The DRM Drumbeat continues

[Stuart Young]

Another eBook DRM format was announced in San Francisco recently. The outfit known as www.seecrets.biz launched their third DRM system with the usual fanfare. The system uses "RSA 8192-bits keys to deliver protected content by e-mail":

'"Every e-mail address is unique. So is the manufacturer's serial number for hard disks. We use this combination to prove idenitity. This is the same as a person's address and the physical house. Privacy issues are not compromised using this model," said Sarah Seecrets, managing-partner at Seecrets.Biz.

Original press release available here.

[VillageReader]

The questions I have for book publishers:

1. How many e-books do you sell?
2. How much are you spending to prevent an insignificant loss compared to retail sales "shrinkage'

Gimme a break, use your heads.

[rmeister0]

Originally Posted by Stuart Young

'"Every e-mail address is unique. So is the manufacturer’s serial number for hard disks. We use this combination to prove idenitity. This is the same as a person’s address and the physical house. Privacy issues are not compromised using this model," said Sarah Seecrets, managing-partner at Seecrets.Biz

Because lord knows, nobody *ever* replaces their hard drive.

[Jaapjan]

Not just that but I go through my email adress' and harddrives faster then you can blink. I do -not- want this crap as well to deal with.

[DaNDeE]

I wonder when will the last on this planet realise, that none of those copy mechanisms is really safe. Hackers unite and prove them once more that they could have thrown money for creating this copylock into the dustbin... stupid world.

[derekweb]

I'm just wondering when someone is going to look at the the Baen Digital Library for a business model? These DRM schemes aren't helping, but rather are hindering interest in e-books. It's hard enough to find copies of books in formats that you can use and enjoy with enough simplicity ... the DRM on top of that makes matters only worse, never better.

[Bob Russell]

Even though I know where there are free ebooks, I would spend money on a lot more ebooks if there was a reliable, non-DRMd, format available with prices like paperbacks, i.e. books with a format that I could believe would always be around. Actually, even zipped HTML or RTF would suffice for my purposes.

Most of the thousands of dollars I've spent on paper over the years (but not all) would have probably been spent on e-books.

For books that are not available commercially in an appropriate form, there will probably always be people bending the rules. Most will try to ensure they are paying one way or another, e.g. by making sure they are buying a lot of similar paper books, or by paying for the same paper book before downloading a pirated copy of an ebook.

But for perceived price gauging (whether real or not), or unavailable ebooks, or moving an ebook to a new device, people are probably always going to treat a strict copyright law sort of like the speed limit. Most want to obey the spirit of the law, but might not exactly stay perfectly within the limits. I think the industry would do well to focus on those customers instead of ruining the whole industry because they are so worried about the fringe element that will take everything for free and never buy an ebook.

Book sellers might even be surprised at how much additional revenue they can get even from those people, because even the typical "freeloader" is likely to occassionally buy a few books, or grow into a stable income and start becoming buyers.

If someone is dead set on not buying any e-books, there's no revenue lost, is there? So why work so hard on the set of people that are irrelevant to the market, and in doing so reduce the legit market to almost nothing? I just don't think that's wise or good for anyone, and if the laws need to change to support greater flexibility for fair use, I sure hope we can find a way to counter the power and influence of the publishers on content owners.

Of course, DRM is not about pirates. It's about shifting the market from purchase of content to rental of content under very strict usage constraints. Content owners would like to control when and how you use the content, and make you pay accordingly. That, however, would not seem to be in the public interest to have that happen. I don't want to end up paying once to see a show or read a book on Tue, Oct 3 from 8-9pm on e-ink device #345123476454 and only when my fingerprint is registered by the device thumbprint reader while I read the book. Then pay again for the priviledge of reading the book again Sun am on a different device, but at a higher rate because people prefer to read on Sundays, and the device has the potential of letting someone read over my shoulder also. That's the sort of thing that advanced DRM allows. Not more flexibility, but more control. And that's what the fight is really all about. Maybe we won't see it to that level, but the choice becomes entirely up to the content owner.

Some say that the content owner owns the content so he/she should be able to determine how it's used. But that protection in copyright law is only there for the public good, not to increase powers of the content owners. The basic idea is about incentives to keep authors writing new books, lest all creative works shrivel up and die. In the days of the original laws, it was a very real risk that no one would be able to afford to publish a book. Now I can publish an ebook for free. It's a different world. So why does copyright law keep getting strengthened? Politics, pure and simple.

Movies and books protections should probably expire after 5 or 10 years or so. Might we lose a few authors due to financial losses. Maybe. Maybe not. I'd like to know what portion of the revenue stream comes after 10 years for books that aren't huge revenue books (those that might not be written without the extra revenues). The laws are supposed to support the public good. Are they doing it right now?

Okay, enough, in fact too much... <me getting down off my soapbox>...

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Even though I know where there are free ebooks, I would spend money on a lot more ebooks if there was a reliable, non-DRMd, format available with prices like paperbacks, i.e. books with a format that I could believe would always be around. Actually, even zipped HTML or RTF would suffice for my purposes.

Bob:

Surely you know about Baen, the Baen Free Library, and (most important of all) Webscriptions. Baen's entire output, at reasonable prices -- $6/book or $15 for 6-8 books, at least 4 of which are new to (legal) bits. Never any DRM, professionally proofed, produced from the same files that go to the printers. Oh yeah... it's essentially the publisher's entire output for the month.

As for piracy... It just isn't a problem. There may well be folks out there stealing the books. From Baen's point of view, however, what really matters is that (a) paper sales go up when bits are released, and (b) total sales go up even more because they get the sales of bits as well as dead-tree-ware! From the point of view of a fan who wants to see authors well-compensated for their work, it's also important to know that the author's royalty on an electronic sale is quite comparable to a dead-tree-ware sale -- better than paperback or large-format paper, not quite as good as hardcover.

Meanwhile, various authors have volunteered some of their books (typically older books or beginnings of series) for the Baen Free Library. Completely legal, completely free, and still no DRM. And, by the way, they report that putting a book in the Free Library leads to a significant uptick in sales of the author's back-list. Especially for the very books that are available for free (and thosse series whose beginning is available for free).

As long as you're after science fiction and fantasy, your dream ebook supplier already exists.

Xenophon

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Surely you know about Baen, the Baen Free Library

Yes, you're right on about them. Baen is great. Sadly, I'm not a huge sci fi reader anymore. Used to be in high school, but somehow never really went back to it. On the other hand, I'm loving the public domain stuff like PG & Portable Harvard Classics. Plus a few ereader.com books in the mix also. Their free giveaways encouraged me to start buying some.

Like so many of us, I'd love to see more Baen-like sellers appear outside the sci-fi subjects.

DRM doesn't stop me from buying ebooks, but it limits my purchases to ones that I plan to read right away, and would have thrown away after reading if it was a paper book. If it's a book I want to keep, DRM ebooks just aren't a very good option.

Having said that, it's still great to have sellers like Fictionwise, the upcoming Sony store, eReader, MobiPocket/Amazon, MSLit sellers, etc. It's not perfect, but it's still better than being limited to public domain, paper, and/or pirated versions.

[yvanleterrible]

I have some questions, if someone can answer them or if they have already been answered in an other thread.

What is the percentage value of an ebook that goes to the rightful author or succession compared to that of an e-leech company (sorry I just don't like most of them) ?

And how many copies of books are pirated from e-book sales compared to those digitized from paper books ?
This one could greatly balance in the "justification" of DRM.

[NatCh]

Hey, yvanletterrible,

I'm afraid you've asked questions that can't really be answered, but maybe the whys might be something of an answer.

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

What is the percentage value of an ebook that goes to the rightful author or succession compared to that of an e-leech company (sorry I just don't like most of them) ?

This depends on the contract the author got from the publisher. It would mostly be arranged either so the author gets a lump sum and no royalties, or so that they get (probably) a lump sum plus a percentage of sales (I imagine there's some variance in what "percentage of sales" actually means, too).

In the former case, the author gets his X dollars and goes about his merry way. If the book bombs or skyrockets, it doesn't make a difference to him. I think this sort of contract goes to new authors who don't have the clout to get better deals, i.e. they make almost nothing from the book. Obviously it doesn't matter financially to this author how or even if his book sells to the public.

The second case, the royalty percentage is what it is. The only finacial difference from a p-sale versus an e-sale is if there is a price difference between the two.

Oh, yeah, they also can set up a fixed royalty rather than a percentage. For example, the author gets $1.75 per sale, rather than 13% of each sale. For this scenerio, the author gets his $1.75 regardless of how the book is sold.

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

And how many copies of books are pirated from e-book sales compared to those digitized from paper books ?
This one could greatly balance in the "justification" of DRM.

I don't think there's any way to know that one short of truth-drugging every person on the planet (the dead ones too!) and asking them the question, or by direct devine revelation (and somehow, I think He's got better things to do ). I'm sure there are estimates, though I don't recall seeing any right off-hand, but those estimates would essentially be SWAGs (that's an engineering term meaning "silly wild, um, guesses" -- the silly is optional).

That being said, I see what you're getting at, and I think you're probably correct that they're fairly comparable, even if we'll never know. Actually, there are probably more scan/OCRed ones simply because there are so few e-texts compared to p-texts.

[Bob Russell]

There's some information along the lines of "where the money goes" for books in an article by Michael Mace at http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.co...t-3-books.html, where he discusses e-books.

The economics of book publishing today: "You don't write a book to make money"

That's the consensus from everyone I know who's involved in the publishing business. When you look at the economics of book publishing, it's easy to understand why they say that. For hardcover books, an author typically gets 10% to 15% of the retail price, depending on how many copies are sold. For paperbacks, the royalty rate is 4-8%. An agent will take about 15% of those royalties off the top. There are good summaries here and here.

That means if you write a hardcover book that sells for $30, you'll probably get about $3 to $4.50 per copy sold. If you write a paperback that sells for $7, you may get about 42 cents per book sold.

He also provides links for those "good summaries", and the whole article is definitely worth a read.

[yvanleterrible]

Thanks NatCh thanks Bob.
That means that since ebooks have no printing costs (maybe scanning and web costs and maybe not because every book is in electronic state for printing)these e-companies will make more than trad. publishing ones ?

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Thanks NatCh thanks Bob.
That means that since ebooks have no printing costs (maybe scanning and web costs and maybe not because every book is in electronic state for printing)these e-companies will make more than trad. publishing ones ?

Remember, though, that if you have a small set of buyers, you still don't make a lot of money even if you have a high profit per e-book. The key is getting everyone on the e-book bandwagon, and DRM is a huge obstacle to that, along with the technological hurdles to get good and cheap reader devices.

[NatCh]

What Bob said.