Sony and the Adobe DRM alliance: New reason for Amazon to get publishers to drop ‘protection’?
Adobe and Sony are riding high now. The PR line is that ePub is the big winner, with 17 devices from Sony and others running Adobe software to read this open standard. Sony will be Adobe Exhibit #1 when the software company woos new customers for its reading software and content server.
ePub itself is open. But all this ePub talk is stealing attention from Adobe DRM, which comes with the software. DRM turns a nonproprietary format like ePub into a proprietary one. Adobe software will let you read nonDRMed ePub. But Adobe is hoping that big publishers will continue their DRM fixation even though this “protection” is a joke since the bad guys can defeat it with crackimg programs.
Striking back
In Amazon’s place, I would upgrade Kindles—at least the models that allowed this—to be able to read nonencrypted ePub just as the Adobe software can. Meanwhile I would do my best to convince publishers to drop DRM or use social DRM, with customers’ names embedded in books—and perhaps with some kind of text version of digital watermarking. Perhaps I would offer the publishers higher book prices to nudge them along.
Also, I would promote the concept of being able to own books for life, this way, without reliance on any company’s DRM servers. Via nonDRMed ePub, meanwhile, I could sell to owners of every bleepin’ machine that ran Adobe software.
The library side
If publishers insisted on DRM ePub for library use, I would reluctantly add this feature. But at the retail level, the main focus would be on lack of DRM. And long term, I would try to develop a cloud computing approach that allowed even library books to go online with DRM worries at the customer’s end.
In real life…
What will Jeff Bezos do in actual life? I don’t know: maybe he’ll strike an alliance with Adobe so his machines,too, can read Adobe-DRMed ePub. Just keep in mind, however, how he responded to Apple’s DRM-based iTunes monopoly—with a store selling nonDRMed MP3s. May he show similar sense here!
August 26th, 2009 at 8:28 am
David, my number 1 preference would be ePub with no DRM. But if that isn’t going to happen soon (I believe eventually it will), then my number 2 preference is for all ebooks, etailers, and ebook devices to use ePub with exactly the same DRM, which would enable me to change devices at whim, purchase from whomsoever I please, and still read books I leased.
Although #2 is acceptable to me, publishers need to recognize that I am unwilling to pay as high a price for a DRMed book as I am for a non-DRMed book.
One other thought about preference #2: With a universal ePub format and universal DRM scheme, the IDPF could make it mandatory that Adobe or the creator of the universal DRM scheme deposit with the organization a DRM removal key in the vent that the DRM creator should no longer support the DRM. It could also require as a quid pro quo for the universal DRM that a system be “deposited” with the organization that ensures that today’s DRM will be readable on all future DRMed devices, perhaps some upgradable path that is built into device firmware.
I think a lot of the problems with the DRMed products can be alleviated by eliminating the DRM babel and having a universal standard. If every publisher and device maker except Amazon acceded to such an accord, the ultimate loser would be Amazon, which, by way of mildly twisted reasoning, would mean that the consumer would ultimately win because even Amazon would have to ultimately join the accord.
August 26th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Currently the only ebook reader software that supports Adobe DRM is Adobe Digital Editions. So single DRM source means single Reader implementation. Unlike the majority of popular Readers, which tend to favour the reading public, Adobe Digital Editions has a “publisher is always right” philosophy. For example, it is impossible to change the margins in ADE, so if the publisher specifies large margins this is what you get even on a small screen.
Stanza should have been the first alternative ePub Reader to support Adobe DRM, but this now seems unlikely to happen given that Stanza is owned by Amazon.