Book Publishers Abandoning DRM 218
tmalone writes "The New York Times is reporting that book publishers are beginning to phase out DRM-protected audio books. This month the world's largest publisher, Random House, started offering DRM-free mp3s; Penguin has announced that it will follow suit. Their logic? DRM just doesn't work. 'Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to DRM out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the DRM-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or DRM-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.'"
abandon ebooks too (Score:1, Insightful)
every new technology satisfies a need that was not satisfied before. there is no need to improve upon wood pulp when it comes to book. a paperback book beats an ebook in any way, any day. technophilia informs some people that they are an improvement, but they aren't thinking like a consumer does. a consumer looks at a paperback and an ebook and he or she chooses a paperback, every time
duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this all based on something we try to teach children? If you give someone trust then they will do the right thing, but if you're instantly distrustful then they're never going to do the right thing.
Hurrah for non-DRM! It's good to see they put some effort in to this rather than just going "we must put digital restricting management on the files because of 'teh leet haxxorz' who will cost us trillions of dollars and destroy the world economy by being selfish enough to want to do what they wish with the file they've paid for".
If only I had the cabling to format-shift my two Discworld audio book tapes.
Is the sky falling? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wtf? A business person actually seeing whats been f...king obvious for years now?
Re:Audible.com not allowing non DRM books (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever the free, pirated version is technically superior to the costly commercial version, the business case is on pretty rocky ground.
There are an increasing number of examples showing that people will pay real money for products that can easily be obtained for nothing, but it must be worth their while. Well presented, high quality, DRM free recording, perhaps accompanied by supporting extras, such as maps and illustrations will sell. The recent experiment by the Nine Inch Nails is an excellent example of people being prepared to pay for a premium product.
Re:abandon ebooks too (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:abandon ebooks too (Score:5, Insightful)
Some get addicted to drugs; others don't.
Some have their health ruined by alcohol; others drink like fish yet remain fairly healthy.
Some get sick when they eat certain foods; others thrive on them.
Some lose weight by exercising; others don't (true; look it up).
And some will never give up paper books, while others will be happy to do so.
It makes life more complicated, but also more fun.
AUDIO book (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you and the parent are talking about different things. eBooks SHOULD be digital books, text documents. You are talking about AUDIO books, books being read by someone. Note how he talks about low-light, while you talk about driving.
Granted, the original article gets pretty confused about it as well.
Re:abandon ebooks too (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
7. Variable type (Score:3, Insightful)
So Just Watermark Them Then (Score:3, Insightful)
If they charge your credit card when you download the watermarked content, they can just watermark the content with your card ID. Then if they catch a file out there in the wild, they can see who it came from, and investigate the cardholder and the contentholder with violating copyright law.
If it's even worth the bother. They'll realize that people distributing some of the content for free to their friends the best advert for more content. And even if they give all the content away free, they'll realize that the content is just a way for people to connect to its author, so the content is advertisement for all kinds of other products: presubscription premiere releases, physical copy collector's items, schwag like T-shirts/posters/actionfigures, personal appearances, "author's picks" compilations of other content, recommendations of other authors, branded SUVs with the author's signature...
The audience has already moved into the 21st Century "free content" economy. These dinosaurs are still selling CDs as if they're still in the business of selling plastic discs, that they emboss with content-encoded patterns as a marketing stunt. Well, they can't custom-watermark CDs so easily, and the costs of trucking them around is more than they "lose" on free downloads. They should get with the program before they're nothing but an obstacle.
Bleah... wake me up when they add eBooks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess I'll stick with Fictionwise and Baen for a while more.
inaccurate subject (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it not ironic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, what? My idea of "literate" isn't having someone read to you.
You normal people should pity the poor hyperlex. There is no way that someone like us could enjoy a book while driving a car. When we read a novel by a good author, we become totally immersed. We are there.
When the literate drive we must unfortunately concentrate on piloting thousands of pounds of steel and avoidiong the fucktards that are paying attention to the machine that's reading to them instead of the task at hand, which SHOULD BE driving the damned car.
-mcgrew
Re:Avoid Audible.com for your own peace of mind (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it not ironic... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can quite easily drive a car while having a coversation. Quite a few people do it every day. People listen to the news on the radio in their cars. There are constant trafic announcements and none of this increases the chance to have an accident. So why are you so hostile towards Audio Books? If people should drive in total silence then why don't we have single seated cars with no audio devices?
It's quite clear that a majority of drivers enjoy having audio of some sort in their cars otherwise *all* cars would not be sold with speakers as standard. In todays world where safety is God, do you really think audio equipment in cars would still be there as standard if it significantly increased the risk of having an accident?
Now you could argue that it diverts attention significantly enough to cause an accident... But then so do police cars and speed cameras... Maybe we should not have those on the roads too hmm? After all, I could be glacing at that police car instead of putting my breaks on one day...
Re:They really would be better off with just PDFs (Score:3, Insightful)
mas vale tarde que nunca (Score:3, Insightful)
The computer software industry generally realized twenty years ago that copy protection schemes cause more problems than they solve. (When was the last time you had to look up a word in a printed manual, or attach a hardware dongle, in order to run a piece of software?) Copy protection is rarely difficult to circumvent, adds to the costs of media distribution, provides no benefit to the legitimate customer, and often drives legitimate customers to become illegitimate for the sake of convenience.
It's nice to see a sign of hope that other digital content industries may finally be coming to the same conclusions.
Re:So Just Watermark Them Then (Score:3, Insightful)
The watermarks can't be so easily detected or removed. The simple way to hide them is to use the download ID itself as the index into the data, then brute forcing it from the relatively short (secret) list of IDs (GUIDs from a very large, but sparsely and randomly populated namespace). Or a secret number from a very short list that's the key to which bit the watermark starts in. The watermarks then run a pseudorandom walk through a small percentage of the low bits of the entire file, indistinguishable from inherent noise. Watermark contains the download ID, and thereby the identity of the original downloader. That cheap and fairly simple watermarking is not going to get cracked or discarded without reducing the quality of the recording.
And I said that eventually these publishers would see that overall limiting the copying is a losing game, compared to what I described. But since they're not there yet, they could at least admit we're all well past DRM, even if we're not to completely unencumbered - or eventually, even publisher-assisted - freely copied content.