Every once in a while you hear publishers mutter something about not wanting to make the same mistakes the music industry made. While it’s an admirable goal, the problem is that it’s not clear that we all have the same view of what those mistakes actually were. As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.
The very nature of DRM runs contrary to the freedoms that all book readers know and love. The freedom to read a book anywhere, the freedom to read a book without special requirements or equipment, the freedom to loan a book to a friend, or borrow a book from a friend or library. By inserting a layer of DRM between readers and books the experience of reading is fundamentally transformed in all of the wrong ways. Not only that, DRM protected books lose all of their essential viral qualities. Unrestricted books sell themselves — DRM protected books never get the chance to.
Given the potential for disaster, it’s only appropriate that the O’Reilly TOC conference devoted a full session to Digital Rights Management. The session was was quite illuminating, if for no other reason because the conference organizers were unable to find a major trade publisher willing to speak to the advantages of using DRM....
What we were left with was a level-headed presentation by a couple of publishers who are actually using DRM-free content as a way to expand their businesses and serve their customers.
Ale de Vries of ScienceDirect spoke about his company’s service which gives subscribers unlimited access to over 2,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals in an unrestricted PDF format....
Michael Jensen of National Academies Press (NAP), a publisher of academic books and reports, described how his company has increased sales by making the full content of all of its books available for free online....
Jensen explained:
“Visibility is the killer. The worst thing for a publisher is to have your material be invisible. We’re dealing with a culture of abundance where there’s so much more material out there than anyone can ever find. It’s our job as a publisher to get our words and content into the minds of as many people as possible. The best strategy for that is to make it as open as we can afford to make it open.”
Jensen also stressed that NAP’s decision to make its content freely available was a legitimate business decision and not a form of zealotry.
“Openness matters as a business strategy, DRM gets in the way of that, creates customer service problems, and impediments to the realities of the new gigantic audiences that we’re trying to tap.” ...
While piracy is a very real problem, the truth of the matter is that DRM creates more problems than it solves. Publishers may argue that they want the right to control who copies their books — and while that is their right, in this case having the moral high ground isn’t necessarily the best business decision.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/29/2007 09:40:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
