|
The reason that DRM was abandoned for music is not because the publishers wanted to. It's because MP3 is a legacy format that has no way to tie the owner of a file to a specific MP3 player.
The absolute number of ereaders out there is pretty small. Amazon went with AZW instead of MOBI in order to stop the 'MP3' problem before it got too large to handle. (I'll hypothesize that Amazon didn't want to worry about bringing all MOBI publishers on-line and coordinating a central user database among them, so by owning/controlling AZW they avoided all of the problems... at the risk of angering ebook early adopters, and I guess Amazon knows how many that is and figures the number is small enough to not worry about.)
(Again, my hypothesis) Amazon sees the Kindle as being transformative in the way that MP3 players have transformed the music industry and killed the demand for CDs, hoping the Kindle will kill demand for bound books. They looked at the music industry as being a model for what to do, and what not to do. If the music industry had established a standard with MP3 player manufacturers to have the individual players verify lawful ownership of MP3s before playing against a database... but it's too late now. The genie is out of the bottle (too much music is available without DRM). It's not too late with ebooks. Hence, DRM.
BTW, the fact that CD sales have fallen dramatically is, to me, a clear sign that piracy is rampant in the music industry. I think that this piracy will transform the music industry radically. Either the industry will band together and come up with new formats which aren't supported by existing players, so they can re-implement DRM, or the recording companies will disappear, leaving the artist to sell works directly to the consumer via the web. Signs of the latter are already visible, e.g., Radiohead's promotion of their latest album by providing free, unprotected MP3s for download.
Every transformational technology causes disruption, and usually the existing market titans are rendered obsolete. Cars killed the railroads. Airplanes killed passenger liners. We're seeing the death of print media at the hands of the online media. Darwinism at it's finest... adapt or die.
|