How the EBook Business Is Pioneering DRM Innovation

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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area that authors in the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these technological advancements are determined to safeguard the written word.

What DRM boils down to is working out a way to stop your eBook being sold-on, copied or distributed without your knowledge (and without you benefiting). Technological innovation in the music industry was slow to catch up on providing DRM, resulting in songs being widely distributed on the Internet. Music publishers were slow to act (and react) in that instance.

The eBook business is different from the music industry though as eBooks are a result of the software sector rather than the book publishing sector. Consequently, written eBooks have incorporated innovation in DRM from the early days to protect the eBook’s contents.

Historically, it has been software producers such as Adobe who pioneered the PDF file format for writing eBooks. Their software can be configured to constrain/restrict certain functionality of PDF readers. You may have seen this before where you receive a PDF book but are perhaps unable to copy/paste any of the text. It is possible to even restrict the user from printing out hard-copies of the document. This is DRM in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

In new and recent developments in DRM, players like the Kindle Reader can send notifications back to their home servers if eBooks are being illegally read or shared. At that point the vendor can then choose how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through litigation). Could they remove the PDF? Yes, apparently this is already possible, as detailed in a recent case when Amazon remotely removed PDFs from customers’ Kindle Readers (http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). This does open up a potential can of worms regarding the privacy rights of device owners so expect to start seeing Terms Of Conditions for digital readers containing statements about remote access permissions of vendor.

Software developers are now also including the ability to disable eBooks remotely. Some vendors can render a PDF unreadable using remote notifications if the customer uses a stolen credit card or is looking for a refund (2 widely used means of acquiring PDFs freely). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF export/creation software is a simple solution that most will welcome.

These developments in the eBook business may be too late arriving for the millions of written eBooks that are already available online (these still have copyright protection on their intellectual content; Just no technological means to protect them). Future developments in PDF copy protection should make it even more practical for authors to start writing eBooks and begin profiting from selling eBooks online.

Writing ebooks and want to publish and sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your ebook ecommerce business online today.


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