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Fairy Leaves: DRM and Trust
Feb. 3rd, 2010 01:17 pmI have a dilemma: I want to spend money and I don't know how.
The problem is good old DRM. Ebooks outside the Kindleverse* are mostly EPUBs with optional DRM from Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). As DRM goes, this is pretty sophisticated, allowing you to register multiple devices to your ADE ID and handling device recovery and even some lending (gasp!).
But the key to my book is still in the hands of Adobe. And that means that there's a trust issue: Will Adobe honour that key in perpetuity? Hell, will Adobe exist in perpetuity?
( tl;dr )
This untrustworthy hint of the ephemeral -- the threat, however small, that the pages of an ebook will turn into so much dust ten years from now -- that makes me unwilling to spend money.
Books last. Cracked downloads last too.
That's why the industry needs to sort this: there needs to be a non-profit universal key service, supported by all actors, used by all actors, so that when a private service dies it goes into escrow heaven there to serve ad perpetuum. It needs to be as universal and as infrastructural as DNS.
Until then, DRM'd ebooks are a rental with an uncertain return date.
* Inside the Kindleverse the DRM is all handled by Amazon: the trust issue is the same, it's just more contained - like Apple, the whole shebang of content, reader and DRM is handled by one organization. It makes things slick and easy (and therefore popular) but doesn't addresss my fears.
The problem is good old DRM. Ebooks outside the Kindleverse* are mostly EPUBs with optional DRM from Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). As DRM goes, this is pretty sophisticated, allowing you to register multiple devices to your ADE ID and handling device recovery and even some lending (gasp!).
But the key to my book is still in the hands of Adobe. And that means that there's a trust issue: Will Adobe honour that key in perpetuity? Hell, will Adobe exist in perpetuity?
( tl;dr )
This untrustworthy hint of the ephemeral -- the threat, however small, that the pages of an ebook will turn into so much dust ten years from now -- that makes me unwilling to spend money.
Books last. Cracked downloads last too.
That's why the industry needs to sort this: there needs to be a non-profit universal key service, supported by all actors, used by all actors, so that when a private service dies it goes into escrow heaven there to serve ad perpetuum. It needs to be as universal and as infrastructural as DNS.
Until then, DRM'd ebooks are a rental with an uncertain return date.
* Inside the Kindleverse the DRM is all handled by Amazon: the trust issue is the same, it's just more contained - like Apple, the whole shebang of content, reader and DRM is handled by one organization. It makes things slick and easy (and therefore popular) but doesn't addresss my fears.
