And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org.

This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters.

For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered here) from a February 17, 2010 panel discussion on the future of publishing. (It even starts the video playback right before the mention of DRM.)

Searching on DMCA brings up 24 results. In fact, you can watch footage of any e-book-related discussion in Congress simply by searching on it. Or the discussion of any topic that interests you, for that matter.

This is a great tool for anyone interested in learning more about the way the US government works.

Like a number of other music vendors before it, Australian ISP BigPond is shutting down the DRM servers for the DRM-protected WMA files it used to sell (before switching entirely to MP3 in early 2009). It is advising customers to back up their music either by burning it to audio CD, or by copying the data files and keys to a backup storage device.

On The Digital Reader, Nate the Great reports that magazine database operator EBSCO has bought the NetLibrary e-book division from OCLC. NetLibrary has been shuffled around quite a bit over the last decade; at one point it owned eReader. EBSCO plans to integrate NetLibrary e-books into its EBSCOhost database, which already provides access to the full texts of various magazines and periodicals.

However, the first half of the article talks about the rise of e-books and e-magazines, discussing the Kindle, the Kindle app for iPhone, and the Zinio e-magazine reader. White doesn’t really mention many of the other e-book options apart from these, but at least he does agree that the PDF format really isn’t best for reading e-books on portable devices.

He seems a little more optimistic about the efficacy of Adobe’s DRM than I would be, though.

Full information and download links here.

(I discovered only after writing this piece that Paul also mentioned Epstein’s editorial back in February, even though it has a date of March 11th. Time travel? But my piece is much longer than Paul’s was, so I’m posting it anyway.)

In digitization, Epstein sees both a blessing and a curse. It will be possible for anyone to become a publisher, “and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping". Publishers will have “imprints” in this digital world, the way they have brand names in bookstores today.

Solitary Creation vs. Collaboration

I find it interesting that Epstein sees literary creation, even in a networked world, as strictly a solitary activity:

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer’s work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

I, on the other hand, have participated in writing any number of stories collaboratively—either by working solo in a shared world, or by working together with other writers in shared-workspace editors such as EtherPad.

Epstein should be paying more attention to the on-line writing community that has been going on at least since the mid-to-late 1980s (as covered in my “Paleo E-books” series) because that is where the first signs of innovation in form can be found—writers adapting to the difference in form between the Internet and printed works. We were writing Superguy stories decades before Elizabeth Bear and friends came up with Shadow Unit using a very similar writing formula.

Piracy-Proof Revenue Models for Authors?

Further down in the article, past a discussion of how the business aspects of publishing might change without the overhead of printing facilities acting as a gatekeeper, Epstein addresses the matter of piracy:

Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that "content wants to be free"—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others.

I personally think that the matter of finding a way to “make up for lost royalties” is just a matter of looking and trying different models. Sure, a writer can’t give a “concert”, but there are other things he could try.

For example, the “Storyteller’s Bowl” model used by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller grossed $30,000 for Fledgling and $27,500 for Saltation (1,200 and 1,100 subscriber copies sold, respectively, at $25 each). Even if the books hadn’t been picked up by Baen, and Lee and Miller had to pay for editing, printing, and shipping the books themselves, there would probably have been a respectable amount left over.

And Lee and Miller have also started auctioning off the original marked-up manuscripts for some of their books, serving the dual purpose of getting them a little extra cash and getting those big piles of paper out of their house.

For that matter, maybe some writers could sell T-shirts, or other custom merchandise. Or go on a lecture tour. Who knows? I’m sure other models are out there. It’s just a matter of looking.

Backlist and the Long Tail

A really interesting part comes later in the article where Epstein talks about the economic factors that led to the decline in bookstores and the subsequent erosion of the backlist. Suddenly stores needed to turn over their inventory as rapidly as possible, and as a result publishers dropped more and more older titles that were still selling, but not selling quickly enough.

In the mid-1980s, Epstein says, he launched a catalog store offering 40,000 backlist titles by mail order, but overhead was just too high to make a go of it. It wasn’t until the expansion of the Internet and the growth of Amazon.com that it became feasible for stores to expand to cover the entire backlist.

With digitization, the out-of-print backlist may become entirely a thing of the past, as there will never be a reason for an e-book to be unavailable as long as people want to buy it. Though Epstein does not use the term, what he is describing is the “long tail” effect—since there is virtually no overhead associated with keeping old e-books available, the random occasional sales of thousands of books will add up to a tidy sum in aggregate.

Conclusion

In the end, Epstein thinks that inexpensive multipurpose devices will expand e-books’ share of the book market, and might even lead to new forms of literary expression. He is doubtful that multimedia extras will catch on, though—reading is too focused an activity for most readers to want to deal with such distractions.

This is a very interesting article, and there is certainly more in it than I have had time to discuss.

Related: We covered another look into the future by Jason Epstein back in 2004, but the linked article is now behind a paywall. We also mentioned Epstein’s theory about the decline of the bookstore and backlist in 2006.

Plastic Logic has announced it is delaying the Que

Speaking of the iPad, from order numbers it was estimated that it sold 50,000 units in just the first two hours of its presale period yesterday. Not a big surprise that people are anxious to get their hands on it.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo has a pair of opposing articles on why you should or should not buy an iPad now. Amusingly, the “should not” article was written by someone who did pre-order, and the “should” article was written by someone who did not. Devil’s advocacy, anyone?

A number of magazines have made electronic archives available on-line, but not many have put them in a computer game. But that’s about to change, at least for Playboy Magazine. Fellow NAPCO blog GamerTell reports that the game Mafia II , set in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, is going to feature period issues of Playboy (or at least the covers and centerfolds from them) as in-game collectable items. Presumably this game is going for a “mature” rating…

Valve’s Gabe Newell won the Pioneer Award at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards this year, and he gave a slide show presentation on the drawbacks of DRM. The audience was reportedly quite pleased.

“One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it’s an attitude that says ‘what have I done for my customers today?’” he said. “It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get into that mindset it helps you avoid things like some of the Digital Rights Management problems that actually make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them.”

When it comes to monetizing web content, you might not immediately think of film critic Roger Ebert, but it turns out he has developed an interesting “value added” membership program for his website. All it costs is $5 per year (though until April 1, you can get the special introductory rate of $4.99). Ebert is not charging for content that used to be free, but providing some member-only “perks” that are well worth the $5. Reportedly, he has “a few thousand” members so far.

Another media organization is pondering a paywall. This time it’s ABC News, according to an interview with PaidContent.org. Paul Slavin, the SVP of ABC News Digital, says that they are working on developing a strategy, and they hope to have some preliminary ideas figured out by June.

The FCC is asking consumers to test their broadband speed, entering their home address at the same time so that the FCC can correlate the information with location to help them determine what areas need the most attention for the national broadband plan they are considering. Some people think the testing methodology may be suspect, but the FCC has clarified it will be combining the results with other information to get a clearer picture.

The Bookseller has an article on this today, and says that some publishers try to get the enhanced rights on a case by case basis, and other publishers try to get them all the time. In addition there are those publishers who are taking the position that “enhanced” rights are included with the normal ebook rights.

Jim Gill of United Agents said the enhanced e-book “seems to us an all-encompassing category that some publishers are seeking to throw a rope around at the moment, potentially covering anything from incidental music with an e-book edition or author interviews, right out to highly designed and produced iPhone applications.”

He said while some basic enhancements might be covered by an existing grant of e-book rights, “beyond that we’re talking about very sophisticated products which don’t resemble at all what we’d all understand to be ‘a book’ licensed under a volume-rights agreement”. Gill added United Agents would “no sooner naturally sell those rights to a book publisher than we’d sell them film right

For more info also see our report Publishing Expo: Rethinking author contracts for the digital world.

But the main topic of interest here is scarcity—and in particular, a pithy quote:

Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.  Society knows how to react to scarcity.

He brings up the example of the Gutenberg printing press turning out not just Bibles, but indulgences (salable licenses to sin) in such numbers that it led Martin Luther to write the Ninety-Five Theses and touch off the Protestant Revolution. In other words, abundance is disruptive.

Guess what digital media reproducible at zero marginal cost leads to?

In discussing this comment on TechDirt, Mike Masnick notes that the default behavior of people when confronted by excessive abundance is to try to force it back into scarcity. Hence, publishers wed e-books (and other digital media) with law-backed DRM schemes that mean you can’t (legally) just make as many copies as you want.

Of course, this isn’t really going to work very well for long, but people keep trying it anyway.

Something else Shirky said was:

It’s easy to say "preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new," but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

This put me in mind of the “burn the boats” comment that Marc Andreesen made, in reference to newspapers clinging to their print versions at the same time they try to get web versions up and running.

While the wisdom of Andreesen’s comment is uncertain (Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur points out that print-driven ad sales still account for over 90% of a newspaper’s revenue), that basic incompatibility keeps showing up every time someone talks about charging for on-line content. People expect to pay for printed newspapers, but the paywall prisoner’s dilemma means that all charging for a web paper will do is drive people to other free web papers.

Another way that incompatibility shows is in the way publishers keep trying to protect their paper sales at the expense of electronic sales. They should be more mindful of adapting to the new electronic model—the more e-sales they build now, the better off they will be when more people change over.

Related: Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow on the future of the bookstore

Gizmodo

The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa.

And don’t expect that DRM to be going away any time soon:

You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will rage with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at leasttry to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?

It also explains why every device except the Kindle reads EPUB, and the way the Kindle’s Mobipocket-based formats and Barnes & Noble’s eReader-based format hark back to PDA legacy formats.

I found it particularly interesting that the article complained about the chance of getting an eReader-format book when you want an EPUB-format one, given that we carried a story about someone in exactly the opposite situation.

The article concludes with the suggestion that creating custom apps to contain books might be the way to go. (I’m not entirely sure whether it’s talking about appbooks, or just individual apps from specific publishers.)

One amusing note: at the end, the article suggests that scanned-comic piracy will “explode” when the iPad comes out, now that a good screen will exist for reading those colored pages.

I suspect that Buchanan probably has not checked out the Internet comic piracy scene lately, given that it is possible to find just about any comic you want on BitTorrent already. But just wait—as soon as the iPad comes out, I’ll bet you that even though the amount of it does not change much, everybody will be Macaulay Culkin-faceslapping in horror how much of a Problem it suddenly is.

I don’t agree with everything the article has to say, but it makes a good primer on the “Tower of E-Babel” problem. Worth a look.

Weisskopf has many interesting things to say about Baen’s overall strategy, pricing, and the question of e-books “cannibalizing” printed books. The interview begins below the jump. (Links added by me.)

Many voices in the publishing industry are proclaiming that, since printing costs are only a couple of dollars out of a hardcover’s total price, selling e-books at a price point of $9.99 is "unsustainable." But Baen has been selling e-books for less than that for over ten years, even of books released in hardcover, and has become the counterexample that everybody holds up in response to other publishers’ claims about printing costs.

TW: Well, part of the “secret” there is that we don’t pay for expensive DRM (“digital rights management”) schemes. I’ve never understood why we should add to our costs with the sole outcome that it’s harder for readers to buy and read the books we want to sell. On the contrary, I want to make it as easy as possible for my readers to find, purchase and read my books. That goal influences every publishing decision I make from our marketing to what typefaces we use.

How is Baen able to sustain selling e-books at such low prices? Is it simply that Baen considers them mainly another form of promotion for the print books (as suggested here), and so does not assign the same share of manuscript production fixed costs (editing, typesetting, etc.) to e-books that other publishers do?

TW: Certainly when we started we viewed the ebooks as an experiment. In some ways mass market paperbacks are also a “form of promotion” for future hardcovers. Indeed, many pbs from the big publishers will run excerpts of the next hc from the author. The ebook just extends that idea. So yes, it’s a form of promotion. Is it also a source of income & profit? Absolutely.

Are you able to discuss the royalty rates Baen pays on e-books, in terms of percentage of "cover price"? How do they compare to print royalty figures?

TW: We pay approximately double hardcover royalties [in terms of percentage of cover price] for the ebooks.

Is it likely that inexpensive e-books will "cannibalize" print book sales—either now, or at some time in the future?

TW: I don’t think any sales “cannibalize” any other sales. Does a used book sale cannibalize a new book sale? Not at all. In general, people buy the nicest version of a book they can at the time. Can a used book sale or a library loan introduce my author, my series, my brand to a new reader, who may then be enthralled, entranced, ensorcelled into buying the next new hardcover in the series (and the eARC, and the final ebook, and maybe the pb too, so she can lend it out)—heck, yes. My goal is to make more readers for my brand. ANY sale has the potential to do that.

Specifically, I think ebooks will extend the market for books, not reduce it. But then what I am selling is good stories; I don’t care what medium I sell those stories in. If my readers tell me they want it chipped on stone, I will find some way to do that. If they want me to beam the story directly to a chip in the brain, I will do that.

Baen has pioneered a number of interesting techniques for using e-books promotionally: the free library, the webscription bundles, the pack-in CDs. Are any new promotional ideas on the horizon?

TW: We are printing codes in some hardcovers for free ebooks earlier in the same series. But for the time being, nothing radical planned. We’ll wait for the technology for flash drives to get even cheaper and flatter and who knows. Maybe we’ll be able to print drives directly into the books. You tell me! This is the sort of thing I rely on my cutting-edge techie Barflies to tell me about. Maybe your readers have suggestions for me? What would they like to see?

Some people have complained that Baen’s habit of treating e-books mainly as promotional material for selling printed books hurts the perception of e-books as having value in and of themselves, and encourages other publishers to misunderstand and perhaps misuse e-books in that way. (They might point to Tor.com’s free e-book promotion which left a number of e-book readers more disgruntled than pleased as an example of this sort of misunderstanding.) Is this a likely scenario?

TW: I can’t control what other publishers do and how they experiment! It’s not like what we do is a secret formula. Though perhaps we should call it that and sell the secret slowly over the course of a year in seminars…. We can only do what we do. But there are plenty of people over at Tor who value ebooks and want to see it done right.

In the last couple of years, since the introduction of the Kindle, we have seen the first signs that the nascent e-book market is actually starting to take off. At the moment, e-books make up a fairly small percentage of the overall book market—less than 5%. What will happen when and if e-books become a significantly larger fraction of the market? Will Baen have to revise its e-book pricing structure?

TW: When the ebook market takes off, we’ll sell more books. A lot of these questions seem to be leading to: is Baen going to raise ebook prices? We don’t have any plans to now, but I won’t rule it out for the future. Part of being small and nimble is the ability to change quickly as circumstances change. It may well be that Baen books sold through third parties will be more expensive than those we sell directly—that’s the function of paying the middleman and the price you pay to extend your reach. But we don’t dictate prices to other retailers, and we won’t to them. I’m certainly willing to try different things. If somebody finds a way to do it better, we’ll adjust.

Recently, Baen "rescued" two e-book series, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller’s Liaden stories and P.C. Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath, after their prior publishers Meisha Merlin (for print) and Embiid (for e-books) went under. What led to the decision to take these books on? Was Lee & Miller’s successful "Storyteller’s Bowl" experiment with Fledgling and Saltation a factor?

TW: We had an editor who was a big Liaden fan, and a freelance editor who had recommended Hodgell to me, so I was aware of those authors in a general way. Also, there was a lot of call for the books from our on-line forum, Baen’s Bar. The Barflies thought the Liaden series would make a good fit for our line. I take that sort of input very seriously. And before they ceased operating we’d been in negotiations with Meisha Merlin to distribute their ebooks, so we were already prepared to take on the Hodgell and Lee and Miller anyway. Hodgell was getting ready to write a new book in the Kencyrath series right about then. It seemed like all the forces of the universe were conspiring to give us the opportunity.

Regarding the success of the “story bowl” early publication of Fledgling andSaltation: yes, it was another proof of principle. We knew the authors had their own strong on-line community, there was already support and good word-of-mouth report on the books, and that wasn’t going to hurt our efforts, but supplement them. The obvious follow-on question is “why not do it again?” And the answer is that it takes a lot of effort on the authors’ part to make that model work, and these authors would rather spend that time writing the next book. Most authors do—but not all. You’ll see this model of publishing more, I think, in the future. BUT—it’s very hard to build an audience if you don’t have the reach of a mass market publisher. Not impossible, but hard. It takes a particular kind of personality to enjoy doing that in addition to enjoying writing fiction that a mass market will want to read—and have the professional skills to do both well.

These series were first reprinted as e-book-only omnibus titles before being re-issued as print omnibuses (although it seems the existing Liaden books were reprinted through Ace rather than Baen) with new sequels commissioned. Were the e-book sales of those titles a factor in the decision to commission new books?

TW: Heck yes! It was invaluable marketing research. And we made money for the authors and ourselves doing it. Win all around.

Toni concluded:

TW: I’m not saying that what we do will work for everyone else. They want to try it, that’s their lookout, and the beauty of a free market. But some contributing factors: because we are an independent publishing house (distributed by publishing giant Simon & Schuster), our overhead costs are probably lower than the big guys. Another factor is that our business model is that of the midlist publisher. Yes, we have several New York Times bestsellers a year. But we don’t expect those books to finance all the rest. All our books are expected to pull their weight, and we rely a great deal on our backlist, the long chain of earlier books in series and so on, to act as a profit center. Put another way, we are betting smaller, so our potential losses are smaller, but the upside is smaller, too. But it is a sustainable way of betting. At least so far!

I refer people to Eric Flint’s “Prime Palaver” at the Baen Free Library for an exhaustive discussion of the issues. In a nutshell, the problem of the midlist author or publisher is not piracy, but lack of exposure. If you like alternate history but don’t know about the 1632 series you can’t buy the books from Baen. So I want to spread the word by any means possible, I want to reach as many readers as possible. So we post extensive partial samples of books, we post partial samples of series (i.e. entire novels) at the Baen Free Library, we distribute CDs with tons of free books in selected hardcovers a couple times a year, we send out review copies to reviewers and booksellers. I hand out free books at conventions.

I have faith in my product: if you read it, you will like it and want more. And if you find you don’t like what I do, I’ve still not alienated a reader who’s been forced to pay for something they don’t like. Plenty of people who like Mercedes Lackey won’t go for Tom Kratman and I publish them both (which means, btw, that I do enjoy them both). This way the reader is more likely to try something new from Baen again—and if I don’t get you with one author or title, maybe I’ll get you on the next one.

The other side of the coin is that Jim Baen didn’t believe our readers are thieves and neither do I. I believe they will buy the book when they have the money. And I don’t believe our readers are ignorant. The understand TANSTAAFL. Our readers understand that we can’t continue to find great books and the authors continue to write them if we don’t get paid. So we don’t treat our readers badly by trying to micromanage the use of the ebooks, and we have been amply rewarded for that trust.

Thanks to Toni Weisskopf for participating in this interview!

Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and Mobipocket, EPUB, and PDF versions as well. Baen does something like this, of course—when you buy a Webscription e-book, you get it in all formats they offer, and can redownload it whenever you need to—and Fictionwise does the same thing for its DRM-free “multiformat” books.

But as Steve Pendergrast has said, publishers regard each e-book format as a separate “edition”—so if you buy a DRM-locked title from Fictionwise, you must choose which format you want at time of purchase—and if you buy a Mobipocket book but later decide you need it in eReader, your only choice is to buy it again.

This “Tower of e-Babel” makes it terribly difficult to future-proof your purchases. If the next reader you buy does not read the format of your existing library, your only option is generally to crack the DRM and convert your library to a new format.

Of course, Amazon and other big companies are banking on this, trying to lock customers into their own formats so they have less choice when it comes time to upgrade. This is one of several factors that may be holding the e-book market back.

The sooner publishers get a clue and start letting us buy the book in a way that will let us use it in all devices we own, the better. At least Valve is going to let us do that for its games.

Steve Jobs

A decent commercial, though I couldn’t help but notice the clip from Star Trek during part of a montage of screenshots and images was in full-frame and looked rather cramped.

Speaking of the iPad, CNet has an iPad FAQ that sums up what is generally known about the device. A good summary, though not much in the way of new information.

And speaking of FAQs, here’s a story I found on Nate’s Ebook News: Educause, a thinktank dedicated to “the intelligent use of information technology” in education, has come out with the latest in a series of articles called “7 Things You Should Know About…” The subject of this article is e-book readers (PDF download).

It’s a good basic summary of e-books in education, focusing largely on their utility for holding college textbooks, and their advantages and disadvantages compared to paper books.

The Google Books settlement gets another examination in the pages of the Mercury News. The article is a good summation of the key issues of orphan works, privacy, and competition surrounding the settlement, just in case anyone here doesn’t already know what they are by now.

And in a follow-up to Saturday’s story about Ubisoft’s consumer-unfriendly DRM, BoingBoing and Slashdot are reporting that Ubisoft’s DRM authentication servers went down yesterday—and had been down for ten hours as of the time the article on The Escapist was posted. That’s a ten hour outage on a weekend, during which time no one who purchased the game legitimately and did not crack the DRM could play even a single-player game of Assassin’s Creed II.

Of course, people who pirated the game or who broke the DMCA by breaking the DRM didn’t have any such problem. What are we paying these game companies for?

In recent days, another computer game’s DRM has been taking the spotlight. Ubisoft has come out with a much more restrictive than usual DRM system, in place on its game Assassins Creed 2, that actually requires gamers to be connected to the Internet continuously throughout their entire gaming session—even if they are only playing a single-player game.

There are on-line-only e-book readers, of course—web apps such as Ibis—but just imagine if your Kindle required you to be connected to Whispernet at all times or else your e-books would not open. What if you had to dial in to Fictionwise every time you wanted to read an eReader book?

Internet Lockdown vs. Unreliable Internet

The rationale behind this restrictive DRM was that it would supposedly be more effective and harder for pirates to crack, so the games would be limited to people who actually paid the money to buy them. The problem is that this ends up hurting gamers with less reliable connectivity—most notably, American soldiers stationed overseas.

The issue is Internet connectivity. "Net connectivity on some of the larger [Forward Operating Bases]—I’m on Victory Base, it’s HUGE and very built-up—is not terrible. However, we all have severe bandwidth caps with the ‘government sponsored Internet,’ drops in connectivity, or we have to pay a high price for ‘civilian’ Internet," [one soldier] explained.

Other groups affected would include people in rural areas that don’t have access to broadband, people who can’t afford it, and travelers.

xkcd Was Right

And how did this fancy new “hard-to-break” DRM scheme hold up in the real world? It was cracked in less than 24 hours. It seems that the game was made so it could be patched to disable the DRM if Ubisoft ever decided to shut down its DRM servers—which meant that clever game hackers could figure out how to “patch” it themselves.

So once again, DRM turns out to be a colossal boondoggle. Ubisoft spent money that could have been better spent on game content developing a “foolproof” system that ends up only penalizing the honest consumer—those who download the cracked version not only get to play for free but can do so without the always-on-line restrictions of Ubisoft’s ill-conceived DRM. xkcd was right.

Invest in Service, Not Shackles

It seems pretty clear that no matter how gaming companies tighten their grip wiith DRM, in the end the pirated games will just slip through their fingers. How about instead of investing in these useless shackles, software companies instead focus on providing extra service to people who buy their products legitimately?

As I pointed out the other day, Valve is a great example of this. It is continually adding all sorts of value to its software, and of course you have to have purchased it legitimately in order to download and play on-line. It also frequently puts games and game packages on sale in its on-line store, and just as with e-books you can buy on-line for instant downloading gratification.

Of course, this sort of service also makes it less likely you can get any benefit out of buying the games used. Much like e-books with the used book market, digital game downloads and online-value-added games may end up killing or severely crippling the used game market.

If we can get an overall better experience by paying that price, then perhaps it is worth it. But it would be nice to have that better experience, instead of just having the price.

See also: TeleRead’s DRM primer