It seems authors and publishers are often at opposite ends of the tug of war between DRM ebooks and Open [DRM-free] Ebooks.
One such author struggled with his publisher over several months to have his books published DRM free. His reasons were typical of the two major hurdles faccing many other ebook authors:
Cost - this is largely a legacy issue through years of rather irrational pricing in the print publishing industry. Books seem to be largely priced on type of cover [hard or soft] and the number of page, and only then by the value of the content [if at all]. This same logic is being applied to ebooks – seen by many as having less intrinsic value than printed books. What nonsense – just because we have been doing it wrong for years, why should we continue now. Look at it this way. If we hire a professional or consultant to do some work for us, we evaluate their fees based on their knowledge and expertise, and the value we will derive from that. We don’t just evaluate them as one person per hour. Yet this is exactly how most people value books. All books are NOT equal. For example, the knowledge contained in a book like ‘The Logical Organization’. It’s a soft cover, 365 page book that retails at $USD79.95, but the content equates to hundreds of hours of consulting time and tens of thousands of dollars. Whether it is received as a print book or ebook is a personal preference of the reader. Myself, I am busy and travel a lot – I wouldn’t want to be lugging around TLO in my brief case. It wouldn’t fit anyway. But I can readily access it on my PDA or Kindle – and since it is a reference style book I can access it whenever I need to, wherever I am.
DRM - when you encrypt an e-book, DVD or computer game, you are immediately creating a relationship with your customer based on distrust. You don’t trust them. In reality – you don’t trust the low copyright laws of China or the fraudsters in Russia and Korea. Again, the logic is flawed. The normal customer is not going to rip off your ebook any more than lending a print book to a few friends. Copyright pirates and ebook theives will find a way to downloaded pirated copies anyway – they are much smarter at it than publishers, authors and readers combined. So the only people you are irritating are your so-called trusted paying public.
I hate DRM books – I can’t use them as I want, take notes out of them easily to reference quickly. Often, I can’t access it through more than one computer – yet I use 3 networked laptops at home, an ebook reader, PDA, PC and laptop at work. And I have to make sure I publish the password everywhere I go otherwise I forget it and can’t get back in!!! DRM-locked e-books will generally work with only one device, or one particular piece of software. No wonder print books are still preferred!!
