Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
Hang on a second. Amazon did have a dog in the hunt, didn't they? IIRC, one of the big disadvantages a DRM-free outfit like eMusic had was that the labels wouldn't make deals with them. It was those deals (and still is, to the best of my knowledge) that determined what music an online music store had to sell. Amazon might not have had a device to sell, but if they wanted to branch into the digital music space, they had to make a deal with the labels to get it done. From re-reading old news from 2007, it seems that the music industry at the time was eager to get out from under Jobs' yoke, and was willing to abandon DRM to do it. It's entirely possible, I think, that the publishing industry goes the same way, eventually.
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Yeah, I meant that Amazon didn't have their own digital music player, so they had no interest in lock-in. Since from a store perspective DRM and closed formats are only useful if you're trying to get people to buy your own device (for example, a Kindle ...), I don't think that was really a priority for them. In fact, from their perspective as a store selling to any and all mp3 players, the more standard and open the format the better. If anybody could buy music from Amazon and play it not only on an iPod or Zune but also a Sansa, iRiver, Creative Zen, Windows PC, Mac, Linux PC, etc, that broadens their target market. When you add in the fact that the record labels really, really wanted to get away from Apple and Steve Jobs (the way movie and tv companies are trying to get away from Netflix right now), they were in an obviously weak negotiating position. Still, given that the main anti-music-DRM manifesto came from Jobs, I'm sure if things worked out differently and Amazon didn't get into the game Apple still would've gone DRM-free eventually. Once Amazon and Apple did it, everybody else followed suit.
The problem right now is that everybody has their own device and wants to lock in the customers. Amazon isn't going to be helpful this time around because they
want closed, locked down formats to keep people buying Kindles, and they're expanding their market not by opening up their ebooks and letting anybody use them but instead by making Kindle apps available virtually everywhere (iOS, Android, and WP7 smartphones and tablets, PCs, Macs, etc). Ironically, Apple might be our best hope for ebooks because their iBooks store is not doing so well. If they realize they could sell iBooks to Nook users, Kobo users, Sony users, Aldiko/Stanza/FBReader/BlueFire/etc users as well as iBooks users, they might come around. They already have the open format (epub), they just need to kick the DRM. And preferably the agency pricing model, but Apple got us into that mess in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
Am I wrong to be concerned about the opposite end, though? What I mean is this: If you really wanted to have an open format that everyone could read on any device, the simplest thing in the world would be to release books in DOC or even TXT format. But then you've got another potential problem: People releasing modified versions of their favorite books and calling them their own (or at least heavily copying and pasting to plagiarize). Is that a reasonable fear, or am I just up way too late?  |
DOC is certainly not an open format, and TXT has limited formatting capabilities. Epub is already a standardized, open format based on standardized, open technology that anyone can easily implement, so that's step one.
I'm not sure I'd worry too much about derivative works any more than I'd worry about people remixing or sampling mp3s. It happens (videos get pulled from youtube all the time for music-based copyright violation), but it's certainly not big business.
99.995% of the people just want to consume, not create. Those that do want to create generally want to create on their own, not steal. There will always be the odd bootleggers and counterfeiters (China is notorious for this), but dropping DRM from ebooks is not going to increase that type of theft, just as DRM doesn't diminish it today.