We need a DRM standard for the little guy.

I don’t like not being able to share a good book with a friend. I don’t like having a book locked up with a certain device, no matter how cool the device is. I’m skipping book that saddled with DRM. I’ve said, “No (thank you),” to DRM. And monopolists.

Rather, I don’t buy ebooks with DRM. That means I buy fewer new releases than I would otherwise.

I’m glad to hear that Amazon’s share of the market is much smaller in the rest of the first world. It makes it less likely that the publishers will manage to shoot themselves in the foot with their insistence on DRM. The way they’re behaving in the U.S, they’re on course to hand Amazon an effectively unbreakable monopoly through control of the dominant format.

I don’t think the situation is directly analogous to music. It’s effortless to rip a CD: the music was in digital format already. It’s not effortless to scan a paper book, and until fast scanners become affordable, pirated books in open format will be a trickle, rather than the flood flood that kept up the pressure for mp3s. I expect ebook DRM to last longer, therefore.

Although there are some basic similarities, there are far more — very significant — differences.

The way we use and read, and what we expect from, books is very different from the way we use and listen to music. For example, I may listen to the same song repeatedly over a long span of time, but am not likely to reread the same book until some time has passed (with a very few exceptions).

I also think it is inevitable that Amazon will open up the Kindle to other formats. In fact, the new Kindle DX directly supports PDF (making me wonder when they will offer a software update to Kindle 1 and 2 that also supports PDF).

Remember that Amazon is a very large corporation, and large corporations do not move fast. I worked in several large corporatsion, and bureaucratic inertia tends to slow progress…but not stop it.

We can only hope that Sony gets its act in gear and rolls out the announced self-publishing tools through their Publisher Portal soon . If nothing else, it might light a fire under Amazon.

Walt Shiel
Publisher, Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC
View From the Publishing Trenches blog

It may be only the American market, but the American market is the only one we Americans have got. What happens in the European market will largely be academic to us if Amazon succeeds in screwing up this one.

Jeff Bezos in 2009 looks a lot like the old Bill Gates, and you know how Microsoft is doing these days.

The U.S. may be a big market, but they are not so big in e-books that they can just ignore what the rest of the world is doing. And Amazon isn’t over there, yet. The rest of the world, frankly, couldn’t care less what we are doing here. They don’t want the Kindle… they just want access to the store.

Case in point: I’ve been traveling a bit recently, and in every airport and on every flight, I have inevitably been asked about my Kindle. I tell them it’s great, easy to read, easy to use, life-changing, etc. And I always think to get in a word edgewise about DRM but … how? Most folks don’t care. They know I have this computery-looking book reader dealy. They have kids to watch, meetings to get to.

However. I think the comparison to the music industry is apt. At first no one cared about copying CDs, either. They just liked how they sounded good and were supposedly indestructible. It was a long way from there to a DRM-free iTunes store, but here we are. I’d say the publishing industry’s curve is going to be even longer, but I’m still optimistic we’ll get there.

Maybe we might die of old age, though. If they’re going to be that slow, better off agitating for increased awareness of drm-stripping and filesharing tools than assisting them in causing us pain and costing us money.

Or maybe all these companies might die. Not that that matters, if a whole bunch of smaller more useful ones spring up from their corpses.

The whole cry for Amazon to support epub is rather amusing. As if the Kindle reading epub natively would really change anything in any meaningful way.

Tim O’Reilly says this in the article David referenced:

“While users can load some of their own documents onto the Kindle, there is no easy way to “rip” a book. But with epub-based readers, there are millions of free titles available, and books are available from many vendors, each able to experiment with new business models…”

And any of those books in nonDRM epub can be read quite easily on any Kindle via a simple file conversion.

Until most major publishers decide to release their products into the retail market in epub…well…who cares? I don’t. Epub is not the standard David always proclaims.

Yes life will be better and simpler when we reach a point where there is a widely used “universal format” for ebooks. All this stuff is in its infancy. Give it some more time and the marketplace will start sorting things out and reach some sort of consensus.

Maybe.

This was also what music labels did for years so maybe time will correct this in e-books as it did in music (of course we need to keep the pressure on them).

Music had .mp3 as the stable open platform and maybe that is what E-pub can become.

Greg

Thanks for speaking out even if we disagree on this one.

David