The DRMless option for publishers: Cory Doctorow’s pesky questions about the Kindle
“Tim O’Reilly predicts the imminent demise of the Kindle ebook reader unless it makes the move to open standards and abandons DRM and proprietary formats. I’ve been trying to get someone at Amazon to answer my basic questions about the ‘DRM-free’ option for authors and publishers (‘Does the EULA prohibit a reader from moving a DRM-free file to a non-Kindle?’ ‘Is there a patent or other restriction that prevents competitors from making readers or converters for the DRM-free files?’ and ‘Can DRM-free files be remotely downgraded, the way that the DRM’ed files have had their read-aloud functionality taken away after the fact?") and been totally stonewalled, as have O’Reilly.’” – Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing, with a pointer to some O’Reilly commentary from earlier this year.
The TeleRead take: In the ePub department, Bezos offered a little hope last month. Time for him to stop teasing and come through for real!
One question for Cory to add to his list is whether inclusion at the Mobipocket Store, where DRM is a compulsory, means that Amazon will release a DRMed edition at the Kindle Store. Oh, how my publisher and I want to kill off the DRMed version of my novel at the Kindle Store!
Related: HarperCollins extends deal with blogger Doctorow, in the Bookseller. Cory will be able to offer for free on the Net “a futuristic look at financial collapse,” which is to appear in hardback in October. Title is Makers.
These are all interesting questions.
I went round in circles with Amazon support this spring over the Kindle EULA and got contradictory answers from just about everyone I spoke with. Finally, my request was escalated to a higher level of support where I was allegedly given the official final answer - moving Kindle books to a non-Kindle device or application is a violation of the Kindle EULA.
Of course that might change again depending on who at Amazon is answering the question.
I suspect even Amazon hasn’t thought most of these issues through completely.
I have no doubt that Amazon will have the K reading ePub before the end of this year.
But no one is going to like it.
1) It’ll be Amazon’s own ePub rendering engine
2) It’ll be Amazon’s own DRM
3) They’ll add proprietary extensions to ePub
4) It won’t help any current ePub publishers because the entire appeal of the K is Have It Now OTA downloads. No way will 99% of K owners wait to get home and buy/cable over eBooks.
Kirk and Mike…
Kirk: If you want to see the DRM or nonDRM option in action in real life, I invite you to catch up with my publisher who’d LOVE to kill off the “protected” version of the Kindle. So far it’s still cluttering things up, preventing me from using the drmfree tag on my on own bleepin’ book. Our offering the book through the Mobi store may be cluttering things up.
Mike: I’d at least like to see Amazon offering pure ePub books without DRM…same as it offers MP3 music. We need to keep educating people about DRM as the enemy of genuine book ownership…and literature…since permanence is part of the attraction of books. As for the use of extensions, that’s an old Microsoft trick. But at least people are hip to it. We need for the same thing to happen in the e-book world–for people to speak up when vendors pull fast ones.
Thanks,
David
Thanks,
David