The Muse

When you hear the term DRM, you most likely think of music. That connection has been reinforced by the digital rights wars of the past couple of years. While Amazon has a fair shake at online music sales, Apple’s domination of the pay-for-play music market has made it a major player in DRM negotiations with content providers. Between the iPod and iTunes (proprietary devices that incorporate their own licensing model), Apple has become the premier digital music outlet.

But what of digital books? E-books vary in definition from an unsecured PDF on a website to a DRM-protected work on Amazon’s Kindle. In between is a myriad of proprietary licensing models and content management solutions, the most prominent of which are Adobe and Mobipocket. Neither offer a solution solid enough to bet on in five years. Publishers must step in, says Bill Rosenblatt in Copyright and Technology:

If publishers don’t act quickly, they face two alternatives, neither of which is very pleasant.  In one, Amazon succeeds in emulating Apple’s success in music and takes control of e-book business models.  In the other, excessive fragmentation leads to confusion, frustration, angry pieces from the blogosphere about the evils of DRM, and a limited market.

But is DRM even worth pursuing? Imagine downloading a PDF from an emerging author’s website. You pay a modest fee and are given a password to access the content. Excited about the read, you share it with friends. You bought a paperback before and did that–why not do it with a PDF? What’s stopping a friend from buying his own copy if he likes what he read? On the flip side, though, what’s stopping him from emailing it to all his friends?

Rob Beschizza, of Wired.com, predicted this dilemma way back in 2007:

Book publishers, scared of the ease of cut, paste, send, demanded it. Understandable. But few customers wanted locked-down devices, or bizarre file formats that offered nothing over plain text, Word documents or Adobe’s PDF.

In short, free copies are acceptable risks. As an emerging author, unless you’ve got enough cash to sink into publishing hard-copy books or setting up sales through Amazon.com, you’re probably going to post an E-book on your website. Be prepared to take the loss. Readers of new authors aren’t going to pay big bucks for someone they’ve never read before, so your first e-book on the market should probably be considered a free sample. If you get paid for a few copies, fine. Just promote your site and e-book until you are blue in the face and get your readers hooked. Then move to a more secure sales solution.

If you don’t bend a little, you may wind up killing your potential sales before they’ve had a chance to start. Eric Lai of Computerworld has a solid analogy, from the perspective of the potential consumer:

Imagine bringing home a music CD from Best Buy and discovering that it will only play on some of your stereo equipment. Moreover, you’re limited in the number of times you can switch the CD from one stereo to another.

Bottom line? In the interest of building a reader base, don’t get bogged down with DRM. Be snobby with your e-books when you can afford it.

        

fowlerjk business, sle, writing