Tag Archives: DRM

Love Books or Love Reading?

Posted on by
2

Today saw a pretty active conversation on Facebook after I posted a comment that books were going the way of the dodo bird.  The reaction was passionate by those who feel that paper books will not be going away.  Before I go any further let me clear something up.   I love reading and I love books but those two things are not the same.  Reading is the act and books are the medium.  I have personally never bought a book just because I wanted the collection of paper and ink that made it a book.  I tend to buy my books because of the content not the medium.

Once the content is decoupled from the medium we can express an opinion about the preferred medium.  There is something quaint and comfortable about reading a printed book.  It’s the traditional way.  The smell, the feel, the weight all contribute to make reading a paper book a joyful, sensory experience.  Reading an electronic book just isn’t the same. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.   When you read a really good book the medium isn’t going to have that much of an impact on whether or not you enjoyed the book.  The reaction to the content will far outweigh how you feel about the medium.  Is a bad book made better because you read it in printed form?  I’m going to guess that it doesn’t.

There are two types of advantages the ebooks have over printed books, those for the reader and those for the publisher.   Printing and distributing books costs a lot of money.  It’s an expensive process that doesn’t really scale well.  Once you reach a certain volume printing books is only marginally cheaper when you print more of the same book.  An ebook on the other hand costs as much for 10 as it does for 10,000 copies once you’ve met your overheads.   This reason alone will drive publishers to ebooks over printed books.  This is great news for authors as they’ll be able to make/sell more books.

It appears that consumers are already voting on which way they want to go.   According to Techcrunch : “Kindle eBook sales surpassed Amazon’s hardcover sales back in July 2010, and they surpassed paperback sales in January of this year [2011].”   In the last year  ebooks sales were 3X higher than the year before.

There is some amount of subjectiveness when it comes to evaluating e-books from the reader’s perspective.  The ability to randomly search for words or phrases is something you can’t do in a paper book but you can with an e-book.  How much value is that to the reader?  It’s hard to say.  It might be a little it might be a lot depending on the situation.  I can carry hundreds or thousands wherever I go with my e-reader.  This is not something you can easily do with printed books but how often would you really need to have access to your entire library especially if you can just google the content using Google books.  How this does help is if you are reading 2-3 books at one time which happens quite frequently  I’m not a very patient person so being able to acquire a book anytime, day or night is a bonus for me.  That has real value for me.  Ease of access whether for multiple books or one device or for getting new books makes an e-reader much more convenient than a printed book.  The ability to read the same book on multiple devices means you don’t ever need to be confronted with the situation where you left your book at home.

Lending electronic books today is hard.  Most books use some kind of digital rights management that makes lending them hard.  DRM free books are easy to lend.   This is a problem that needs to be solved.  It will probably get solved the way music rights were solved.   The music was pirated until the legal purchase got cheap and easy enough to make it better to buy than to steal.

Printed books aren’t going away tomorrow but they will become less available.  If everyone has access to an e-reader then why print the book at all?  As more people get e-readers there will be fewer and fewer reasons for a publisher to print books.

I didn’t even touch on the cost of books to libraries.   How much real estate is devoted to libraries just to house books?  If every book was digital how big would the library need to be?  Would we even need libraries?

There was a time when photographers used film because it was “better” than digital.   There aren’t fewer photographers because we don’t use film anymore.   This will be the case with authors.  There will be more books “published” the sooner we move to digital distribution. The barrier to entry will be lower.

DRM Causes Revenue Leakage

Posted on by
2

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a bad idea.  This isn’t the first time I’ve said so.  I get that creators need to be paid for their work.  I like to buy my media.  I have subscriptions to Netflix and Zip.ca to watch movies. I buy my music on iTunes and I have a subscription to Audible for audiobooks.   If I really wanted to screw the creators of media I wouldn’t pay for all these services would I?   So why is it that as a paying customer I get screwed?  Why is it that I can’t use media from the services I pay for on the devices I own?

I recently bought a Playbook.   Software developers have been slow to develop for the Playbook.  As a result of this slow development I am not able to watch Netflix, listen to Audible or listen to music downloaded from iTunes.   I don’t blame RIM for this problem.  This isn’t a media player problem.  The Playbook comes with media players.  The problem is with the DRM.   There are Open Standards format for the media I want to consume it’s just that digital rights management prevents me from using the Open Standards.  Music and audiobooks can be played as MP3, movies can be played as MP4 or a streaming format.

Let’s get something clear, if I wanted to steal movies, music or books I’d already be doing so but I’m not, not yet anyway.  When will content creators wake up to the reality tbat DRM causes more revenue leakage than it prevents by forcing consumers to break the DRM in order to consume the media they have paid for?

From where I stand DRM sucks!

DRM Sucks

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t care if it’s music or software or videos, locking access to the product only hurts the customer.  People that are going to steal your intellectual property are going to find a way to steal it regardless of how you try and protect it.

I was having some hardware problems the other day and after a while of fighting with the problem I decided it would be easier to bring my laptop back to a factory install and go from there.  I was only half right.  The hardware problem went away but I introduced a number of problems all in someway related to some kind of digital rights management.

First it was my music.  My computer was no longer authorized by iTunes.  It’s the same computer as last week but because I reinstalled the OS Apple thinks I have a new computer, I wish!  So I now have three of my five available computers authorized even though there are only two computers involved.  In a house of four people, where everyone has at least one computer, five authorizations may not be enough.   It took over 6 hours to re-transfer music and audio-books that I already had on my iPod.  Apple, smarten up!  That’s not fair, it’s not Apple’s fault.  It’s the music industry that has it’s head in the sand.  By and large the music on my iPod is music I bought either on CD or from the iTunes store.  As a result I had “licensing” problem.  I can get around these problems by doing what almost everyone else does and download my music from the Internet.  Is that really what the rights owners want me to do?

Then came the software for my GPS.  The original disk I bought a few years ago has not faired well.  It is scratched to the point where my computer will not read the disk.  Sure I can download a version from the support site but it needs the original software installed before it can do an update.  I was able find a work around but that only solved part of my problem.  I still don’t have my map files installed.  I can’t get replacement media from Garmin so I guess I’ll have to go with an opensource solution for the maps.

I even had problems with my Adobe Acrobat software.  I’ve been using Acrobat 7 pro for a few years.  It works fine.  It turns out that Adobe no longer supports Acrobat 7, they are on to version 9 now.  As a result I can no longer download version 7 from the Adobe website.  Luckily I was able to find a version on my machine but it wouldn’t work on Vista.  There is apparently a known compatibility issue.  I got tired of fighting with that and upgraded to version 9.  Maybe that was part of their strategy?

I just can’t help thinking that the only people that are affected by all these hoops or the people that are trying to abide by the rules.  My experiences over the last couple of days are really making question why I should.