Author Archives: Ryan Markel

Thoughts on Ebook DRM Standards

I’ve recently been performing some research into so-called “social DRM” as it applies to digital files for my own knowledge bank. I’ve been very interested in the approaches to DRM shown by groups such as The Pragmatic Programmers and ebooks purchased from outlets like Lulu, where the name of the purchaser is automatically embedded within the purchased file in order to provide it with some measure of discouraging sharing/piracy.

iTunes has done this from the start, and even though they have dropped the traditional notion of DRM from their music files now, they still mark each and every file you download with the email address of the Apple ID used to purchase the song. It’s not used in any sort of enforcement application (that we know of to date), but knowing it’s there stops some people from posting the tracks publicly or sharing them with anyone who is not a close personal friend or relative (my conjecture).

In doing this research, I ran across a two year old blog post from Bill McCoy of Adobe. He has some words to say about the same, which is fascinating coming from the GM of their ePublishing department. His comments are in reaction to the Steve Jobs note from 2007 regarding music and DRM—something that ended up happening less than two years after the fact. I also ran into some more recent comments from McCoy, speaking to the establishment of a DRM standard that is cross-platform instead of complete advocacy for the removal of traditional DRM systems from ebook titles.

Let’s talk about why this isn’t feasible and how we can learn from the past.

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links for 2009-04-03

Once Again, It Comes Down to Value

Electronic Cottage reports that there’s a small-scale user revolt boycotting Kindle titles that are priced higher than the new release and/or bestseller $9.99 price point:

Now, Amazon has many books over the $9.99 price it promised for new releases when Kindle was first launched. That price was a major selling point to convince buyers that the large investment in a Kindle would pay off over time. The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn’t usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.

Kindle owners have organized a boycott of Kindle editions over $9.99. The uprising is ably helped by Amazon’s own online tools: the 9.99boycott community and a boycott discussion forum. Cleverly, the boycotters are using the Amazon tags feature to tag books over $9.99 with the 9.99boycott tag. Boy, if I were a publisher or author, I sure wouldn’t want to see my books listed at the top of the tag’s “Popular Products” under the boycott tag.

Interesting that part of the article here is that Amazon has provided customers with all the tools they need to create an uprising within their own service. Pay attention to the number of books the author says he purchased at the lower $9.99 price point. Like iPhone applications, there appears to already be a price ceiling forming with the Kindle.

I don’t think this is what Amazon was going for, nor do I think they promised everyone $9.99 books, but (again) like the App Store, the customer base is showing what they’re willing to pay.

(Via Tools of Change for Publishing.)

Twitter, Like Google, Is All About the Search

Well, actually, Google is all about the advertising, but that’s another article.

From the Twitter blog:

We went back to the original sketch and made everything far more awesome. Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.

Take a look at the whole article. It’s awesome to see the design process boiled down to a simple sketch on a legal pad. Sometimes, the best ideas have very simple beginnings.

It's Not About Cost; It's About Value

The Macalope says it’s go time with Microsoft:

[…] This is not about price. This is about making “safe” choices. For years enterprises have chosen—and let themselves get locked into—Windows because, yes, no one got fired for buying Microsoft.

But these companies also bought Microsoft because, like AIG, Microsoft simply seemed “too big to fail” and Apple did not. Well, that’s as may be, but there’s “fail as a company” and then there’s “fail to deliver”—and Microsoft has certainly failed to deliver.

So, congratulations, enterprises! You’re left holding the bag for an outdated desktop operating system bundled with a costly and uncertain path forward!

Seriously, if it were solely about price and choice, every company in the world would be running Linux.