Does DRM/security affect the e-book experience?
What about security on e-books?
By Brenna Lyons
People who follow the internet news will ask about the problem of e-piracy, BitTorrent, and so on. What are the pros and cons of secured formats? Sadly, the pros are few and the cons are many.
Does DRM/Digital Rights Management affect sales of e-books. Yes, they do…and negatively. When one of the owners of Fictionwise was keynote speaker at EPICon in OK City, he stated the following. Secured formats cause ten times the number of customer service calls, when compared to unsecured formats. A customer who has a problem with a secured file is ten times less likely to purchase secured formats again.
In addition to problems opening the secured files and reading them, customer complaints about DRM include:
The inability to use a file they rightfully paid for on all devices they own personally. Secured formats are difficult or impossible to pass from device to device.
The inability to back up and safeguard those files, in anticipation of catastrophic loss.
The inability to cut or copy and paste from a resource book protected by DRM, when citing material in a scholarly study…or when using a recipe from an e-book version of a cookbook. Some might argue that you have to hand type in from a paper book, but the fact is the unique advantages of e-books are stripped away by DRM.
The inability to make the e-book into an audio book.
The inability to print and read on the go from paper.
The added expense of DRM, which is passed along to the reader, in the form of higher prices.
Some people in the industry believe that DRM is the only way to stop content piracy, but the truth is that DRM punishes honest purchasers, in a vain attempt to stop criminals. There is currently no DRM that cannot be broken. When a new form comes out, it is usually broken within a number of weeks and the hack…or the unlocked copy of the file is passed around.
Is piracy a problem? Yes…a major one, in some cases, but the DRM isn’t going to stop it. Further, it’s not just e-books that put up with pirates. Paper books are routinely scanned into recognition scanners and pirated as e-books. That’s why you can find e-book copies of Harry Potter, when Rowlings has repeatedly refused to release the books in e-book formats.
Thankfully, most indie presses do not use DRMd books, so readers don’t have to put up with the inconvenience and higher cost of secured formats, when dealing with indie press.
August 12th, 2009 at 8:10 am
[...] Lyons, past and current President of the E.P.I.C. organization, makes use of humor to communicate a serious message in an entertaining [...]