TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Social DRM’ Category

By David Rothman

Moderator’s note: Adobe will ideally discover the joys of social DRM—talked up by the company’s own Bill McCoy—rather than simply going with the traditional variety alone. Meanwhile, with just slight editing, here’s news about Content Server 4, posted for TeleBlog readers who like the usual DRM. CS4 includes some wrinkles of special interest to libraries. And that should help spread around ePub, not just the usual PDF. - D.R.

Leading Publishers and Distributors Secure Digital Content With New Adobe Content Server 4

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sept. 9, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Content Server 4, a new server software solution that copy protects downloadable eBooks for Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe’s free client software for purchasing, managing and reading eBooks.

Adobe Content Server 4 enables publishers, retailers, libraries and other distributors to leverage hundreds of thousands of titles for sale or loan and was developed in concert with more than 30 industry partners worldwide (see separate quote sheet ), including Booxen Co. Ltd, Ciando, Ebooks Corporation, Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Ingram Digital, Jouve, LibreDigital, NetLibrary, Overdrive, Random House, Value Chain International Ltd, and others.

Today, Adobe Digital Editions is popularizing the digital reading experience on both Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems and emerging platforms, such as the Reader Digital Book by Sony®.

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By David Rothman

So what else would you expect from EFF? Well, for one thing, I’d welcome EFF taking an interest in ePub development and encouraging a good mix of players so that no one company can dominate.

EFF’s advocacy of social DRM as an alternative to the usual kind—a compromise, even though the best "protection" is none—would also help.  No, we’re not talking about encryption here.

Social DRM is hardly without flaws, but would still be a nice, gentle way of reminding the users of both their rights and the creators’. I can even see social DRM systems set up to allow buying and selling of e-books in keeping with the first sale doctrine.

Related: Social DRM, Watermarking and Ex-Libris.

By David Rothman

David Pogue, the New York Times tech columnist who has worried that E means piracy, will be participating in a laudable O’Reilly experiment involving nonDRMed PDF, Mobipocket and ePub.

The Pogue book served up this way will be Windows Vista: The Missing Manual.

And significantly, he’s "encouraging O’Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps, like adding a footer at the bottom of each page that says, ‘This edition specially prepared for bgates@microsoft.com (or whatever your e-mail address is). That might deter people from posting their copies online for all to download.’

Wow. Sounds like social DRM. Nice going, David! The best arrangement would be nothing—that’s what I’ll do with my forthcoming book—but this sure beats the normal DRM.

Detail: Above link is PW-protected. I hope to replace it with one that isn’t.

By David Rothman

Is it time for the Brits to re-colonize the United States? Absoutely! Bring ‘em back, Redcoats and all.

Some of the wisest utterances on topics like DRM and colliding e-book formats are coming from the British publishing community.

A gutsy PW equivalent in the U.K.—far braver and smarter than the wimpy Yankee variety, which zapped my anti-DRM, anti-eBabel blog—has just published a memorable article on the very problems that so many American book people are sweeping under the carpet.

In eBabel on and on, The Bookseller explains the mess in terms that even the dumbest blockheads on our side of The Pond ought to understand. And it does so without ignoring the nuances.

"It’s the DRM, stupid"

Under a subhead that might have come from the TeleBlog—"it’s the DRM, stupid"—Features Editor Tom Tivnan warns: "…Even within format, different publishers’ DRM can vary, affecting device readability. Files wrapped with DRM also contain a variety of restrictions, such as whether a customer can print or not, if the file can download to other devices, or whether it can be emailed.

"Even within formats, DRM continues to evolve. As Martyn Daniels, vice-president of sales and marketing at digital content management specialist Value Chain International, explains: ‘Mobipocket, for example, has gone though several incarnations. If you are using, say, a Mobi 3.0 file and the device you are using reads Mobi 6.0, it will still be able to read it, but there will be subtle differences that affect performance.’"

Tivnan even provides a glossary of formats—from ePub to eReader. Guess which he lists firsts? Nice priorities, Tom.

The Moi angle: My opinion—and perhaps yours, too

While PW has made me a nonperson in the best Orwellian tradition—the cowards at PW actually killed the online archives of my E-Book Report blog—the Bookseller has the nerve to quote me. Tivnan nicely sums up what’s on my mind and yours, if you’re like many members of the TeleRead community.

"David Rothman, an American writer who runs the e-book blog Tele-read.org, believes that DRM is anti-consumer and is relatively in-effective against piracy. He says: ‘DRM penalises legitimate owners with various restrictions, such as limits on the number of devices. If a book is truly popular and big money is at stake, then both amateur and professional pirates can scan paper copies, or even type them out, as happened with Harry Potter.’"

Social DRM mentioned

The Bookseller goes on: "Rothman has called for publishers to agree to ’social DRM’—an idea mooted by Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe’s ePublishing business—no technical restrictions other than stamping a file with ‘This e-book is the property of . . .’ Social DRM, Rothman believes, would open up the e-book market, and prohibit one dominant player such as Amazon from elbowing others out. He says: ‘The real irony with Amazon is that they have been doing wonderful things with music MP3s and anti-DRM on music downloads. The damaging thing is that Amazon is using DRM to herd customers into the Kindle away from other devices. This is not good news for publishers.’

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By David Rothman

Mobipocket Desktop 6.2 isn’t just importing the IDPF’s ePub format—it’s now able to recognize it automatically to convert it for reading in Mobi.

Yes, Mobipocket would do well to render ePub natively without translation. But auto-convert is still a nice step forward despite shortcomings, and I hope that Amazon will consider the same capabilities for its Kindle device, which can read nonDRMed Mobi.

An iPhone reader is among the new versions of Mobi that will be available later this year. Nice going! Oh, how there’s more to life than PDF! On top of everything else, at least some of the cheapie new Astak machines will probably be runnning Mobi, in which case they will be able to display converted ePub.

ePub creation, too, perhaps—via Mobi apps

Laudably, too, Mobipocket apparently will soon let you create ePub files through the next gens of Mobi Creator and Mobigen. That’s my impression from a MobileRead post from Nate the Great (see update). Hello, small publishers? This might be it in many cases—your way to conform to IDPF standards and have the files readable on one of the world’s most popular e-reading systems.

While I’ve never been shy about criticizing the business practices of Amazon, Mobi’s parent company, I’ve always considered Mobipocket’s software to be more usable than rivals’. Now if only Mobi and Amazon can experiment with social DRM, as Wiley is doing. Maybe for some Amazon Shorts, if nothing else? People want to own e-content for real, and dropping traditional DRM and offering ePub would bolster consumer confidence in the medium and make more money for everyone, Amazon, included.

Note: I changed my ePub “File Associations” in Vista from Adobe Digital Editions to Mobipocket, and sure enough, when I clicked on a downloaded ePub of Flatland from Feedbooks, Mobi instantly converted the novel.

Update, 6 p.m.: I’ve followed up with questions to Mobipocket, and I hope others will join me. One thing I want to double-check is whether there will indeed be “creation” of ePub rather than from it. No misunderstanding here? The MobileRead post reads, “The next version of Mobi Creator and Mobigen will also support EPUB creation.” Not conversion from ePub? Meanwhile I’ve tweaked the post and headline, since I feel we need to double-check, given the importance of this apparent news and the fact I don’t see information about it elsewhere. No reflection on Nate or Mobi here—just a determination to make sure that the glad tidings are for real.

Update, 9:50 p.m.: Nate, too, will be checking to see if Mobi will in fact offer ePub creation tools in “the next version of Mobi Creator and Mobigen.” To his vast credit, Nate says his notes may have been wrong (here’s to honesty!). My hunch now is that the next Mobi tools won’t support ePub creation. But you never know. Let’s keep an open mind until we get the word form the company, which, of course, is welcome to use the TeleBlog comment area to clarify matters.

By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

Moderator’s note: Nice going, Joe! Keep us posted on this social DRM experiment. May Wiley extend it to full-length books from all its imprints! - D.R.

There have been countless times over the past several years when customers have asked us, “Hey, how come I have to buy the entire book when all I really want are these 3 chapters?”  This is a pretty popular question when you’re standing in the WROX booth at a developer’s conference, for example.  Well, I’m happy to say that we now have a product for that situation and it’s called Chapters on Demand.

The service launched this week, and there are currently 47 titles available in PDF format, most selling for $4.99 each.  That’s about 900 chapters that are available immediately, and we’ve got another 800 chapters (from 37 other titles) that will be added shortly.

No DRM horrors, no device limits

My favorite part of this: We’re selling all this e-content without the use of traditional DRM. I say “traditional” because we’re using more of a social DRM solution where we inject the customer’s name in the footer of the PDF.

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