The Digital Reader

At the end of last week, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue reflected on what we’ve learned (and not learned) from Macmillan’s move to drop DRM from the digital books sold by its Tor imprint. Announced in January 2012, the decision took effect a year ago, affording Pogue an anniversary assessment.
[Read more →]

When it comes to DRM anyone who wanted to open their own ebookstore generally had 2 options. Pay Adobe a lot of money to license Adobe DE DRM or sell ebooks DRM-free via Paypal, Gumroad, or some other service.

But in the past few months there has been a number of new services launched that offer more options for authors and publishers who want to encumber their ebooks with DRM. For example, a few weeks ago I wrote about EditionGuard, a service that is designed to support smaller ebookstores that wish to use Adobe DE DRM.
[Read more →]

DRM is a topic with entrenched positions on both sides, and in all the years I have been watching the debate I have read arguments about whether DRM was necessary, useful, and effective at preventing piracy. But there’s one argument that I have not seen debated, and that would be the cost-effectiveness of a small ebookstore maintaining a DRM system.

I can’t recall that anyone has discussed to what degree DRM can increase the sales of a title in a small ebookstore by limiting piracy, and in particular whether that marginal increase in revenue exceeds the cost of the DRM system.

I’m not sure how you would answer this question when it comes to content, but a similar debate has come up before in relation to mass transit systems. It raises some interesting questions.
[Read more →]

Earlier this week I reported that the POD and ebook distributor service Lulu had dropped DRM from their ebookstore, and it seems they’re not the only ones. Some time next week Centraal Boekhuis, the leading distributor of books and ebooks in the Netherlands, will start distributing more ebook titles unencumbered by Adobe DRM.
[Read more →]

Have you seen the article that Cyrus Farivar wrote for Ars Technica on Monday? He takes a look at why the publishing industry has not yet followed in the footsteps of the recording industry in dropping DRM.

And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?

This article is getting passed around a lot in digital publishing circles, and before you get to pondering it I want to add something. This article has a significant flaw in its basic assumptions.
[Read more →]