First, forgive me for spelling Kassia with a “C” last time, I definitely wasn’t handing out a grade.

The DRM on my ebooks is applied by Lightning Source, though whether they still use Adobe software to do that is unclear to me as Adobe announced a year or so ago they were getting out of that business. Since Amazon no longer lists LSI supplied ebooks, you’d have to go somewhere like Powells to see them. The only reason I didn’t discontinue them after Amazon dropped them (so long to $500/month on the bottom line) is for those overseas customers who would have to pay a fortune for shipping a paper book, or wait a lifetime for a slow boat.

I’d be interested in reading more about your collection of anti-piracy success stories. With the advent of duplicate content penalties in the search engines, it’s become an endless annoyance for me, and I find that pirates are actually LESS responsive to take-down requests than they were a couple years ago. I assume that’s either because they don’t see any high profile cases of “little guys” getting hit with big sticks or because everybody is doing it. The DMCA filings are a lousy solution, they take hours to prepare and the writer or copyright holder gets treated like a criminal to boot!

I’m aware that some authors see DRM, and in some cases, copyright, as evils we would be better off without. I’m obviously not one of them. I’ve earned a modest living purely from writing and publishing the last 10 years, I’m not a performer or a consultant who can treat writing like an advertising expense.

I’m not as sympathetic to authors who find DRM they don’t like on their ebooks as I am with authors who’ve been hurt by screwy discount clauses, non-competes, and other trade publisher contract clauses. In the thousands of e-mails I’ve gotten over the years from authors, a problem with the DRM their publisher applied hasn’t come up a single time:-)

Seven years ago, I went to the major ebook conference that was supposed to solve the DRM and compatibility issues for the ages. One speaker, I think he was the chief engineer for the original hardware ebook solution, maybe Rocket, gave a demonstration of cracking Microsoft’s DRM of the time. He did a demo with a laptop, showing an ebook with the DRM, and showed that he couldn’t read it. Paraphrasing from faulty memory, he said:

See, can’t read this ebook. It’s F-’d. What do you do with an F-’d ebook? We go on the web and find a way to Un-F it.

And he downloaded a so-named program that did just that. I suppose the main reason I remember was his unorthodox use of language, though we couldn’t avoid laughing. But looking back, I think the sales pitch was:

And that’s why you only want your ebooks to be downloaded from authorized servers to our proprietary hardware reader. Any other protection is only an Internet crack away.

I gave up on the idea of publishing ebooks for money when I came back from that conference, and it wasn’t until I’d been using Lightning for a couple years for on-demand printing that I gave their ebook program a shot. I was really surprised at the sales, which I attribute primarily to instant gratification buyers, because neither the rise nor the fall of ebooks on Amazon had any effect on my paper sales, it’s just a different type of buyer.

Talk about veering off topic:-)

There were many reasons bandied about — including the audio rights to a book. This was the worst argument because it showed a clear misunderstanding of what this reader was doing and what audio rights are. The publisher in question suggested that the authors decided if the audio option was available for an ebook, but the authors were all “huh?” No author I know of would deny a blind person the ability to do what a sighted person can do — and the way this person wanted to “read” the book was virtually the same way a sighted person would read. Instead of her eyes reading the text, the computer read the words…in the computer voice. This was not a performance nor something that most people would choose. It is how blind or sight impaired individuals “read” text online.

The above probably feels like it’s veering off topic, but it’s part and parcel of DRM. Locking out options locks out readers.

The second — the issue I’m discussing in this post — relates to how a person who buys a book interacts with it. DRM does not have to mean restricting the consumer to specific rules for consuming media. Proprietary formats necessarily leave a portion of the reading market out of the game (I tried to figure out the DRM you’re using, but either missed it or missed it). If I have to use X system to read a book, but my system is Y, sure it’s a business decision on the part of the publisher, but I’m going to be a lost sale. If I am desperate to get my hands on that particular book and I were of a pirate nature (alas, I look awful in eye patches), I might consider alternate scenarios.

I truly believe that most people will pay for their entertainment media. This, despite my lack of faith in humanity (I’m the girl who used to collect articles about anti-piracy successes to prove that money spent on anti-piracy was worth every penny; I’ve lead a sad, weird life). That being said, when using something you’ve paid for becomes harder than the perceived value, then the consumer will consider alternates for acquiring that media.

Finding the right balance — the right DRM for the media — is a work-in-progress. The pendulum is swinging toward less restrictive DRM. The EMI example is instructive because they’ve kept the price of a song within a range that most people consider “cheap”. They’ve chosen a retail outlet that everybody but me seems capable of of working without a hitch. They’ve chosen a format that people can play on a variety of devices. All of these make the idea of spending a little over a dollar a much more palatable choice for consumers — especially given the alternative of seeking out a pirate server that has the song in an easily acquirable way without the possibility of getting a nasty virus in the process.

Finally, thank you for admitting that you don’t read the EULAs. I feel shame for my insistence on reading contracts when I skim the fine print myself…

I’ve been publishing ebooks with DRM for a number of years. J. Wynia (The Glass is Too Big Blog) hated the DRM on my publishing book and wrote about the experience:

“But, like a perfectly grilled steak served up on a dirty garbage can lid, it’s not entirely the content that matters here.”

Back when Amazon was selling Lightning Source’d ebooks, I usually had a title in their top 100, and I’d estimate I got one DRM complaint per month. I know I issued some back-channel refunds or sent printed books to customers who really had trouble with it.

That said, when I’ve explained to customers why I use DRM, I’ve gotten a pretty good response. For me, the purpose of DRM is to make it 100% clear to customers that they haven’t purchased distribution rights with the ebook. It’s not like I read the EULA’s I click on myself, so I don’t expect anybody else to either. Without DRM, some percentage of customers wouldn’t think twice about passing along a PDF or posting it to a forum.

As a web based publisher, the number of people who read me online exceeds the number who buy my books by a factor of several hundred or more. But, I’m dead set against the notion that the marketplace or the reading public should be able to decide how my works should be distributed or whether or not I should get paid. I may make the wrong decisions, maybe I’d see my sales go up if I published everything under Creative Commons license, but they are my decisions to make.