Quote:
Originally Posted by tibiafry
Wow, thanks for the warm wellcome. I'm going to read a lot of the wiki. I'll do some searches too.
About the DRM, in fact, I work for a publishing company and we intend to publish with DRM altough I already said that it can be removed easilly. I must inform myself on the security of DRM before we invest a lot of money in a protection tecnology that has no practical use. That's what I need to know about DRM: is it really effective?
Thanks everybody for your answers.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tibiafry
I'm aware (and have informed everyone) of DRM problems. But this is a company, and people want to protect their futures. I must study it very well.
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i think it's great you are investigating the question before jumping in. i understand that people want to protect their futures. experience is showing more and more that the best way to gain customer loyalty and ensure honesty on the part of your customers, is to behave this way to them.
As a publisher, you can help educate the authors you publish. If you take a look at some of the discussions around here you'll find that the majority of readers are very happy to pay for their books, and will be very loyal to publishers which are perceived as "fair dealers" ; publishers selling for reasonable prices with no drm will make a lot of friends.
as for the effectiveness question, drm is not really effective. as you've no doubt seen, it can always be circumvented one way or another, and most people don't hesitate to do it if they need to because they often see it as a rather unfair (even underhanded) way of preventing them from fairly using content they have legally purchased.
for example, sometimes they want to read a book on a device which may require a format shift, or they have lost access because of computer problem. i recently had to reinstall the operating system on my computer and discovered that i could no longer download my (legally purchased) lit format books from my account at the online bookseller where i had purchased them, because my newly re-installed microsoft reader had a different id code (or something).
i wasn't bothered enough to try to find a solution, since i had previously downloaded them and immediately removed the drm from my purchases for precisely this sort of reason (and also because i wanted to read them on my eb1150, which can only read the proprietary .imp format, so i *always* had to shift the format), but still, it's a problem if my hard drive crashes, say, and i lose my drm-free copies, and on principle alone i don't appreciate the extra hoops i have to jump through. i paid for those books, and all i want to do is read them myself, on the device of my choice ; it seems unfair that the publisher should try to prevent me from doing that.
there are more extreme examples ; recently, fictionwise was
forced to remove some titles in certain formats, because one of the drm-management companies stopped abruptly doing business with them. as a result, customers who had bought books whose drm was managed by that company no longer have access to them in the format they purchased,
at all. fictionwise is a very decent company, so they did their best to ensure that the books were replaced in their own e-reader format. but if you don't have a device which reads that format (no currently available e-ink device does...), you're faced with the problem of having the shift the format, which means... removing the drm, whether you like doing that or not. that is not a unique situation, either ; there have been many cases of people losing access to media they have legitimately purchased because of drm problems. you'll find plenty of stories in this forum.
for some successful models of drm-free publishing, take a look at
Baen books,
O'Reilly, and
PanMacmillan.
more and more publishers are abandoning drm as they recognize that it's expensive, ineffective, and tends to alienate customers. the same thing happened previously with the music industry and the film industry. i hope that publishers will be able to learn from their experiences, and not follow the same long path. one of the best things that could happen to ebooks would be for all publishers to stop using drm completely, tomorrow. i hope your research will lead you to be one of the enlightened early adopters of drm-free publishing.