By Bill Rosenblatt
EditionGuard is a “white label” ebook retail platform that, like many of its type, is based on Adobe technology, including Adobe Content Server DRM. This week the company added an option called EditionGuard Social DRM, which enables its customers—publishers, retailers, and independent authors—to use e-book watermarking instead of DRM.
EditionGuard Social DRM embeds a visible watermark in ePub files that includes the email address and phone number from the purchasing user’s account. This watermark can be shown at the beginning, end, and/or random locations within the ebook.
EditionGuard’s watermarking technology is proprietary; they don’t use a third party scheme such as that of BooXtream or Digimarc. Unlike Digimarc (but like BooXtream), EditionGuard doesn’t offer a monitoring service that searches for watermarked ebooks on websites, blogs, file-sharing networks, etc., though it’s possible to engage a third-party service to have that done.
The point of this type of watermark, of course, is to deter users from “oversharing” ebook files because their personal information is in there. That’s why the term “social DRM” is often used as a synonym for e-book watermarking (the term was coined by Bill McCoy when he ran the e-publishing group at Adobe).*
The use of both end-users’ email addresses and phone numbers makes this one of the most aggressive ebook watermarking schemes I’ve seen. The only more aggressive scheme was one used in Microsoft’s long-discontinued Microsoft Reader technology, which gave publishers the option to embed the end-user’s credit card number in the ebook. Other watermarking schemes, such as Pottermore‘s, use opaque ID numbers that are only meaningful to the retailer.
The amount of personal information in EditionGuard’s watermark should boost its value in deterring oversharing. Yet it could also increase the risk of watermark strippers becoming available. A visible ebook watermark like EditionGuard’s can be removed from an ePub file with a simple script written in a language like awk or perl.
Although many ebook distributors today use watermarking, EditionGuard is the first retail platform to offer an explicit choice of traditional DRM, watermarking, or both. The advantages of the watermarking option for publishers and authors include easier setup and no per-download fees (which are passed along from Adobe’s pricing scheme for Content Server).
It will be interesting to see how watermarking affects EditionGuard’s popularity and how many of its customers choose watermarking instead of DRM. Although ebook watermarking has gotten quite popular in certain countries (such as Italy and the Netherlands), it hasn’t made much impact in the U.S. market so far. EditionGuard has promised to share data with us on the uptake of its Social DRM option as time goes on. It will also be interesting to see if other ebook retailing platforms start offering watermarking as an option. (Ingram’s aer.io offers a watermarking option but not standard DRM.)
It would be even more interesting to measure the different types of EditionGuard files that appear in unauthorized places. How many are copies of files that were originally encrypted with DRM? And of the watermarked files, how many still have the watermark in them, and how many had it stripped out? That could tell us something concrete—and heretofore unknown—about the relative effectiveness of DRM and watermarking in preventing unauthorized ebook use. If you have monitoring technology and would be interested in tracking this, let me know.
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*Although “Social DRM” has become an accepted term, I dislike the use of the term “DRM” to describe watermarking—especially when used in misleading phrases like “Watermark DRM.” When it first came into being in the mid-1990s, the term “digital rights management” was applied to a broad range of technologies for managing rights to copyrighted material, not just technologies that encrypt content and control usage. Over the years, press coverage caused the term first to be narrowed so as to apply strictly to the latter types of technologies, and then broadened to any type of technology that controls or restricts anything, including proprietary screw heads.
I’m happy to accept the definition offered by the anti-DRM organization Defective By Design, which defines it as “… the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media.” Watermarking doesn’t fit this definition; by itself, it doesn’t control or restrict anything.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The above column from Bill Rosenblatt, an industry consultant and owner of GiantSteps Media Technologies Strategies, originally appeared on his site Copyright and Technology. We have reproduced it with his permission (thanks, Bill).
Bill doesn’t speak for TeleRead and vice versa. But I will say I strongly agree with him that watermarking—aka “social DRM”—and DRM are different creatures. For years TeleRead has used the term “social DRM” because then-Adobe executive Bill McCoy applied the label in popularizing the technology. But I am considering limiting our mentions to “watermarking.” What do you think?
Meanwhile I share Bill’s curiosity about DRM vs. watermarking in terms of piracy rates of titles used with EditionGuard.
Of course, my own belief is that DRMing of mass titles tends to be a loser for publishers no matter what happens since it limits people’s reading and technology choices, and beyond that, it is easy for the tech-savvy and semi-tech-savvy to strip. Check out TeleRead Editor Chris Meadows’ excellent commentary, just posted: Of ebook legal restrictions: We need more FUD.
While my own preference would be no DRM or watermarking of retail books, I see the latter as a good compromise. With watermarking, you can read ePub on zillions of different apps and devices. That contrasts with the user hassles of regular DRM. In the case of books with encryption-based DRM, for example, you can’t add all-text bolding to Amazon-DRMed books without stripping the protection tech in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. – D.R.
teleread.org 
“A visible ebook watermark like EditionGuard’s can be removed from an ePub file with a simple script written in a language like awk or perl.”
Which makes this watermarking entirely useless. It will not stop piracy of an ebook. It may get a little guy who shared the ebook with a few friends but the big pirates will remove any identifying code and continue doing what they have been doing for many years.
This type of DRM and any other DRM is a complete waste of many.
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@Hayden: I share your negative feelings toward traditional DRM. But just as Bill and I have pointed out, watermarking is not DRM—it doesn’t obnoxiously get in the way of noninfringing copying and file modification the way DRM does. I’m even reconsidering TeleRead’s use of the phrase “social DRM.” As for little guys getting caught—well, that’s a human rather than tech issue. Do you know of watermarking cases where the publishers went too far?
As for stripping of watermarks, I suspect that can be trivial, technically (although some sophisticated systems may actually complicate things). But many fewer people will bother removing them compared to the number who are now using easy tools to remove traditional DRM.
With watermarking, files will be readable on a number of ebook devices and apps from many companies and Amazon’s hardware side will have to be more innovative and more flexible. No longer will Jeff Bezos and friends be able to deprive me of the option of all-text boldface just because they can. They’ll face too much competition from nonAmazon alternatives. That said, Amazon could still do well and maybe even better if it showed less arrogance toward readers.
I truly hope that watermarking can somehow catch on here in the States, and perhaps the threat of anti-trust action will prompt Amazon to consider watermarking as an approach less risky in the long run than the current proprietary DRM. Part of the problem, of course, is publishers wedded to trad DRM. Ideally regulators can encourage everyone involved to stop the insanity.
Can it happen? We already know that Donald Trump, albeit for nasty reasons, is eager to make trouble for Jeff Bezos and Amazon. As for Hillary Clinton, who knows? Elizabeth Warren is helping her win the election and perhaps will have Clinton’s ear afterwards. Warren strongly believe that Amazon is throttling competition. Use of watermarking, rather than device-tied DRM, would be a great way for Amazon to help dodge bullets from anti-trusters in the future.
Thanks,
David
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Hi David,
I really cannot see how watermarking is not DRM. What is the point of the watermark if not to manage the digital rights of the ebook? True, it allows an ebook to be read on any ereading app, but an ebook with a watermark that contains the buyers email address, phone number, credit card number, etc, is still DRM. If I buy the pbook version, the shop does not add stamps on random pages identifying me. I am free to share that pbook with a friend, swap it with another book, give it away, sell it and so on, but If I did that with my ebook I could get in legal trouble. Yes, it is true that nobody has been prosecuted at this small level, but the legal threat is still there and watermarking an ebook will facilitate this. Again, watermarking is there to manage the digital rights.
I think that you are trying to limit the definition of DRM to software that prevents readers from moving ebooks to other ereading platforms, but DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and therefore any attempt to manage digital rights has to be defined as DRM.
The vast majority of books are read once and then either forgotten in a bookshelf, given away or thrown out. With ebooks, the retailers with their DRM try to prevent the buyer from passing on the ebook to another person, something that is not done with a pbook.
I am with you 100% that most DRM technology is awful in the sense that the DRM locks us in to a retailer’s reading apps. I agree that if we could easily move our ebooks to any app, then the likes of Amazon, Kobo, Apple would have to continually offer better features for us to want to read on their apps and ereaders. Some people are savvy enough to strip DRM, change the ebook format and move their ebooks to their favorite app, but the majority of readers do not have the knowledge to do so.
Now going back to piracy, firstly, I want to say that I believe authors and publishers should get paid for their works. I really think that piracy is a bad thing and it should be discouraged at every level.
To me, EditionGuard watermarking is completely useless and a waste of money for authors because:-
1. The big pirates will easily remove any identifying data. For fun, they could even add fictitious data. Imagine if a pirate replaced the original email address and phone number, with say, your email address and phone number or Donald Trump’s or Hillary Clinton’s. I can imagine a court case where the defendant would bring a programmer in to testify that the data is easy manipulated and it can’t be proven who actually pirated the ebook. Case dismissed.
2. Any type of DRM has proven to be ineffectual in stopping piracy.
Every time I read an article about a new type of DRM, I just see a guy or a company trying to cash in on authors fears of piracy and their ‘lost revenues’. For all the years DRM has been around, it has not stopped ebooks from being made available to download by pirates. DRM in any disguise is still useless and at worst it can diminish the reading experience of the honest reader.
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Hayden,
By your own standard, a copyright registration notice is also DRM.
Oh, wait, there’s one in pretty much every book.
So much for that theory.
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First of all, crooks who want to illegally share ebooks will overcome any technology embedded in a digital file, whether DRM or Watermarks.
What providers should do is make the illegal content undesirable. They could do this themselves by uploading bad content to the illegal sites. Lots of intentional typos, mistakes, and missing sentences or chapters. Imagine some one downs an illegal murder mystery by a bestselling author, then reads 95% only to discover the critical paragraph that unmasks the killer is missing. The reader will be miffed. He will have to scramble to download a different illegal copy. Or buy the real one. Do this enough to make it hard to find “good” version on the sharing sites to dissuade people from going there.
I’m sure the sharing sites would then have to “ban” the uploaders of “bad” content which will take time and resources to ensure the quality of the “illegal” product.
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@Greg,
I think that the dark web is already helping in the ways that you are suggesting.
If you want to download a book by your favorite author, then you may do a search on Google for that author. You will find a list of websites offering free downloads, but some of them are just full of malware, or they try to trick you into giving them your credit card details, etc. It can be a really bad experience.
I think one of the best ways to minimise piracy (you can never totally eradicate it) is to make your ebooks easily accessible to your readers.
1. Never ever get into the habit of windowing an ebook. If the hardcover is released, so should the ebook be released. Not everyone wants to read a book made out of half a tree and if the book is out to be read then people want to read it. They will try to find the ebook version and may only find it as an illegal download.
2. Pricing. This is a tricky topic. On one hand the author/publisher wants to value the product at a certain price point, but with the market now being very competitive, an overpriced ebook will sell less copies than similar ebooks. Some people will use this an excuse to find a free version of the ebook.
Indie authors are doing great these days because the larger publishing companies are pricing the ebooks much higher than the indies. Honest readers are buying the more affordable ebooks from indies than the much higher priced ebooks from the bigger publishers. The bigger publishers are losing sales, not to piracy, but to everyday market forces.
If a reader can get a steady supply of ebooks at affordable prices, then they will not need to search out pirated versions and risk having their computers infected or credit card details stolen.
I am not saying that an author/publisher does not have the right to price their ebooks at whatever price point they want, but they have to consider that the higher the price, the greater the risk of people going the piracy route to read the ebook. Putting DRM on an ebook (even watermarking) is not going to magically bring back those lost sales.
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@Bill Rosenblatt
October 11, 2016 at 11:31 am
For some reason, it is not possible to reply directly to your comment.
Does a copyright registration notice have imbedded in it my email address, phone number or credit card?
Even the people producing this watermark are calling it a DRM, even it is only a ‘Social DRM’, but since you and David have agreed that it is not DRM, then it must not be. I stand corrected!
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@Hayden: Not sure why you couldn’t reply to Bill—it could be because the comment involved was itself a reply to a reply or something like that.
I’ll stand by my assertion that a distinction exists between restricting even noninfringing use and tracking illegal copies.
You’re welcome to your own opinion—I appreciate the thought you’re giving this important issue. But if nothing else, consider the practical side. Both publishers and readers need to know there’s a better alternative to traditional DRM—watermarking, which does away with the walled-garden approach and lets you enjoy your books on a number of machines.
Let’s not lump everything in the DRM category—that’ll help increase awareness and appreciation of watermarking. And, yes, with that in mind, I’m going to stop using the phrase “social DRM.”
Just so it’s clear, I’d rather that we not even have watermarking. But as a compromise it’s far superior to encryption-based DRM.
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