TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
A Campaign to Organize Against DRM
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
In a TeleRead piece that I wrote last week, along with a perhaps more interesting exchange of follow-up comments, I began thinking about what it might take to mount an effective organizing campaign against DRM. Starting from some relatively passive speculation that Amazon could well move to diminish or get rid of DRM in the Kindle Store out of its own self-interest, I attempted to challenge readers and commenters to think rigorously about what would be required in terms of strategy and intellectual honesty to mount such a campaign:
“[I]t is important for those who are committed to the anti-DRM fight to realize that the fight does not become a campaign until it has three elements: (1) a clear-eyed sense of the relative support that exists on each side of the question, where it comes from, and the extent to which consumers care or don’t care; (2) total intellectual honesty about the current state of play — for instance, it seems to me that assertions that ePub is the e-book publishing ‘standard’ or that ‘serious e-book-lovers hate DRM’ declare victories that have yet to be won; and (3) [a] strategy [built around the self-interest of the player or players who hold the power to give you what you want].”
My point was to suggest that it is seldom enough to be right. If we want to change something worth changing, we need to get up off our keisters and organize. There are some interesting models worthy of emulation just now in the Reading Rights Coalition’s text-to-speech advocacy and the Green Press Initiative on publishing materials.
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'The book’s women...radiate that screwball-comedy pizzazz a la Roz Russell’s Hildy Johnson in the film His Girl Friday.'
