Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series, was one of several people interviewed for an “All Things Considered” feature that aired on NPR this week discussing DRM, or Digital Rights Management. DRM—meaning software built into electronic books that controls the way it can be viewed—is a hot-button topic among publishers, writers and agents these days; both proponents and detractors discuss it passionately. Naomi’s point of view, which you can listen to here, is anti-DRM. As an author, she wants as many people as possible to be able to read her work.
As an editor whose continued employment relies on book sales (both electronic and hard-copy), I am of course conflicted about the topic. But I am fully in favor of offering non-DRM titles on occasion to fulfill the same goal as Naomi’s. That’s one reason we’ve opened the Suvudu Free Library, which will make electronic books available on numerous eBook sites for free. There are authors I know I would like to try but have never gotten around to reading; if I ran across a freely offered electronic copy of one of his or her titles, I most certainly would download it. (And if I liked it, I’d probably plunk down hard-copy money to buy the print edition—me being a fan of hard-copy books more than eBooks, at least at this point.)
DMR has been much discussed in the SF/fantasy world. Cory Doctorow and Baen Books, for example, have long been vocal proponents of making eBooks freely available. Any opponents out there? Let us know your opinion.
for me the issue is less about are they freely available or DRM protected and more about consistency.
Now, I'm no fan of ebooks at this point, but I won't even give them a chance until the various e-readers out there share 1 format for their books. For example - in my opinion the number one reason why the kindle is evil is because kindle ebooks can't be read by another reader (such as a sony). Publishers, book sellers, and ereaders need to realize that they won't be successful until all ereaders share one format.
Back to the original issue of DRM - I think that at this time there is good evidence that offering an ebook for free ultimately helps (but as ereaders improve and young kids who don't care about paper books grow up this may change).
First, I recommend that anyone who has any interest or passion at all in this issue, regardless of which side of it you may lean to, go to http://baens-universe.com/ and read the series of editorials that Eric Flint has been posting for the last couple of years. You'll find them very interesting. And I think you can read them without having to subscribed to the magazine.
Second, I agree with the above comment. Consistency is indeed part of the issue. However, you're never going to get all content providers to agree on a single consistent format, if for no other reason than the differences between their preferred software platforms. So, the more logical way to ensure consistency is to either provide the e-books in all common formats, or provide at least one format that is simple text that customers can then use tools to convert to their preferred format.
Third, related to second, I categorically refuse to use a reader that locks me into a single format. I read my e-books on my laptop right now, but I am seriously considering an e-book reader for when I travel. I want to be able to take e-books from any format (rtf, html, pdf, or proprietary such as Mobi) and read them on a single device. That means that the Kindle and similar devices that are locked in to single proprietary formats aren't even going to make my initial list, much less my short list for consideration. (I'm currently considering the NAEB reader, if you want to know.)
Fourth, I categorically refuse to pay hardback level prices for e-books. That is an absolute ripoff. The practice today is for the author to deliver an e-file (.doc, .rtf, whatever) for a new work. Editing is done to the e-file. It takes very little additional effort (on the order of a couple of hours, maybe) to format an e-file for posting and downloading via the internet. Baen has proven that an e-book can be sold for less than $7, provide a reasonable profit to the publisher and a hardback level royalty to the author. I can see perhaps having a premium on a book for the first year of its life, just for the newness of it. I would consider paying up to $9.99 for a new e-book, especially if it was from one of my favorite authors. But I would also expect the e-book price to be reduced to match the paperback price when the paperback edition was released. Pricing any e-book over $10 is simply pure greed on the part of the vendor, and in the long run depresses the demand for the work. No offense meant to the host of this page, but that's the way I see it.
And fifth and last, when I buy an e-book, I buy it for portability. I want to be able to load it into my laptop for home reading and secure storage, I want to be able to load it to a thumb drive or external hard drive for back-up, I want to be able to load it to my e-reading device (when I get one) so I can take it wherever I want whenever I want. And I don't want any kind of DRM software to restrict those abilities. (If I choose to make a copy for a friend, that's my business, but if I do, it will probably result in additional sales for the vendor and the author. It's no different than loaning him a physical copy.) So, proprietary formats that restrict those abilities will not get my support.
My opinion, worth what you paid for it. :-)
These are well-reasoned responses. I'm going to share them with our eBook people. Keep talkin', people.
Looking at my eBook list, I have approxitmately 450 ebooks. All but 3 have no DRM and I don't read the 3 with DRM because it's too much of a hassle, so I stopped buying encumbered eBooks. I read on my phone (an HTC touch pro at the moment) and everytime I upgrade my phone, it breaks the DRM on those files, making it a real hassle to keep up with them. I think what really annoys me about DRM is the implicit assumption that I'm a criminal and the only thing keeping me from spreading the eBooks that I've purchased to the wind is an easily broken lock. If nothing else, that fact that DRM doesn't work (see music, movies and every where it's been tried) should be enough to convince people not to waste money on it.
I have a number of ebooks, like Jim (though only a couple hundred), mostly non-drm'd. I've moved from pdfs on my treo to the Sony Reader to a Kindle 2 (with the treo viable through them all), and drm was simply not a practical option. Note that you don't *have* to get drm'd books on the kindle (just like I didn't have to on the Sony), and while maybe amazon won't autoload them, it's still just a drag and drop to install them. There *is* an open standard for books, "epub", and it will make life easier for everyone if it's adopted (assuming it's a decent standard, I haven't actually worked with it from an authoring perspective, but one would hope...) Lastly, there is more non-drm'd content out there than I have time to read as it is, so providers forcing drm are just shooting themselves in the foot. I know there are a number of ebooks that I would purchase if I could get them uncrippled.
I just bought a Sony PRS-505 (what a terrible name!) a month or two ago, so my perspectives on e-books have definitely changed in recent months. I've always been a proponent of EPUB, but more on an academic level. Now that I'm actually having to deal with the tower of e-babel, it's a lot more relevant to me personally. Publishers should be jumping on EPUB like crazy. It's good for readers, which makes it good for business.
Regarding DRM vs no-DRM in particular, it seems like there's a false dicotomy being drawn. DRM-less does not have to mean "free". Just sell the darn book without DRM. It may get shared around. Okay, it probably will, if it's really worth reading to begin with. But your books are already getting "shared around" at used book stores, libraries, and among friends. I suspect that DRM, in its current level of sophistication, is doing way more harm than good to book publishing.
As a musician, aspiring writer and technophile, I see little value in DRM. I believe society is in the midst of a huge paradigm shift, particularly for artists and how they relate to their audience, and DRM simply gets in the way. Is that what the artist really wants? Obstacles to his content?
For me, DRM is the annoying cockroach on the proverbial banquet of universal content and it does nothing but keep the lawyers — er, exterminators — primed to the brim with self-indulgent enthusiasm and lustful finger twitching.
DRM has its place, however… and that is to provide false comfort to those artists who wish to remain in their citadels of old-world thinking, when it comes to the brave new world of digital media.
Having said all that, I’m all for copyright control. It’s just that I believe DRM is approaching the issues from the wrong direction. If an artist wants to protect their work and get his due compensation, I take no issue with that, of course. But in the end, trying to put digital content in a vault is like trying to store precious wine in a sieve. It just ain’t gonna happen.
What I believe will matter the most for artists in the 21st century is the human relationship between the artist and the audience. That personal connection is what will propel their audience to purchase the novels, music, films and so forth. That relationship generates trust, loyalty and even pricks the conscience of those audience members who have partaken of pirated fruit.
And that relationship takes work… a kind of work on the part of the content creators (and their teams if they have the budget) that is sometimes more difficult than the creation of the art in the first place. And I think it also requires a higher standard of merit for the work itself, raising the bar to a new level for the highest level of success. That’s where I come to the opinion — yes, this is just opinion so please disregard all this if you disagree — that a paradigm shift is upon us.
This generation, frankly, looks at content differently than prior generations. Content is not an object to them. It is to be easily and freely passed between devices, and yes, even between friends. When content loses its physical properties, something has to take the place of that which is lost. And that is where the relationship comes in.
In this short space I can’t go into more of my theories on this topic, but suffice it to say that DRM simply prevents the natural movement of content to the audience for which it is intended. And the audience of the 21st century will almost certainly take the path of least resistance. If it takes more effort to access or use an artist’s content, many won’t bother with it at all.
For those that choose to stoically defend DRM, please, have at it. But please don’t wonder why the content you are trying to protect is distributed without your control anyway and all that effort (read: time and money) you put into vaulting it up and chasing after pirates could have been spent building good will, trust and loyalty with your audience, one paying customer at a time.
I would like to second Preston's comments. I purchase ebooks from Baen all the time and have a wish list full of selections I will be paying for in the coming weeks and months.
For any book I purchase from them, I can download it in a variety of DRM free formats and can go back at any time and re-download any of them as needed (even in another format). It gives me confidence to spend all the money I want, knowing that whatever device I buy or upgrade to in the future, my purchases are safe. I also love picking up older works that aren't easily available anymore (especially whole series at a time =).
I also have no problems with premium prices ($9.99 seems fair) for a year or so to match the hardbound run but they should then decrease with the issue of a paperback and be at least somewhat cheaper that the physical book.
Also, as an American living and working abroad, ebooks are often my only source of good English books so this is particularly important to me. Even when I have them, I'm tired of a quarter of my luggage allotment going to books =)
Danny
I'm also a big shopper from webscriptions.net. Typically I don't get Baen's original fiction -- I like to pick up their classics omnibuses and the e-reads and Night Shade materials. I prefer to purchase my e-books from them because I KNOW that I'll never have a problem with the files.
It kind of reminds me of what happened with the Overdrive issues that happened a while back. A lot of people lost books that they thought they owned because Overdrive decided it wouldn't work with a particular vendor any more. And that should not happen. If someone purchases an item, they should be able to keep it, no matter what happens between the vendor and supplier. Or, if there is going to be DRM on books, then the vendor/suppliers should be totally up front that the purchaser is not actually going to own the book, but would be leasing the book. And in that case, maybe the model should change from a one-time payment model to a monthly subscription model.
I want to point out the seemingly obvious fact that paper books are not DRM, and that seems to be okay with everyone. I can personally state that I found all of my favorite authors, not by browsing a bookstore shelf, but by poking through the public library. None of those books are DRM, people go through and can read anything they want, whenever they want just by going to the library.
Also, I've turned friends on to authors by loaning them my own personal copies of books. By giving it away, and sharing it, I've made more people aware of authors, and therefore increased the publisher's market audience. Those friends have turned around and purchased their own copies. With DRM, I can't do that. My books are locked into my device, and there's no way I can share it with my friends (who would then look to purchase their own copies if they like it).
On a related side note, I'm not a huge fan of just having PDF files being given away for free. PDFs are meant to represent what's on a written page, and don't translate well to pages that are the size of most reading devices. Also, it's a real chore to get a PDF converted so that it will work with a device that doesn't natively support PDFs. Tor.com had the right idea by providing a wide variety of files that were easy to convert. Here's hoping Suvudu will also adopt that kind of flexibility.
Before I started reading regularly, I was PC gamer, so DRM was nothing unfamiliar to me. Most commercial PC games are sold with some form of DRM, and the many titles that I have bought and can no longer play make me the bitter anti-DRM zealot that I am. Unfortunate as it is, there are even several games I have bought new and not been able to play because the publisher/developer went under and disconnected their DRM servers that a game calls up to get permission to work on a computer.
When I started reading ebooks, I bought some book in adobe pdf format. It wasn't until downloading it that I realized it was DRMed, and had I known in advance, I never would have bought it in the first place. Disgusted, I backed up my copy and ignored it, as I was no longer in any mood or taste to read it. I didn't buy another ebook until about a year later. As for that ebook, I still have the backup, but I don't have any means of reading it. It won't open on my new computer, and I have no clue what I did to register it with the DRM system it used. I keep the file as a reminder.
Nowadays I buy near-exclusively from Fictionwise and Baen's webscription.net, and I make a point of NEVER buying DRMed books. To me, even DRMed freebies are worth ignoring, as I'll probably get frustrated halfway through about my limitations for reading them. I currently use my Windows PC, my Linux PC, my Palm (Mindspring Visor), my eBookwise, and occasionally my mom's Sony PRS-505, so having a book available in multiple formats is important to me, and DRM prevents me from reading on most of these devices.
But beyond just basic DRM, I've started paying attention to also using free and open formats. I collect ebooks because I don't have the room to collect treebooks, and I hate the idea of having all my books only available in dead proprietary formats that I won't be able to read in 20 years (like VHS tapes, for which I am without a VCR to watch them). Being able to convert formats of a book helps a lot, so this is a minor problem, but I still always try to get books in their most enduring format possible (and right now ePub gets big smiles from me).
As for books I want to read that are only available with DRM, I can read the treebook version. Being on a student's budget, I usually just head over to Half Price Books (there are at least three in the Indianapolis area) and pick up a used copy. Just this weekend I picked up Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle for $1.75 because the ebook version was only available with DRM. It's cheap, disposable, and lets me read the book without supporting a DRM-based sales method that I loathe.
If I really were in an absolute need to read an ebook only available with DRM, I would probably just go get a pirated copy of it from the darknets and then go buy the a treebook copy just so I feel less like an evil anti-author villain. Supporting authors is important to me, and I sympathize with cold-footed publishers, but I'm not going to go out of my and compromise my views on DRM just to keep them happy.