More and more people are echoing our sentiments against the darker side of the Sony Librie.
The new E Ink screen technology is awesome, but, alas, the Librie comes with Sony-stupid DRM. Books even vanish after 60 days. An anti-Librie mention in the TechDirt blog elicited such reader reactions as: “I feel sorry for the authors who will sell quite a few less of their e-books because of this kind of Orwellian technology.”
Now you can add the United Kingdom to the growing list of countries–including Japan itself–where angry e-book enthusiasts are speaking up. “Nice ebook, shame about the DRM,” reads a headline accompanying J. Mark Lytle’s article in the UK-based Personal Computer World.
An e-mail list membership as a vote against Draconian DRM
“Anything I can do to set up a group to put pressure on Sony, let me know,” Mark Hill, a member of a new international Librie list, wrote me from London. In line with Japanese blogger Yutaka Ohno’s wishes for a multinational protest against the Liebrie’s anti-consumer software, I would urge owners and prospective owners of the Librie to sign up for the list, which Sven Neuhaus started in April. Sven is in Germany–yet another market where Orwellian DRM may well be toxic to consumers.
Right now the Librie is officially sold only in Japan. Let Sony know that the exported Librie won’t be worth the trouble if company does not wise up.
Hardware hackers working to free Librie
Of course, list members already intend to give Sony a little help. The Librie is Linux-based with openly published source code, and they’re hoping that e-book readers for HTML and PDF can be flashed onto the Librie. They are publishing photos of the inside to help each other better understand the machine. Far from being anti-Sony, they’ll do the company a favor if they succeed. The list is key. Your membership on the list will be a vote against Orwellian DRM. The list also means–as a result of the exchange of knowledge–that the white hats will stand more of a chance of bypassing the anti-reader technology in use on the Librie.
Sony itself could help immensely by switching the Librie over to the cross-platform Mobipocket, which nicely imports HTML and is among the best of the proprietary e-book readers. Later Sony could move up to OpenReader, whose planned capabilities will leave Mobipocket and the other proprietary programs in the dust. Momentum is building for OR in the wake of a key O’Reilly editor’s enthusiasm for the nonproprietary approach to e-book formats.
Anti-reader DRM’s rewards: $30M down the drain–and bankruptcy
The sentiment toward the Orwellian DRM of the Librie, however, is headed in the opposite direction. One TechDirt reader worked for Netactive, a DRM company that blew $30 million and went bankrupt because “consumers do not want DRM. They want free products, not ‘kinda free’ products. Or they want to pay for something and actually own it, not just ‘have a license to use, for a limited amount of time.'” Needless to say, the Netactive fiasco ought to be a lesson for the big companies behind the Open eBook Forum–DRM and the Tower of eBabel are no small reason why e-book sales are so puny. Can’t anyone learn from the past?
Lest Sony still be reluctant to ditch the Orwellian approach, here are some details from the Lytle article in Personal Computer World:
One of the buzz products of the first half of 2004 is Sony’s new…�210…electronic book reader called the Librie EBR-1000EP, seen by many as the first decent attempt to replicate the paper-based reading experience on an electronic device.
Its ‘charm point’, as Japanese girls like to say, is not a dazzling smile or a cute dimple, but a screen with amazing contrast produced in collaboration with America’s E Ink Corporation, among others.
Less than charming, however, is the digital rights management (DRM) used for the project. Fifteen of the biggest Japanese publishers (and Sony) put their heads together to figure out how to offer a compelling collection of novels and other material while protecting their own financial investments in the work and the interests of the authors.
What they came up with is a sad business model that ties downloaded ebooks to a maximum of four devices, which is reasonable enough, but also ensures that the titles purchased (with your money, remember) lock up after 60 days, which is far from reasonable. Sure, the books are cheaper than their real-world equivalents, but who in their right mind is going to buy books that simply evaporate after two months? Periodicals might be suitable for this protective scheme, but none are yet taking advantage of it on the Librie.
I can’t help but feel sorry for this terrific little device, as one of the first journalists to get to play with it, hamstrung as it is by misguided anti-piracy efforts. Tying software to specific hardware, as Microsoft is now doing, seems to be just about acceptable these days, but let’s not take the fun out of books while we’re at it.
Of course, as the Linux movement grows, Microsoft’s software-hardware approach many not seem so brilliant after all. And within e-books, its Windows-tied Microsoft Reader has already been a debacle. Sony could do very well for itself if it were among the early adopters of a more open approach in e-books and hopefully other areas as well. This would be in the pro-consumer tradition of Sony’s battle of yore against Hollywood for the right to sell VCRs to consumers–a fight whose results enriched the content-providers by many billions. Such is the good side of the old Sony, and a reader-friendly Librie would be a wonderful sign that the company is back in fine form.
