Oh, no! Even record labels are pushing for a DRM standard. A lesson for publishers deailing with the Tower of eBabel in e-book formats? Here’s a Slashdot item:
thejoelpatrol writes “Bad news for Apple fanatics but good news for all the crazy slashdotters who want an iPod but feel dirty using Apple’s DRM: the labels are getting together and insisting that online stores standardize their DRM methods. Being the providers of the music, the labels clearly wield a lot of power, but so does Apple: without iTunes, the online music business is next to nothing. Will Apple give in? Not if they can help it — they’re on top of the world. Before anyone messes it up, AAC is an open format, while the Fairplay DRM standard is not.”
OpenReader for e-books, anyone? DRM Lite–with uniform standards for publishers–is part of The Plan. Maybe Sony, the maker of the DRM-hobbled Librie, can learn here. Its proprietary mania, at least as shown in the model for the Japanese market, is not publisher-friendly.
Reminder: You can have an open format, but without standardized DRM, you’ll still have the eBabel Tower. We need standards for both the format and the accompanying DRM. Ideally book publishers will learn from the music business’s insistence on standardized DRM. Balkanized standards transfer wealth from content providers to the proprietary format crowd. Microsoft charges as much as 15 percent of cover prices for its consumer-hostile Reader format in DRMed form. Beyond that, more and more publishers of books and music hate the idea of just one company controlling the format and DRM action–a situation that could invite favoritism toward certain content providers at the expense of others.
