Ebooks and DRM

One of the big topics at the TOC conference was Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how it should be applied to ebooks. DRM is technology that basically locks up a file to prevent unauthorized duplication. This sounds like it shouldn't be a big deal in theory--after all, most people out there would agree that unauthorized copying shouldn't be permitted--but when DRM is implemented, many problems become evident. One of the primary issues is that of transferability. Say you have a DRM program that prevents the file in question from being copied at all. This would certainly prevent unauthorized copies from being made, but it would also keep me from being able to move the file in question from my computer to a mobile device. Even more troubling, it would keep me from being able to transfer the file from my old mobile device to my new one, meaning that I would have to buy the file all over again on my new device.

Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote speech blasting DRM. He had a number of excellent points, but chief among them was the fact that using DRM takes the terms of the ebook out of the publisher's hands and puts them in the DRM providers hands. This can cause all sorts of problems, as it did when DRM provider Overdrive decided to pull its service from Fictionwise. While this did not mean that people lost all of their ebooks, as some have claimed, it did mean that purchasers could no longer download new copies of things they had already purchased--files could no longer be transferred, in effect. So if your old Sony Reader had been dropped in the swimming pool one time too many but you were holding off until the new version was available in your area, you lost the ability to access all the ebooks you had already bought.

The other problem with DRM is that users hate it. As Doctorow said many times, all it does is make people feel like it's okay to steal from you, because you're a jerk. This is the primary reason that the music industry has belatedly moved away from DRM. Publishing is moving more slowly, to a large degree because electronic formats are a new thing for us, but we seem as an industry to be following in the footsteps of the music industry, determined to repeat their mistakes.

The difficulty with moving away from DRM is that the distributors get involves. Amazon, for example, refuses to let ebooks be sold for the Kindle without DRM. Publishers are left with a bit of a dilemma, then: Hold fast to principles and be denied a major market, or throw up your hands and say "fine", and put DRM on your files?