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Fairy Leaves: DRM and Trust
I 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?
I'm reminded, always, of the Wal-Mart music DRM failure a couple of years ago: The ongoing cost of running a DRM service for some old music site isn't trivial and they cancelled it; users' music died on its legs. Who is to say that the same won't apply to Adobe, or to the conglomerate that buys Adobe in five years' time, or the standards refresh that makes ADE hilarious legacy tech in ten?
And how about corporate spats? What if Adobe disagree with, say, Amazon over some deal and they stop honoring the keys (think of the recent Macmillan spat and escalate it)? Or if currently unwritten legislation requires them to do so (imagine a corporate merger and the unintended consequences of an antitrust ruling)? What about a book vendor that goes out of business? Or is declared seditious?
There's no way ADE can kill the book on a device - it's not got the Kindle Killswitch. In fact it's pretty darn good as DRM goes. It communicates only infrequently, when move or copy a book, so the danger is at refresh time. Imagine five years from now, new reader: You log onto ADE to get a "service unavailable" message and your books are so much junk. Or a new PC: You install ADE, log on and... your books are so much junk. It's like discovering that bookworm has eaten the pages of everything on your bookshelf.
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?
I'm reminded, always, of the Wal-Mart music DRM failure a couple of years ago: The ongoing cost of running a DRM service for some old music site isn't trivial and they cancelled it; users' music died on its legs. Who is to say that the same won't apply to Adobe, or to the conglomerate that buys Adobe in five years' time, or the standards refresh that makes ADE hilarious legacy tech in ten?
And how about corporate spats? What if Adobe disagree with, say, Amazon over some deal and they stop honoring the keys (think of the recent Macmillan spat and escalate it)? Or if currently unwritten legislation requires them to do so (imagine a corporate merger and the unintended consequences of an antitrust ruling)? What about a book vendor that goes out of business? Or is declared seditious?
There's no way ADE can kill the book on a device - it's not got the Kindle Killswitch. In fact it's pretty darn good as DRM goes. It communicates only infrequently, when move or copy a book, so the danger is at refresh time. Imagine five years from now, new reader: You log onto ADE to get a "service unavailable" message and your books are so much junk. Or a new PC: You install ADE, log on and... your books are so much junk. It's like discovering that bookworm has eaten the pages of everything on your bookshelf.
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.
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How sharable something is has a similar effect on value.. depending on whether its something i want to share.
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There's a decay-curve that seems to fit pricing: High when it's the new hotness, dropping rapidly to a trade-average, then down into the dollar tail specifically when obsolete. That matches with the physical publishers' hardback-tpb-paperback-cruft route pretty closely, so it should feel reasonable to the punter too.
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Upside: Great thermal insulation from walls covered in five inches depth of paper.
Downside: Not got enough walls.
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Also, I like the way books feel.
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Strictly, sharing books might be naughty anyhow. Old 70s American paperbacks said that the jackboots would get you if you dared it; the principle was ruled silly by law of first purchase (ie, you really own it) but the menacing warnings remain to cause hilarity in secondhand bookstores.
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Which is too bad -- I like the idea of the ebook readers, especially the Kindlekin electronic paper/superthin/built-in wireless/etc. I like the idea of having my entire library in my Timbuk2, so if I feel like looking up that quote that reminded me of Kant in Carpe Jugulum, I can, wherever I happen to be at the time. If I'm unexpectedly delayed waiting for service at the deli, I can re-read that bit in Jhereg where Vlad finds out he used to be a Dragaeran. Or even the first chapter of a book I didn't own before I downloaded it just then, standing on line, waiting to order my lunch.
None of which will, I believe, ever wholly replace paper books for me. I love having shelf upon shelf of them, love flipping through them, love being able to turn to favorite sections entirely by feel and the shape of the text blocks on surrounding pages.
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And I resent funding a publisher who thinks that this is clever. I'd rather torrent the book and throw into the authors' site tip jar. The always-unreliable WikiAnswers suggests that on average authors get about 16% of retail...
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Also, I spend all my money on things to stick in my hair. So all in all I will probably not be buying an ebook reader for a while.
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Oh, and it doesn't really get warm up here, but it should have stopped snowing by the end of March.
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Fluffy dribble!
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The only formats acceptable for 64 years are csv and adobe. Can't find any links in a 2 min google, but I thought these were the formats the UK government says are acceptable for archiving over the 64 year time frame.
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DRM, the horror.
My limited experiences from music downloads mean I'm more likely to bittorrent next time, than pay them for the privilege of losing my music when I rebuild my hard drive.