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I believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on
by cstross 13y ago
I believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on a per-book basis, with some imprints being entirely DRM-free) -- are already revisiting the question of whether DRM buys them anything useful.
This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).
- pacificmint 13y agoFunny how it took the music industry a long time to come to that conclusion (that DRM is useless), but every other industry insists on making the same mistakes again. Kinda like parents and children, I suppose.
- gcb0 13y agoprobably shareholder lobbying. 1. invest in useless DRM vendor. 2. buys share of company X, go to meetings and say how by not using DRM shareholders are getting screwed. 3. shareholders demand DRM 4. profit! ...If this does not exist yet, I demand 10% commission.
- higherpurpose 13y agoWhat's worse is that Hollywood and Netflix are now trying to push DRM to the web.
- Jare 13y agoVideogames dealt with piracy and DRM way before music, movies and books, and DRM is very much alive there. The only significant change in DRM usage in videogames is due to the shift to service-oriented games (multiplayer, updates, events, etc).
- jdowner 13y agoOne of the differences with video game piracy (at least a few years ago) is that video games tend to have a short window after release when they make most of their sales. Everyone in the industry knows that a game will be pirated eventually so DRM is seen a way of delaying the availability of pirated version of games to maximize that window of sales. Obviously, this varies with publisher, studio, and game, but that was the rationale I heard when I worked in the industry.
- leoc 13y agoIt's interesting, though I can't say how significant, that the (pretty tiny) tabletop-RPG publishing industry, which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.
- cstross 13y agoTwo words: "fewer lawsuits". RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here". Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...) It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
- mattl 13y agoEven GW is selling DRM-free epub now.
- rXoX 13y agoVery good point re: "activist shareholders". Too few people appreciate what can happen when corps aren't seen to be squeezing out every last drop...
- pjc50 13y agoShareholder lawsuits are vanishingly rare, though.
- gboudrias 13y ago> (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop) Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast now, btw. Abandon hope all ye etc.
- fpgeek 13y agoThe Big Five publishers should be long past "Does DRM buy us anything useful?" and should be thinking about "Is DRM hurting our interests?" The effect of DRM on piracy is negligible at best and could be actively promoting it at worst (when ordinary customers get stuck in these hoops). Meanwhile, the main practical impact of ebook DRM is to create lock-in for ebook DRM providers, especially the ones that are also retailers, like Amazon. The Big Five publishers seem convinced that Amazon is a serious threat to their business. Given that, I don't understand why they give Amazon the club to beat them with by insisting on the customer-hostile misfeature of DRM. If they hadn't done that in the first place, perhaps they wouldn't have felt forced to solve their "Amazon problem" with an illegal conspiracy in the second place.
- acjohnson55 13y ago+1 to this. I guess the question is whether these stodgy old publishing houses can adapt to thinking about how they can be more forward-looking than Amazon, rather than continuing to try to protect the paper model. I hope they do, because as much as I like the convenience of Amazon's products and services, the lack of interoperability is a big turnoff.