Social DRM used by Wiley’s WROX imprint for chapters on demand
Moderator’s note: Nice going, Joe! Keep us posted on this social DRM experiment. May Wiley extend it to full-length books from all its imprints! - D.R.
There have been countless times over the past several years when customers have asked us, “Hey, how come I have to buy the entire book when all I really want are these 3 chapters?” This is a pretty popular question when you’re standing in the WROX booth at a developer’s conference, for example. Well, I’m happy to say that we now have a product for that situation and it’s called Chapters on Demand.
The service launched this week, and there are currently 47 titles available in PDF format, most selling for $4.99 each. That’s about 900 chapters that are available immediately, and we’ve got another 800 chapters (from 37 other titles) that will be added shortly.
No DRM horrors, no device limits
My favorite part of this: We’re selling all this e-content without the use of traditional DRM. I say “traditional” because we’re using more of a social DRM solution where we inject the customer’s name in the footer of the PDF.
Print it. Use it on however many devices you want to. Just don’t release it into the wild. Is this hack-proof? Of course not, but what is? The key is that we want to make this a very attractive product for our customers, and we believe this is the right approach.
For more details, see this post on Jim Minatel’s blog. Btw, Jim and the rest of the team did a fantastic job implementing this great service — congrats to everyone involved!
Moderator: If you and other Wiley execs like the results, Joe, this’ll be one more argument for ePub. Minus traditional DRM, it can truly be a universal format. And of course, ePub is reflowable and easier to read on PDAs than PDFs are. If an ePub/social DRM approach catches on, then companies such as Amazon won’t be able to herd customers into proprietary formats, which reduce publishers’ bargaining power—and the long-term value of books. - D.R.
Image credit: Casey West.
I’ll be interested to hear how this works–and whether customers find the dropping of traditional DRM to be helpful. As many of you know, I don’t use DRM on BooksForABuck.com books, but because I offer books in multiple formats (a customer can download any or all of them, depending on their device requirements), I’ve seen social DRM as a administrative non-starter.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Thought: Social DRM might be a good solution for larger publishers with the infrastructure to implement it—while smaller publishers simply avoided DRM. But would implementation be that difficult? Bill McCoy picked up the idea from The Pragmatic Programmer—hardly a giant conglomerate. Perhaps third parties could handle administration; costs would still be much lower than for traditional DRM. Meanwhile thanks to Rob for sharing his perspective. David