"The Apple rumor du jour is that Sony Music Entertainment will license DRM-free tracks to iTunes, under the iTunes Plus program," reports Billboard.biz.
Time for Sony’s e-book side to experiment with DRMless ePub, which its new reader devices can display? Maybe with social DRM? I think so! Without traditional DRM to gum things up, ePub is a standard for real. Sony and independent stores—the company laudably plans to reach out to indies, when its forthcoming readers go wireless—could exploit this to the max in marketing. "Buy from us and own your e-books for real."
My personal stake is this matter—as a writer
I know: Sony will need cooperation from publishers. But at least the DRMless approach should be available as an option for cooperating houses. I’d love to see The Solomon Scandals offered through Sony without "protection"; I’m not just talking theory here. My publisher, too, dislikes DRM’s hassles for consumers. To one extent or another, the technology is a threat to our livelihoods, and I really dislike Amazon’s DRM requirements. A DRMless option would be one way for Sony and friends to distinguish themselves from Amazon and woo consumers and forward-looking publishers.
A reminder: The TeleBlog has both pro- and anti-DRM readers, and I encourage both sides to speak up here, in a civil way.
Related: Wikipedia item on Sony Music Entertainment.
Image credit for "Social Way" photo: Casey West.
Absolutely DRM should be dropped from ebooks. I see DRM as an attempt to apply the old business model to a shiny new phenomenon. The first major publisher / ebook maker who drops DRM is going to very well for themselves, it seems to me. I’m hoping it will be Amazon (since I’ve got a Kindle) but whoever it is, I think plenty of people (for instance, people who frequent 2nd hand bookstores) will get switched on very fast. These days, people expect free as a matter of course. Sooner or later the publishers, like the record companies before them, are going to have to face that reality.
Unfortunately, I am afraid the book industry is going to have to learn the same way the music industry did; the hard way. Yes, there are some publishers (Baen chief amongst them) that recognize that it is against their interests to DRM books. That being said, there are plenty of others who fear that if they remove DRM, that in the future only one book will be sold and then everyone will read copies of it. That being said, the biggest problem right now is that Amazon and Sony are both developing their business model in a way that ties the readers to their devices; DRM ensures you need a Sony Reader to read books sold by Sony and a Kindle to read Amazon books.
Thus, the largest hardware vendors in particular are probably going to be the hardest to wean off of the technology.
> That being said, there are plenty of others who fear that if they remove DRM, that in the future only one book will be sold and then everyone will read copies of it.
Nice, rational fear, eh? I guess publishers will have to stop doing paper books so they can’t be scanned and put out in DRMless P2P editions 😉
I really like the way the book industry treats law-abiding customers. (Major sarcasm alert.)
Thanks,
David
“I really like the way the book industry treats law-abiding customers.”
That is exactly what’s at stake. They are treating customers like me, who would love to pay them for the work, like pirates.