Will e-books ever go DRM-free?

While reading this thread I realized that this is a question of some concern to me. I have any number of different devices, and I tend to spread my purchases around several vendors (Amazon, B&N, Apple). It would be great if e-books eventually joined music as “typically, distributed in a DRM-free format.” (Yes, I know that some vendors, such as Baen, currently offer DRM-free eBooks, but they’re certainly the exception and not the norm. For purposes of this discussion, “eBooks are DRM free” effectively means “Amazon’s eBooks have no DRM.”)

So, what do people think? I figure it took around 8 years from the time MP3 sales became a Real Thing™ until DRM-free became the norm. Will books eventually join them, or are DRM-constrained eBooks here to stay? And why or why not?

There are a couple of publishers - Baen, Angry Robot - who do DRM-free books. So it’s viable, much as iTunes with DRM-free music is a reality now.

However, it’s very difficult to predict the dynamic. iTunes is the way it is at least in part because Steve Jobs didn’t like DRM, and only put up with it for as long as he felt it was necessary. Amazon seems to be cut from a different cloth, and they dominate the eBook market. Given the nasty tricks they pulled with MobiPocket, I don’t see them changing any time soon.

So, I voted “distant future” when something forces Amazon to abandon DRM.

iTunes is the way it is because the music industry became scared by Apple’s dominance of online music sales and allowed iTunes competitors (notably Amazon) to sell DRM-free music to give them a competitive advantage.

There is strong evidence that Apple does like DRM (and presumably so did Steve Jobs): Apple uses FairPlay DRM (the same system they originally developed for music) to protect app store apps. This is one area where they absolutely have a choice in the matter–perhaps Apple is forced to use DRM on TV, movies, and books by the respective publishers of same, but the app store is theirs to do with as they will.

Apple was the last major music retailer to abandon DRM. Perhaps they never wanted to use it; it’s certainly the case that music publishers forced it on everyone at the start. Perhaps they abandoned it the second they were able to negotiate a contract allowing them to do so. But there is no evidence to show that Apple dislikes DRM in general.

Good enough. I was just repeating something I’d vaguely heard some years ago, which may very well have been propaganda. At least in Baen’s case, it’s quite unambiguous that they think DRM is a net evil, and they’ve been vocal about it.

Baen is basically the equivalent of the indie bands on emusic.com or whatever. They’re not relevant to the bigger picture.

I put in my vote for it going away, but I’m not at all sure about that. Here’s my rationale for and against DRM going away:

AGAINST: Consumers don’t care. DRM on MP3s was irritating, because you probably wanted to put your music on a USB stick to listen to it in your car, or stream it to your Squeezebox, or burn it to a CD (and yes, I know iTunes had some limited allowances for that), or whatever. But books? You can read them on your Kindle, on your phone, on your iPad, on your PC. What do you want to do with your book that you can’t do with it?

FOR: Consumers don’t care NOW. As they start buying next-gen readers, they might. If the Nook 3 is way better than the next Kindle, a lot of people might buy it, and then realize they can’t read their Kindle books on it, and then get upset. But I’m not actually optimistic about that happening, as it never did with MP3 DRM. People just used their DRM lock-in as a reason to keep buying the same device brand over and over.

AGAINST: Publishers are morons. DRM on ebooks is essentially irrelevant anyway, and doesn’t stop much in the way of piracy at all, because the people uploading to torrent sites aren’t stopped by it, and everyone who’s pirating just downloads the torrents. And meanwhile, Amazon is really good at making it so super-easy to just buy books from them that probably half their audience literally is technically incapable of pirating. So DRM is pointless. But publishers don’t care.

FOR: DRM locks in ecosystems. If you have 500 Kindle books, you are never going to buy anything other than a Kindle. And if you’re never going to buy anything other than a Kindle, you’re going to buy all your books at Amazon. And if most people are doing that, well, when Amazon decides to renegotiate terms with publishers in five years, boy howdy do they have some awesome bargaining power. Publishers won’t want Amazon to get that much market power, so eventually they’ll sell their stuff DRM-free, so that B&N can sell to the Kindle crowd and curtail Amazon’s power somewhat. (This is the main reason they ultimately went DRM-free with MP3s, after all.)

AGAINST: Publishers are morons. They’ve been taking counter-productive actions one after the other through this whole ebook transition, so just because something’s in their best interest is no reason to expect they’ll see it. I mean, it’s obvious NOW that the ecosystem lock-in thing is boosting Amazon’s power to dictate terms to them, but they’re still insisting on DRM, so.

Personally, I find that I really don’t care this time around. It’s easy enough to de-DRM stuff in Calibre, and if they make it hard, then I’ll just download de-DRMed copies after I buy the DRMed ones.

There’s a B&N and Amazon app for iOS. Makes me think an iOS e-reader makes more sense than a Kindle or Nook. At least a Nook Color is easy to root and you can put the Kindle app on it then.

I went through this process myself.

I originally used a Palm TX as my reader, and Mobipocket was far and away the best reading software. eReader wasn’t good at all. A lot of books on Fictionwise had DRM, but it didn’t trouble me because I was only reading on one device, and DRM wasn’t getting in the way.

Then Amazon purchased Mobipocket and killed it. The DRM servers for Mobipocket got phased out. Each device had its own DRM key, and I couldn’t get copies of the books I owned with keys for new devices.

The Kindle and Kindle apps are actually Mobipocket, and use the .mobi format, but they’re deliberately crippled. You can’t use them to read DRM-encrypted books that weren’t purchased from Amazon.

That’s what pushed me to discover how to remove DRM from my existing book library, and convert to ePub so I could read them with Stanza.

I’m frankly amazed at the ability of the publishing industry to shoot themselves in the foot here. They know Amazon is working against their interests, and yet they’re still handing it the ultimate weapon in the ebook publishing wars.

If I were a publisher, I’d make the absence of DRM an absolute requirement for reselling my books.

I doubt conventional publishers are the ones holding the cards at this point. They’re even more of a joke than record labels… I give it maybe ten years at the outside before they all but cease to exist.

The thing is, the publishers have won every battle against the bookstores to this point. The agency model (and attendant crazy-high prices for ebooks – they now routinely cost $15+) got pushed onto Amazon; the Kindle Lending Library has a severely limited selection, and Amazon is only able to do it at all by paying the full purchase price of the book to the publishers, because none of them would cooperate with Amazon in doing something sensible.

Amazon just doesn’t have the market power yet to break the publishers. But the way things are going, they will in a fe years, and the world will be the better for it.

I don’t think converting the world of book publishing into an iTunes App Store style single-publisher monopsony will make the world a better place.

Sadly I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get an e-book about the Byzantine Empire by Cyril Mango at anywhere near $10. If Amazon can do that for me I shall do unfathomable things for them.

I wouldn’t have thought so either, until the publishers used their monopoly power to ensure that no retailer can ever offer any kind of discount, and then mandated prices of $15+ for ebooks. It’s hard to do worse than that.

“You can never lend books to anyone ever again.”

There. Worse.

Most of my views were covered by mkozlows.

Books strike me as an impractically hard thing to lock up in a technical sense. You could have the craziest unbreakable DRM in the world, but the actual content is a few hundred kb of text. It’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Burns and Smithers descend to the ultra-secure bunker only to find a rusty screen door leading out back.

I had trouble finding a legit ebook version of the new Game of Thrones book. Googling “purchase a dance with dragons epub” got me nine million torrent sites. Meanwhile I could initially only find the hardback version on Amazon, and later was able to find the epub version but wasn’t sure if it was legit for my phone as well as my computer.

I wanted to buy it because, uh, I guess I wanted to give away my money? Anyway, it was a way bigger pain in the ass (had to install an amazon app, find it on there, buy it on amazons site and then sync the two) than just downloading the freaking thing illegally and stuffing it onto my iphone in stanza would have been.

Which is dumb. I’m practically begging people to take my money and they can’t be bothered to make it a seamless and easy experience? Go fuck yourselves, you dumb schmucks!

“I just owned your DRM in two minutes of googling and lent my books out anyway.”

Which is why my brother is reading ADWD on his phone. My book, I lend it to whoever I choose.

This, I think, is an unfair critique. If you have a Kindle, and want that book, go at Amazon, search for it, click Buy, and it appears on your Kindle (and iPhone’s Kindle app etc.). It is as seamless and easy as it could possibly be. It’s not going to be much more complex if you have a Nook and want it from B&N, either.

It is much, much easier to get books onto your Nook/Kindle legitimately than it is to find pirate torrents, downlaod them, and transfer them across. Whatever you might accuse Amazon of, making the default case hard isn’t one of them.

Aeon221 seems to have gone about it the hard way. I mean, if I Google for a random song name followed by the file type, I also get a bunch of torrents and sketchy sites. (Example.) Fire up iTunes and punch in the song name in the search box and 99% of the time you’ll get exactly that, which is a big part of how Apple fought the pirates. By making songs easy and cheap to buy.

Nook and Kindle works the same way.

Edit: This is what pops up when you search on the B&N website: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/game-of-thrones-george-r-r-martin/1100041703?ean=9780553593716&itm=2&usri=game+of+thrones It has the link to the ebook right there.

I don’t think the two are comparable. The most that’ll happen: Amazon becomes the largest general-purpose publisher. I’m ok with that. What, you’re that attached to Knopf or Random House or whoever? Meanwhile, printed books won’t completely disappear (at least not in our lifetimes), and Amazon will continue to not make the only devices that can read e-books by a long, long way. We aren’t really in danger of ever seeing Amazon implement an Apple App Store-style “we must approve all books” system.

Amazon’s dream:

Most readers buy a Kindle. They buy Kindle books. They can’t switch to any other ebook retailer, because they’re locked into the Kindle ecosystem.

Publishing directly through Amazon becomes more profitable than going through a traditional publisher. You get a smaller market and no editorial support, but Amazon gives you a better profit share.

Traditional publishers die.

At this point, Amazon will own most of the book market. They’re an effective monopsony–you publish through them or else. They can dictate any terms they want, including “we aren’t going to publish your book, because we find it offensive” or “if we see that book on Barnes & Nobles’s ebook store, we’re cutting your royalties.” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Do you feel lucky?

It isn’t necessarily a dystopian future. Books still get published. Something gets worked out to make up for the lack of editorial support. Most people don’t care that Nazi nostalgia fiction can’t make it into Amazon’s store. You can’t lend books any more, but you can probably still pirate them.

Better than the a horrible world of today in which I have to choose between paying $15 for an ebook of Reamde or $20 for the print edition? Not in my book.