I believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on a per-book basis, with some imprints being entirely DRM-free) -- are already revisiting the question of whether DRM buys them anything useful.
This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).
The Big Five publishers should be long past "Does DRM buy us anything useful?" and should be thinking about "Is DRM hurting our interests?"
The effect of DRM on piracy is negligible at best and could be actively promoting it at worst (when ordinary customers get stuck in these hoops). Meanwhile, the main practical impact of ebook DRM is to create lock-in for ebook DRM providers, especially the ones that are also retailers, like Amazon.
The Big Five publishers seem convinced that Amazon is a serious threat to their business. Given that, I don't understand why they give Amazon the club to beat them with by insisting on the customer-hostile misfeature of DRM. If they hadn't done that in the first place, perhaps they wouldn't have felt forced to solve their "Amazon problem" with an illegal conspiracy in the second place.
+1 to this. I guess the question is whether these stodgy old publishing houses can adapt to thinking about how they can be more forward-looking than Amazon, rather than continuing to try to protect the paper model. I hope they do, because as much as I like the convenience of Amazon's products and services, the lack of interoperability is a big turnoff.
Funny how it took the music industry a long time to come to that conclusion (that DRM is useless), but every other industry insists on making the same mistakes again.
Videogames dealt with piracy and DRM way before music, movies and books, and DRM is very much alive there. The only significant change in DRM usage in videogames is due to the shift to service-oriented games (multiplayer, updates, events, etc).
One of the differences with video game piracy (at least a few years ago) is that video games tend to have a short window after release when they make most of their sales. Everyone in the industry knows that a game will be pirated eventually so DRM is seen a way of delaying the availability of pirated version of games to maximize that window of sales.
Obviously, this varies with publisher, studio, and game, but that was the rationale I heard when I worked in the industry.
It's interesting, though I can't say how significant, that the (pretty tiny) tabletop-RPG publishing industry, which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.
RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here".
Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...)
It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.
> which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.
IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)
This matches my experience--a friend and I were among those "early adopters" who published PDFs back in the D&D 3.0 days, and nobody was using DRM then; first, nobody wanted to pay the license fees to Adobe or whomever (most of us couldn't afford them in any case), and second, all it would have done was piss off our customers anyway. Later on (in the D&D 3.5 days), as you say, third-party PDF distribution services started offering DRM, but even then there wasn't a lot of uptake that I could see.
I highly recommend reading that to anyone as an introduction to why free software and free content are extremely important. Not to mention reverse engineering tools like debuggers.
Just reading that makes me yearn for the days of SoftICE where you could just hit Ctrl+D and immediately be dumped into a debugger, no matter what your system was doing. It was such a potent feeling of control.
I would like this story, but it comes across as typically RMS preachy - people should have inherent moral rights to what they own, but people also have a moral right to sell their work instead of giving it away if they want. That is a different issue to DRM.
Nothing RMS said or says is against selling digital products. IIRC, he had himself sold copies of GNU Emacs - obviously, properly obeying GPL license they were under, i.e. providing buyers with four essential freedoms that Free Software is all about.
It's just that works are usually not sold, but only licensed, because giving users rights to do whatever they want with their copies conflicts with current idea that people have exclusive rights to their works (actually, not usually their, but the ones they brought from original creator).
Wonder what difference it would cause if someone to regulate that market and force sellers to use proper wording in their offers, so you won't see calls to "buy a book" (unless you really buy it, huh), but only "license a book" or "buy/get a license for a book." Oh, right, nothing, it's just "buy٭" or "$0.99٭" buttons everywhere.
My current workflow is to buy Adobe DRM'd epubs and remove the DRM so I can read them in FBReader on Android. That'll sadly be impacted until the new DRM is defeated. I could switch to buying from Amazon in the interim and cracking those, but I'd rather not support the Amazon ebook oligopoly. Annoying. I guess I'll have to switch to using a DRM-enabled app for a while, but I don't like any of them as much as FBReader. I suppose I could try limiting myself to DRM-free releases for now. Wonder what's out there? I remember Tor Books went DRM-free ...
Let's hope you're right. I'm curious though, do you base that on actual time-to-circumvention experience with ebook DRM systems? Might be interesting to compile some data points on that ...
The exploit that's currently available to extract the key from an authenticated instance of Adobe Digital Editions for Windows only applies to a very old version of the app, so I don't have working memories of how long it took last time.
Hmm, that's repeatedly not worked for me IIRC, but then I'm doing it on Wine rather than an actual Windows. Actually, now that I'm forced to recall the details ... maybe the problem was actually getting the newer version to run due to the .NET requirement.
Still though, different app versions but same DRM system version - the relevant info would be how long it took to defeat that version of the DRM the last time, right?
Absolutely, I'm not saying I'm impacted the most here. The situation sucks for many participants.
As for ignoring the law ... I enjoy reading books. I like paying for books, because I want the activity of writing and publishing books to be a well-compensated endeavor in my society, so I (and others) get more great books from professional writers. Removing the DRM gets me a superior reading experience (favorite reading app), which aligns well with both of those things. Having to remove the DRM is essentially a nuisance I'm choosing to put up with because I like books well enough. It's frustrating the nuisance is mounting.
But you are rewarding those using DRM and going against their intentions. And by spending that money and your time/attention on those, have taken it away from the alternatives that are in your interests and what you want to reward. Yes the alternatives may be worse right now, but they will get better quicker with your money and attention.
You're right. I'm going along with DRM by putting up with it, and it's not something I feel good about, and something that bothers me. I'm doing it because it's a complex situation, especially for the authors involved, many of which aren't in a position to stick up "for the cause". I understand you want me to make strategic decisions to bring about change faster, but I'm concerned about the collateral damage. It's tricky.
I have actually tried to give preferential treatment to DRM-free options where available, and bought some DRM-free books that I might not have otherwise, as well as advertised them to peers and generally tried to awareness of the topic and the benefits of unencumbered book files.
That's the trade-off I'm currently at. It's not a desirable one and I have great respect for your stance, but it's what I feel is best under the circumstances.
I prefer supporting those that sell DRM free from the beginning. Fortunately I like Science Fiction and at $4-6/book, with a bunch of free full length samples, there is nothing to loose. http://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx
I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment here regarding "wise".
> And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies’ wise decision to use their own DRM.
About the only thing "wise" about it is that if Apple were to change its own DRM scheme for the books it sells, I'm assuming they'd update iOS to include the new functionality.
Admittedly, this would still lock out older devices potentially that couldn't upgrade to the latest version of iOS.
But at least Apple and Amazon control their own destiny. If you're going to do DRM, there are some plusses to that.
If you just choose the "standard" DRM, you can end up with what happened to Microsoft customers and their MP3 players. "Apple is proprietary! Get PlaysForSure." It was a real good pitch, up until your Dell Whatever stopped being able to get new music because MS had abandoned PlaysForSure and Dell wasn't going to update their old players.
Amazon and Apple have large incentives to keep their DRMed content working on older devices, at least for a couple of years. Adobe has very little incentive to ensure that their DRM keeps working on the various Sony (and other) Readers.
Apple's tying of iBooks at least partially to iOS updates actually makes them the worst offender in this area. I'm willing to bet 1st gen iPads can't get some new iBooks, but I bet all 1st gen Kindles can still buy all books from Amazon.
I bet all 1st gen Kindles can still buy all books from Amazon.
You lose this bet. There are quite a few Kindle books like this: http://cl.ly/image/2t2m2V3Y0513 that won't play on basic Kindle devices. I discovered this when I tried to read one of my books on my gen 1 Kindle.
There are also some unexpected restrictions on some titles, such as books that are viewable only on 1 or 2 of your devices, which is quite annoying to discover when you're not near one of the previous devices to deactivate it.
I can't comment on the functionality of iBooks on Gen1 iPads because I've never purchased an Apple iBook, but your guesses about Amazon are, sadly, wrong.
I think the "available only on this devices" thing is about formatting, not DRM, although I could be wrong. (Of course, one might wonder why the original Kindle isn't being updated to support the new stuff...)
The point stands that I can't read those books on original Kindles at all. It's not like there's a "let me read the text, and don't show some graphics" option.
"There are also some unexpected restrictions on some titles, such as books that are viewable only on 1 or 2 of your devices..."
You can check this when purchasing on Amazon: the small print you're looking for in the Product Details section is "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited". If you don't see that, it means your Kindle book is restricted (I believe to 5 devices simultaneously, though perhaps it varies from book to book.)
It varies from book to book. Some of them are only 1 or 2 devices. The annoyance is that I inevitably forget which books are device limited and end up unable to open them from work / while traveling / etc.
The nice thing about Amazon's Kindle DRM is that it's fairly easy to crack. It presumably satisfies publishers who insist on continuing with this cargo cult charade (which really should have ended after the music industry accepted DRM-free sales), and it allows educated consumers to strip the DRM if they really need to.
I'd pay for a tool that I could feed in my Amazon credentials and it would iterate through the hundreds of eBooks I've purchased, download them, crack them, and then back them up to an S3 bucket.
1) Download all the Kindle books you've owned (either onto your device, or using the desktop reader - I think there is even one on Linux). You can mount a Kindle as an external drive, so you can easily move files to your hard drive even if you have too many to fit onto the Kindle.
2) Use Calibre to unlock the .mobi files, using the serial number (conveniently located under the "Device Settings" or "About this Device" menu - I forget which it's called, but it's a ~16 digit number and very easy to find.
3) Upload to S3
This works on Linux - I assume it works on OS X and Windows too.
Judging from your user name your time might be worth more than mine, but some scripting + Calibre could do this for you with not much effort on your part.
AFAIK all common book DRM types EXCEPT for the adobe type are currently crackable. This is the main reason why I do not buy any adobe DRMed books. First thing after buying a ebook is to decrypt it and keep a copy as a backup. That way i still have it even if amazon or whoever chooses to revert it.
When I converted my book to Epub and Mobi I just focused on embedding watermarks/serial numbers so I can identify where the leak is if it leaks. However, I trust the people that bought my book to understand how much effort I put into it and that if they would share it with someone else; it would really hurt my feelings. However, I would never prevent them from putting the book on all their different devices.
From experience, the bigger risk is not from genuine customers (even though some of them will share it with friends or even post it online for others). The egregious ones are the dedicated "pirates" who purchase the book using stolen credit card data, leaving you with a chargeback penalty fee while they upload the book to websites plastered with Adsense ads so they can profit from it.
Since you can't stop the dedicated ones, better to provide your genuine customers with the best experience you can.
This is almost certain to cause an increase in piracy as owners of now-obsolete Nooks turn to torrent sites for books they otherwise would have purchased.
It's a situation that takes the usual morality of theft piracy question (which people have many different opinions on, both regarding the question itself and the possible answers) and makes it harder: What happens when people can't make a "moral" decision, because you've taken away their option to do so?
The people who really lose here aren't the ones who go to the torrent sites; they at least still get what they want. It's the people who don't know they can do that. Those people? They're just screwed.
Hopefully they get collectively upset enough to make people notice. We'll never be rid of this kind of problem, but perhaps it can be made less painful if enough angry support calls are made.
> It's a situation that takes the usual morality of theft piracy question and makes it harder
No, it just highlights the fact that you cannot assume that illegal implies immoral.
A little piece of fine print claiming that your purchase was actually an indefinite rental that can be unilaterally cancelled has only tenuous legal power, and absolutely no moral authority. If you bought an eBook in a transaction that was essentially the same as buying a paper book, then you've fulfilled all moral obligations for compensating the author and publisher. No amount of legal shenanigans will create a moral obligation for you to censor that book from your personal library, any more than a legal action can create a moral obligation for you to burn your personal paper books.
There's a problem here, but it's not a moral dilemma, it's just another imperfection in our legal system - an indication that we need to change the laws.
Does anyone know if the Adobe DRM in the BN readers can be upgraded with a software update? I've never understood whether it was basically just a library loaded on the Android OS or if it was some type of firmware that possibly can't be upgraded...
Adobe says their source code was stolen last October: "Very recently, Adobe’s security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products." http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/10/important-custo...
Ah, of course, I should have remembered that. I don't quite see the connection, though -- unless there was a backdoor and the crackers got that backdoor password, or some such.
I imagine this has to do with how easy it has become to strip the DRM off of Adobe's current epub solution. For those users savvy enough they'll at least be able to salvage their _purchased_ books.
This might break the option to use Adobe DE on Linux. The current version does not properly work with Wine, only a specific older on (1.7? There are by now different reports on WineHQ, but it just didn't work on the system I tested). I migrated the family computer to Ubuntu (ran XP before), and to support the prior bought DRM-protected Epubs, Adobe DE in that old version got installed and locked.
Later on, I removed the DRM from that books, but still, DE was necessary to download the epubs if the online shop provied just the download files, not the epub itself. If the new DRM will change any of that Workflow, Adobe-DRM-protected epubs will just not be readable on Linux anymore - as they are not providing a Linux-Version of their software.
Or does someone know a .asm-Downloader? Calibre will surely support breaking the now DRM soon, so that part might be fine.
What a fucking mess. How are ebooks supposed to be used by the public, if it is even for me complicated to have a proper workflow which does not mean the ebooks we buy are less usable than a real book (which costs the same)? How shall this system work if they don't even support Linux?
There is a certain series of books, that several installments are only e-books, and the only place you could buy them in Brazil was from Fictionwise.
Except Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise and closed them down, and left a faq on Fictionwise site saying that you cannot even download the books you bought on that site if you are not in the US...
Meaning, that I NEED to pirate books. ZERO stores sell it to Brazil, and ALL of them have DRM. The only way to get the book, is find a illegal copy (because even if you bought legally in the US, the DRM would not allow you to read it in Brazil anyway)
Overdrive (the service most libraries use to lend out books to their users) uses Adobe DRM if you read the book in Overdrive's own app on iOS.
I have an iPad1, so I'm probably screwed. I'll still be able to use the Kindle app to read borrowed books, but some books don't allow reading on Kindle.
We use Overdrive from our library on two separate Android devices. Does not worry me for my device but the other user is not technology adept. Just getting Overdrive working and the user trained on was a nightmare and bucket of frustrations.
I have an aging (5 yrs old) Sony reader that I still use. It uses Adobe DRM, but it didn't when I first got it. Sony have been pretty good about updates so far.
If DRM breaks for it, then I'll simply stop buying books from the Sony store (which I mostly have already) and just use DRM-free ebooks from gutenburg etc.
Did they not already abandon one DRM scheme many many years ago, with DRM-ed pdfs? I remember Acrobat versions 5-8 or somewhere in that range of versions having DRM, with a few vendors using it, then dropping it around '06.
I would gladly pay (help fund) to get a DRM remover ASAP for the new Adobe DRM make it useless as fast as possible. I pay for my books I love the Kobo ecosystem (and safari/manning) but I always download the epub and remove adobe DRM. since that is the only way to ensure your investment is still readable for the years to come. If you want DRM give me a rent option for 10 per month like Spotify. Anyway I would stop buying books until the DRM is hacked.
Yes, I have the previous generation paperwhite. I love it. I just keep the radio off except to download or purchase new books. I periodically use calibre to extract the books I purchase and strip the drm. My calibre library is in ~/Dropbox/Library/. That way everything is automatically synced to one of my macs which has an always attached time machine backup. Said backup is rotated with another drive in my safe deposit box every month or more often if I'm working on stuff I don't want to lose.
I still use a Kindle. Convenience trumps that kind of theoretical concern. If a book was wiped by Amazon I'm sure I'd be able to find a pirate copy, but it would take faff.
In this case Kindle users who buy their books from Amazon shouldn't be affected by this Adobe format change. Amazon decided (smartly in this case) to keep the keys to their own walled garden.
As to your other question, I still use a Kindle. I buy books from various places, but I always put it in Calibre and create a non-DRMed mobi file from the DRMed version. I would not buy a book where I could not strip the DRM.
At least with my kindle, only the books that I bought via amazon and did not liberate from DRM are affected, so the risk is fairly low that it will nuke something really important.
I also use CM, who are very good at reversing google's anti-privacy changes (personally, I think they should fork android entirely, but that's another conversation).
This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).