TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Social DRM’ Category

By David Rothman

Related: Adobe news release on Content Server 4 and ePub.. – D.R.

Adobe is making its DRM more flexible. Instead of simply choosing between the usual DRM and no DRM, publishers will also be able to password-protect books. That’s the plan for a forthcoming Content Server version, not the current 4.

Computerworld has a helpful write-up by Eric Lai. Under the system, you’ll link your books to your Adobe ID account and enter a user name and PW; and you’ll then be able to read the books. You won’t have to use the PW whenever you open the book file. Some progress!

“On the flip side,” Eric notes, “that means a cracked Adobe ID and password could be distributed and used to let pirates read an eBook, just as stolen license keys are used to enable the installation of pirated software.” But how much revenue will actually be lost that way?

The Computerworld piece quotes a certain uppity blogger, who points out this still isn’t genuine social DRM—in other words, still not just names and addresses embedded in books. Besides, in some ways, is the PW approach simply a repackage of one used with eReader with encrypted credit card numbers? In fact, Adobe seems to say as much in this B&N-related FAQ, which will be of interest to Nook owners among others.

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By David Rothman

Pirates find easy new pickings in open waters of e-book publishing is the headline of a Times piece in the U.K. As reported there:

–American publishers have lost “more than $600 million” to piracy, by one estimate.

–Readers downloaded illegal copies of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol “more than 100,000 times” within days.

–In excess of 4,000 piracy cases have been reported to The Publishers Association in the U.K.

These numbers are still small compare to total p-book sales, but will increase as E catches on in popularity.

The best way to fight piracy? Get e-book shoppers accustomed to buying from legitimate sources before it’s too late. That means easy downloading, fair prices and the ability to move content easily from machine to machine within a household. Use of the standard ePub format and the end of traditional DRM could go a long way in that regard. Social DRM, anyone?

Elsewhere on the piracy front: Digital divide over filesharing plans: Digital economy bill proposals receive welcome from music and film, but anger from ISPs and privacy campaigner, in the Guardian.

Related: TechCrunch piece on DRM and Chris Meadows’ different perspective. Also see Why social DRM makes sense: Wise words from book maven Mike Shatzkin.

By David Rothman

You apparently can already preorder the $399 Sony Reader Daily Edition, the one with a 7.1-inch E Ink screen and 3G wireless from AT&T in the U.S.

Go here, and let us know if there’s a problem preordering the PRS-900.

Nov. 18 had been mentioned earlier as the starting preorder date by TechFlash in Eric Engleman’s Q&A with Steve Haber, president of the Sony digital reading division.

The Daily Edition will actually begin shipping on or around December 18 if information from a TeleRead community member is correct (thanks, eBook Reader!).

December is also the month when Sony is to reveal the newspapers and magazines that will be available for the device. I just hope the presentation of news content is more efficient than the Kindle’s. I can’t get to the stories lickety-split the way I can reading the New York Times mobile edition on my little iPod Touch.

So who’s carrying Sony Readers right now, or about to? “Wal-mart, Best Buy, Target, Staples, Borders,” Haber has told TechFlash. “Last season was about 3,500 outlets. This year it’s 9,000. Best Buy, this is the first time they have it in stores. It was just online last year. This is a significant push for them. Wal-mart will be more stores than last year. And Staples is all new. Toys R Us.”

Meanwhile, if you own the original Sony PRS-500, you can either update your firmware or trade in the 500 for a new ePub-capable model and get a $50-$75 discount (via MobileRead). You’ll have to send in the 500 for an update—your can’t do it at home.

(Updated at 9:30 a.m.)

Related: Sony, B&N better on DRM than Amazon—but still a long way from perfection.

By David Rothman

Sony, B&N promise to rekindle rights for book owners is the headline on a Boing Boing posting from Rob Beschizza.

Without doubt, Sony’s Steve Haber and Adobe’s Bill McCoy have been more sensible on DRM than Amazon, with more flexible approaches. I applaud their efforts. But we’re a long way from nirvana. Gang, what do you think of this snippet from Boing Boing?

I recently talked to Sony’s Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer’s respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won’t: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. … We’re obligated to have DRM but we don’t pull content back."

Um, as long as there’s DRM, Sony isn’t offering  genuine ownership of your “protected” books, a category that unfortunately includes most bestsellers. And remember, “Buy on any device, read on any device” is just a hope—and can really be achieved only without DRM or with social DRM (which could embed your name into an ePub file without destroying the ability for it to be read any ePub-capable machine). Operating systems and apps come and go. It is inherently impossible for the e-book industry to come up instantly with up-to-date, DRM-capable apps for every gizmo.

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By martinkochanski

As publishers, we want our readers to be as free as possible to do what they want with the books we sell them, as long as we don’t get robbed.

Classic DRM doesn’t do this. It ties the reader to particular reading devices and software and imposes unreasonable restrictions — on lending or giving away e-books — simply because the technology can’t regulate these activities and so must ban them. Classic DRM is equally bad for the publisher because he has to buy in (literally) to one DRM platform or another and be tied to a specific distributor who can provide support for it. He sees important word-of-mouth amplifiers such as lending banned, and the giving of his e-books as gifts made virtually impossible. Word of all, for both reader and publisher, DRMed books suffer from bitrot and in a decade from now most of them will be unreadable.

Social DRM is the obvious, humane alternative. We all know what the reasonable use of a book is, even if we can’t necessarily formulate rules that capture its essence. So let’s mark each e-book with its buyer’s fingerprint and tell the buyer to act fairly and reasonably. A fingerprinted e-book can be read on any e-book reader in the world, and always will be readable on them. If someone makes illicit copies for all his friends and relations, we won’t notice, but equally we won’t lose much. If someone decides to ruin us by selling thousands of copies of the book we sold him, we’ll buy one of those copies, see who he is, and ruin him back.

That’s the theory. Now for the questions.

Is anyone actually using social DRM?

Is it working?

If, by making available a reasonably-priced socially-DRMed e-book, we remove the reasonable  motives for hacking, will it stop happening? Or are there enough fundamentalist neo-Stallmanites around who will make it a point of honour to get hold of every book, remove its DRM fingerprints, and make it available for free download? “Books are information and information wants to be free”.

Are there methods of social DRM marking that will survive a passage through (for example) Calibre?

Can we build a consensus that fingerprinting is honest and respectable, and persuade toolmakers to preserve it on file conversion and not to supply tools for removing it?

By David Rothman

“Most importantly, Adobe’s current DE DRM has been cracked and once Adobe ePub is stripped of its DRM shackles, it is like any other ePub file.” – Spider Mattheson’s comment.

The TeleRead take: Hey, Spider, that’s an interesting observation—now that many e-reader-makers will be using Adobe “protection” and the Sony eBook Store will rely on it.

Now a question for knowledgeable TeleRead community members. For legal reasons, please don’t get into specifics; but in a general way, without revealing any how-to details or giving links to this information, tell us how easy you think Adobe’s DRM will be to crack. Amusingly, Microsoft .lit is a hit among some e-book techies because it is so simple to strip away the “protection”—not for piracy in most cases, but rather for the sake of convenience, such as for format conversions or backups or use on a bunch of devices.

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By David Rothman

Over at Harvard Business Review, Rita McGrath says Amazon could lose out to Barnes and Noble’s multidevice approach.

But wait! Hasn’t Jeff Bezos himself given strong hints that Amazon will work to get Kindle books on a bunch of platforms?

Considering the far-from-gung-ho reactions to B&N’s current e-bookstore, I wouldn’t worry that much in Jeff’s shoes, at least for now. Amazon still has more of a chance of dominating e-books. B&N so far has tuned out me and others pleading for the chain to try to ditch traditional DRM in favor of no DRM or social DRM so people can own books for real. Talk about a stubborn refusal to consider this major product differentiation!

Meanwhile, writing for the Guardian, Victor Keegan notes how power has flowed from traditional publishers to Google and Amazon and, perhaps, Apple in time.

One way for publishers to win back their lost power

But can’t publishers mitigate and perhaps even reverse the above by insisting on a standard e-book format without proprietary DRM (a major negative even with a multiplatform approach)?

Keegan talks about the possible end of book ownership. But you can have ownership if you phase out DRMed anything in favor of nonDRMed ePub, the core format on which major publishers have agreed. Let ePub be plain vanilla ePub, not Adobe-ized ePub or Sonyized ePub or B&Nized ePub or, in the future, maybe Amazonized or Googleized ePub. No 800-pound gorillas!

DRM vs. max inventory

DRM and other proprietary baggage can get in the way of readers locating what they want, even at Amazon, where, despite all those hundreds of thousands of titles, I still can’t find Saul Bellows’ masterpieces in E. Proprietary tech jacks up costs and makes books less likely to be candidates for conversion.

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By David Rothman

I wanted to run a pro-DRM post that a book biz insider made on an e-mail list. He wouldn’t let me. Feared it would just stir up bad feelings against him and his employer.

But meanwhile I was pleased to see another insider, Calvin Reid over at Publishers Weekly, note the following in his writeup of the IDPF’s Digitial Book 2009 conference: “More than ever Digital Rights Management—and even the notion of e-book piracy—was portrayed as more of a problem to the developing e-book market than e-book piracy itself.”

Exactly, Calvin. Perhaps someday you won’t just note the discontent with DRM but publicly share it. This is a revenue-drainer. Speakers such as Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches / Trashy Books were right on the money about the damage DRM is doing. What we have is a major disconnect between insiders and outsiders. Here’s a Reid excerpt illustrating this:

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By David Rothman

DRM is probably E-Book Annoyance Number One for our savvy TeleBlog readers.

They understand that if a publisher, store or tech company goes out of business, you eventually may not be able to access a DRMed book. You really don’t own DRM-blighted titles for real. You’re just leasing them.

So who are the heroes in the anti-DRM struggle?

Among the stars, as I see it, are Steve and Scott Pendergrast, the owners of Fictionwise, who offer DRM only because publishers insist on it. They really prefer that books appear in a bunch of formats without DRM, and as a bonus they’re updating their eReader software to handle ePub, the industry standard.

Please help the anti-DRM cause by using the comments section of this post to name your own favorite anti-DRM examples. Or e-mail me. Mention the good guys’ actions or planned actions. Mark Coker, moderator of Tools of Change’s Feb. 10 panel on the rise of e-books, will be celebrating these anti-DRM heroes during the panel.

Below, to help get you going, are some of my other choices for the anti-DRM honors—listed in no particular order, except that I’ll mention publishers first.

• Small publishers such as Lida Quillen of Twilight Times Books (home to The Solomon Scandals, my own novel), who arranged with the Pendergrasts for her books not to be infested with DRM at Fictionwise’s eReader.com site. Who are your own favorite small publishers battling against DRM? Some of the romance houses, such as Ellora’s Cave, have led the way. For publishers like Lida, one of the big frustrations is that stores such as Mobipocket’s insist on use of DRM. And my impression is that publishers have to go out of their way for Kindle Store books not to be DRMed, assuming that Amazon will let them. It’s another indication that DRM is really better as a monopoly-promoter than as a genuine protector of intellectual property in the era of the scanner and crowd-sourced transcription of popular books.
• Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan. Pan Mac is laudably asking writers not to insist on DRM, when they sign up. It’s already offering some DRM-free titles. Most Pac Mac e-books are still DRMed, but ideally this can change over time.
• Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Savikas and colleagues at O’Reilly Media (TOC organizer), which is promoting new books as DRM free and is also championing the ePub format. Perhaps someone at O’Reilly can enlighten us as to the DRM situation with past titles. Significantly, within the book world, O’Reilly is known as a technological leader.

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By David Rothman

Social DRM, an approach repeatedly talked up here for publishers who don’t want to release e-book files without anti-copying measures, is already in use in iTunes.

Check out a Slashdot item and CNET article for more on iTune’s use of social DRM. What’s more, eReader gets more or less into social DRM territory by including encrypted credit card numbers in files. Of course, purist might argue that the actual name of the purchaser should be always visible (see related comments).

Despite the flaws…

The best “protection” is none—why penalize legitimate owners?—but I hope that e-book publishers will pay close attention to iTunes and the better side of the music industry. Are big publishers really more conservative than RIAA members?

Despite the privacy risks, Social DRM is far more consumer-friendly than traditional DRM. At the very least, e-book-lovers ought to have a choice.

Image credit: Here. CC-licensed.

(Thanks to Arthur Atwell, cofounder of Electric Book Works in Cape Town, South Africa, for the tip.)

By David Rothman

"The Apple rumor du jour is that Sony Music Entertainment will license DRM-free tracks to iTunes, under the iTunes Plus program," reports Billboard.biz.

Time for Sony’s e-book side to experiment with DRMless ePub, which its new reader devices can display? Maybe with social DRM? I think so! Without traditional DRM to gum things up, ePub is a standard for real. Sony and independent stores—the company laudably plans to reach out to indies, when its forthcoming readers go wireless—could exploit this to the max in marketing. "Buy from us and own your e-books for real."

My personal stake is this matter—as a writer

I know: Sony will need cooperation from publishers. But at least the DRMless approach should be available as an option for cooperating houses. I’d love to see The Solomon Scandals offered through Sony without "protection"; I’m not just talking theory here. My publisher, too, dislikes DRM’s hassles for consumers. To one extent or another, the technology is a threat to our livelihoods, and I really dislike Amazon’s DRM requirements. A DRMless option would be one way for Sony and friends to distinguish themselves from Amazon and woo consumers and forward-looking publishers.

A reminder: The TeleBlog has both pro- and anti-DRM readers, and I encourage both sides to speak up here, in a civil way.

Related: Wikipedia item on Sony Music Entertainment.

Image credit for "Social Way" photo: Casey West.

By Garson O'Toole

Bill McCoy, the General Manager of ePublishing at Adobe, wrote an influential blog posting that catapulted the term “social DRM” into wide use. He said

“For eBooks, I really like the ’social DRM’ approach of The Pragmatic Programmers, who ’stamp’ PDF eBooks with a ‘For the Exclusive Use of …’ and the name of the purchaser.”

Traditional Digital Rights Management (DRM) requires implementing technological obstacles that prevent the purchaser of a digital object from copying, displaying, and accessing the object except in limited ways. These obstacles can cause endless aggravation to the consumer. For example a Kindle format e-book cannot be read on an iPhone or iPod touch even though the hardware sales of the latter Apple devices dwarf the sales of the Amazon device. (Update: Kindle e-books are now readable on the iPhone and iPod Touch but are still unreadable on PCs and Macs.)

I do not know if McCoy invented the term “social DRM”, but his blog post certainly helped to popularize the term. The article facilitated an important dialogue about e-book security, and this post is not meant to be discourteous. However at this stage of the conversation I suggest that the term “social DRM” should be replaced by “digital watermark” or simply “watermark”.

Physical watermarks are well known for paper stationery and the idea has been expanded to apply to digital pictures, music, video and now e-books. For additional background there is a useful Wikipedia entry on the term digital watermarking. Here are some reasons for the switch:

• The term “social DRM” is confusing because it does not really refer to an “access control” technology. Instead it refers to a technology for “tracking” and “display”.
• The term “social DRM” verges on the oxymoronic since “social” is nearly the opposite of “DRM” in the context of e-book “security”.
• Agitating against DRM while simultaneously being open to “social DRM” is terminologically confusing.
• The existing term “digital watermark” or “watermark” can typically be substituted for “social DRM” and the meaning can be preserved.
• There is a rich preexisting vocabulary for watermark description and classification such as “perceptible” and “imperceptible”; “fragile”, “semi-fragile”, and “robust”.

I was originally planning to provide a cluster of suggestions to replace or supplement the term “social DRM” such as: customize, tailor, imprint, stamp, inscribe, personalize, endorse, bookplate, dedication page, insert page, fingerprint, hash, and signature. But the easiest approach appears to be adopting the expression watermark.

Here is an example of how to use the term “watermark”: I wish Amazon would use a standard open format without DRM for its Kindle e-books. If Amazon deems some security measure necessary then why not try watermarks. With watermarks and an open convertible format I could still read my Kindle format e-book on my cell phone, computer, or dedicated e-book hardware (with conversion if needed). The catalog of e-books for the Kindle is extensive with Amazon claiming “more than 190,000 books available, including more than 109 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers.” Please do not lock up this catalog by coercively tethering e-books to the Kindle hardware using DRM.

The landscape image above is a fragment of a picture in the Flickr photostream of Shiny Things. I have superimposed a watermark image of the word watermark. Some rights reserved.