ideally Amazon should also offer the ultimate solution to DRM incompatibility woes, which is no “protection” or social DRM. Or if Amazon and big publishers still insist on DRM in books, they should wholeheartedly embrace interoperable DRM of the kind that the IPDF is planning to go along with .epub.
I know. Amazon and the big publishers may think that if e-books are hard to use, people will just keep reading the paper variety. Will they, however? E-books, as the Harry Potter episodes show, are a cinch to scan and upload. And believe me, DRM is one “feature” that the pirates won’t offer. So why penalize law-abiding buyers of e-books, crippled by DRM? Increasing numbers of young, tech-hip users will start either avoiding DRMed books or else using easy-to-obtain programs to crack the “protection.” Even today, Microsoft Reader is much beloved among serious e-bookers, given the ease of bypassing the DRM with an easily available program, which, out of respect for U.S. law, I’ll not name here.
Meanwhile I’ll once again remind readers that when they buy DRMed books, they do not truly own them. The e-book business lacks an archive to assure eternal access to them, and we already have the sorry example of Gemstar owners and others who could no longer enjoy their books when their machines died, no small pain considering the hundreds or thousands of dollars that some owners had spent. The Kindle won’t vanish tomorrow. But we need to think of the long-term gamble people take when they buy books in Jeff’s proprietary formats.
The perils of the book-machine link
The book-machine link makes the Kindle especially dicey for consumers, even forgetting the fact that Jeff blithely tossed out the Adobe format in favor of Mobipocket, then started playing up the Kindle most of all.
In a related vein, we learned this week that Walmart was closing its business of selling downloands of DRMed films; and the hassles of protection just might be why the marketplace said, No. You can play Walmart’s files only on the machine you originally purchased the movies for. Small wonder that consumers hate DRM and most likely will flock to the Good Amazon, the MP3 store. Although the Kindle is hardly a failure and has more flexible “protection” than Walmart does, Jeff would do much better in the long run with a DRMfree .Epub Store.
Yes, there’ll be leakage aplenty. But many amateur pirate sites require a certain amount of technical expertise to use. What’s more, I doubt that customers of commercial pirates would be buying e-books anyway. Meanwhile law-abiding consumers will catch on to the obvious benefits of legal purchases. Just the other day a friend of mine downloaded a book—already owned on paper—from a P2P service. Guess whose computer ended up bogged down with adware. I warned her; now she knows. Beyond that, keep in mind the slash-and-burn war that content providers are waging against the big P2P services, as well as the carrots they could offer them—advertising, for example—in return for more aggressive efforts against piracy.
Time for Amazon to sell DRMfree .epub as aggressively as the Kindle
Jeff’s people managed to sell the book world on the Kindle, and now, with Amazon shareholders in mind, I hope they’ll be just as energetic in pushing DRMless books. No instant miracles expected. But this is a dollars-and-cents thing—absolutely no idealism needed, as the Warner and other examples show. Listen to the marketplace, Jeff. People hate DRM. Adjust, just as you sensibly did with your MP3 store.
Oh, and noting personal, Jeff. Within the past day I happily plunked down $22 for an Amazon book—an old-fashioned reference work on paper. At least I’m of the p-book-buying generation. Millions of young people, however, weaned on the Net, just may want to skip commercial books in many cases and instead rely on free legal alternatives online, or else pirated copies they can truly own.
Technorati Tags: Jeff Bezos,Amazon,Amazon MP3 store,Warner
December 30th, 2007 at 2:42 am
I actually do a lot of reading on my mobile phone right now. I find the screen size is not an issue for ‘low format’ text. The phone screen is too small for illustrations, diagrams, tables, poetry (the line structure gets too fragmented), … but for straight prose it’s fine, you only read a few words at a time anyway. For now the small size buys you ultra portability - the book is always with you, I’d like one of those roll-out shown above though.