Pioneering DRM Innovation In The EBook Business
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of technological advancement that authors within the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these innovations are striving to safeguard their written work.
DRM relates to protecting creative output in digital media formats (CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc.). DRM technology attempts to stop your written eBook being resold or duplicated without your permission. The music industry was slow to react in protecting their music in digital formats, meaning tunes were widely available on the net without the music publishers profiting.
In the case of the eBook business, rights management was built in from the early days of computer engineering as eBooks are a product of the computing industry, rather than having started out of the regular hard-copy book publishing industry. This key differentiator means eBooks have used technological innovation from an early stage to protect the text and content of eBooks.
In the early days, Adobe championed the PDF file format. Their software can constrict what PDF readers are permitted to do with a protected file. In particular, a PDF can disallow copying of the eBook text (a simple copy and paste of text to another document) and also stop the user from printing hard copies of the PDF file. This is DRM technology in action.
Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.
In new and recent developments in DRM, players like the Kindle Reader can send notifications back to their home servers if eBooks are being illegally read or shared. At that point the vendor can then choose how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through litigation). Could they remove the PDF? Yes, apparently this is already possible, as detailed in a recent case when Amazon remotely removed PDFs from customers’ Kindle Readers (http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). This does open up a potential can of worms regarding the privacy rights of device owners so expect to start seeing Terms Of Conditions for digital readers containing statements about remote access permissions of vendor.
In parallel with the hardware producers firming up the DRM security, software publishers are also including functionality into their PDF publishing tools to include the ability to disable an eBook remotely if a customer uses fraudulent credit card details or is seeking a refund (two traditional means of obtaining PDFs at no cost). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF creation software is an ideal solution.
These improvements in the eBook business may be arriving too late for the existing files available online (these do have copyright protection on their content; Just no technological way to safeguard them). Over the coming years, developments in copy protection via hardware and software solutions should make it even more convenient for eBook authors to get writing eBooks and securely selling them online.
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Tags: ebook business, ebooks, ecommerce, internet, publish, publishing, sales, selling ebooks, selling software, selling software online, small business, software, writing ebooks