"’DRM a drag on e-book growth,’ say critics" quoted in Computerworld—and I’m one of ‘em (updated)
See Eric Lai’s useful Computerworld piece, which carries the subhead of, "Amazon.com and Adobe both creating consumer-unfriendly hassles." He also quotes Smashwords’ Mark Coker, another DRM critic.
Over at Fictionwise/eReader, the Pendergrast brothers (not quoted) are skeptics toward DRM, which they offer just because certain publishers and others insist on it. Same situation at Lexcycle, home to Stanza.
I do think the two sides in the DRM debate can learn from each other. Check out a TeleRead audio interview where Frank Daniels III of Ingram said that DRM is not an obstacles to e-book purchases. I’d love to see someone with Frank’s DRM opinions contribute regularly to the TeleBlog. Email me. As a compromise between DRM and no DRM, I’ve advocated social DRM, which wouldn’t suffer from the usual DRM’s technical complexities.
Related: Adobe’s new e-book software ratchets up fright against Amazon Kindle: The new Adobe Reader Mobile SDK is aimed at smartphones and handhelds, in Computerworld.
And a 2:23 p.m. update on Kassia Krozer’s DRM post for Booksquare—summed up here earlier: Kassia continues to draw comments from e-book readers who hate the technology. Ideally Frank Daniels can take time to read not just her piece but also the comments, some of which flatly contradict his statement that DRM isn’t an obstacle for shoppers. As a courtesy to Frank, I’ll point him to the current TeleBlog post as well as Kassia’s article. Is there any chance whatsoever that Ingram could experiment with social DRM, under which, for example, a store or publisher could embed the name of a purchaser to discourage copying?
In one of her own comments, Kassia sensibly writes that DRM "might not stop the first purchase (call it the naive purchase), but if the DRM creates a conflict between reader and reading material, you can bet it won’t happen again."
Exactly. And that’s not the only nasty surprise ahead. Just when techies and publishers think they’ve perfected DRM, along may come new technologies, new products, that get in the way. It’s tough enough for e-book standards to be spread even without DRM. Readers, publishers and technologists don’t need this additional complexity to hit them in the future. If nothing else, DRM is an unwittingly attack on books as a serious medium since it ties the fate of an author’s words to a particular company or companies—which may or may not be in business a decade or two from now. DRMless archiving at libraries can go only so far. And besides, who’s the "buyer" of a book in most cases, you or a library? As has often been noted, you’re just renting a DRMed book. No wonder the FTC has taken an interest in this matter and has drawn 700 comments—almost exclusively anti-DRM.
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