KNOW THIS: E-Books Update: Publishing Industry Options for Piracy Protection, Full Use Guarantees, and User-Friendly Formats
August 26, 2009
Other articles in this Know Something Project series:
E-Books: Where Literature and Technology Meet (June 2009)
E-Books Update: Pricing and Release Date Debates (July 2009)
E-Books Update: Amazon’s Disappearing E-Books Debacle (August 2009)
The original Know Something Project article on the e-book phenomenon, “E-Books: Where Literature and Technology Meet,” included a link to a very helpful piece on digital rights management (DRM) from TeleRead.org. According to TeleRead, the term digital rights management is often used interchangeably, but not altogether correctly, with “encryption” to describe “measures used to prevent casual copying of electronic media such as books, movies, or music.”
DRM arose from book publishers’ concerns regarding the ease of copying and sharing electronic files. Powers-that-be in the publishing industry made it difficult to copy e-books by “encrypting” each title so “it could only be read by one (or just a few) devices, based on a key—something unique about those devices that other devices would not share.” This way, “only a person who paid for a particular book file would be able to open it. He would also be prevented from making copies of it, sharing it with friends, or converting it to different formats (for example, printing it out to read away from the screen).”
BUT, TeleRead argues, such limitations go too far because they impede the application of “fair use” copyright laws, laws that state once you purchase a product—say, a music CD—you’re allowed to copy content from that CD onto your iPod or computer or other device for your own personal use. With encrypted e-books, however, once you purchase a product—say, a title in a certain limited format—you can only use it on a machine equipped with a reader that recognizes and can display content created in that particular format. You also are not allowed to copy content from that media file onto any other device, even if it’s for your own personal use. This, many argue, keeps consumers from making “full use” of the digital print products they purchase.
Additional points regarding the ineffectiveness and inefficiencies of the DRM model are noted by TeleRead, which also notes many sites report the absence of DRM restrictions leads to increased rather than decreased sales. Innovative e-book sci-fi/fantasy publisher Baen Books and its Free Library and Webscription sales are cited, as is Barnes & Nobles’ Fictionwise e-books site, which categorizes its inventory based on whether titles are created and sold in “Secure Formats” (i.e., encrypted), or “MultiFormat.” MultiFormat titles are not encrypted and can be read on a wide range of reading devices and platforms. Problem is, these titles are not likely to be bestsellers from major publishing houses.
In the comments section of the TeleRead piece, one author insists that dozens of copies of her e-books have been given away on “file-sharing”/piracy sites that distribute free, unprotected copies of books while profiting from advertising. No percentage of these profits, of course, goes to authors or publishers of the works. Still, some folks argue the free publicity generated via such piracy likely results in increased hard copy sales down the road. Somehow, I doubt most authors and publishers are willing to accept that argument as a good reason to abandon DRM.
Luckily, there are other options. At the end of July, TeleRead posted a call from the IEEE Microprocessor Standards Committee for those interested in participating in a Digital Personal Property Study Group. While the term Digital Personal Property (DPP) is described in great length in the TeleRead post, it is not widely used in the industry…yet. While DRM refers to “content protection systems that impose usage restrictions,” DPP is considered “the complement of DRM-protected products.”
While “DRM title ownership is retained by the supplier,” “DPP title ownership is transferred to the purchasing consumer.” And while DRM works for “rental and usage-restricted possession,” DPP more effectively protects “true ownership as the term is intuitively understood by consumers.” Both, it seems, can work together, depending on the desires of specific suppliers and consumers. A consumer who wants to pay for an e-book she can legally use, share, and give away “with complete autonomy and privacy” will be better served by a supplier who offers DPP ownership of its titles rather than strictly DRM-protected books. E-book publishers highly concerned with protecting their rights as copyright holders would likely stick with DRM.
Will this limit accessibility? Will pricing of DPP and DRM e-books cause additional industry quandaries? Probably, but for those in the industry concerned with consumer rights as well as copyright protections, some combination of the two standards may be considered ideal. As TeleRead puts it: “Digital Personal Property holds the promise of legitimizing DRM in the eyes of consumers by providing them the option to own, thereby turning DRM-protected rental and restricted-possession products into a reasonable, fair, and money-saving alternative to full ownership.”
Yet another option, suggested by publishing veteran Mike Shatzkin of the IdeaLogical blog, is “Social DRM”—“watermarking the name and email address of the purchaser on their ebook.” Such a strategy would discourage free distribution of a protected title while granting paying consumers “full use” privileges that allow a title to be moved from one device to another or lent to a close friend or family member. Through such watermarking, an e-book uploaded illegally to a file-sharing site for broad distribution would provide immediate information about the person who posted it, making that person an easy target for prosecution by the copyright owner.
Regardless of the rights e-book publishers opt to sell with their titles, e-book consumers continue to be limited by the varied formats of e-books. Sony Electronics, developer of the Sony Reader, has made headlines on this and other e-book fronts of late:
Most recently, Sony announced the planned release of a new Reader with wireless capabilities like those offered by Amazon’s Kindle. Earlier this year, Sony joined with Google and now offers more than one million free public domain e-books through its Sony online store. Via its newest partner, Overdrive, the “leading global digital distributor of eBooks and audiobooks to libraries,” Sony also allows library patrons to download available e-books for free onto their computers and then, if they choose, onto their portable Sony Readers. Of course such an e-book “rental” is only accessible for a limited time. But, rental advocates argue, once an e-book is read it’s usually not reused by a typical e-book reader anyway due to (current) DRM limitations (see above). If unable to transfer a typical e-book to another device or share it with a friend, why not borrow rather than buy it in the first place?
Sony’s partnership with the leading global distributor of e-books to libraries is a result of an important feature of its Readers: their compatibility with “industry standard eBook formats offered by libraries.” Such formats range from the increasingly popular open ePub file format to much more limited file formats that allow certain titles to be read only on certain types of readers. Last week, Sony announced that by the end of this year it will sell digital books only in the open ePub format. According to the New York Times, Sony also plans to “scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.”
Such changes will allow e-book fans with readers other than the Sony Reader to purchase e-books from the Sony eBook Store, and perhaps even share e-books with others. Readers that use the open ePub format include the slim COOL-ER eBook Reader and the new Plastic Logic eReader due out in 2010.
According to some, the publishing industry’s bottom line depends on the adoption of a single open e-book format such as ePub by all book publishers. Only through an industry-wide adoption of an open e-book format, some argue, will more titles be made quickly available to more book-buying consumers regardless of the reading hardware they use, the avenues through which they make their purchases, or the types of protection attached to the titles they opt to buy.
—Karen DeGroot Carter
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