Should Publishers Abolish DRM and Trust Customers Instead?

My new column at Huffington Post suggests publishers should abolish DRM and trust their customers to do the right thing.

Most ebook customers don't know what DRM is. Many authors and small publishers don't understand it either. Yet if you're a reader, author or publisher, it's probably a good idea to roll up your sleeves and think about how DRM might impact you in the future.

All Smashwords books are published DRM-free. This means we don't apply copy-protection schemes that would prevent, for example, a customer from reading their ebook on any of the multiple ebook reading devices they may own today or in the future (e-readers, computer, cell phone, etc.).

Some of our retail partners apply DRM to our books in their own stores, and we're fine with this. It's up to the customer to decide if they care about DRM or not.

At Smashwords, we're strongly anti-piracy, though unlike publishers who infect their books with DRM, we instead work with our authors and publishers to help them educate customers to do the right thing. We think most customers are honest and honorable, and they understand the value of supporting the author or publisher who created the book for their enjoyment.

In the Smashwords Style Guide, we encourage our authors and publishers to add the following license statement to their books, which acts as a gentle reminder:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The license statement also acts as a trojan horse. Should the book fall into the hands of readers who didn't pay for it, the license statement provides the honest reader a chance to make good on their obligation to support the author or publisher.

Obscurity is a bigger risk to authors than piracy. And while I'd never say piracy is a good thing, I've seen some folks argue it can actually provide indirect benefits to the creator. The idea isn't as outlandish as you might think. Imagine if somehow my novel was pirated, and fell into the hands of one million readers. What if the gentle reminder above prompted one percent of them to purchase the book? That's 10,000 paid customers.

In the column at HuffPo, I have a real world example of how one forward-looking software company (and folks, ebooks are software!) leveraged piracy in their early years - even encouraged it - and now they sell billions of dollars in software per year. There are many lessons to be learned by authors and publishers willing to experiment.

The column at HuffPo is actually a re-write of a previous column that first appeared here on the Smashwords blog. In that column, I tried to rationalize what I viewed as dichotomous thinking on the part of mainstream publishers. They sell books in print, and those books are shared, resold, resold again, again and again, and at each step the publisher receives nothing. If that book was an ebook, the publisher would call it piracy.

The same previous column was also republished over at Teleread. One commenter there called it, "marvelously imperfect," which is the highest praise I've ever received on a blog post. To me, the best blog posts provoke thought and serve as conversation-starters, not the last word.

What do you think is the last word (or the next word) on the DRM debate? Comment here, or click here to join the discussion at HuffPo.

Why Print Books are Like Zombies

Print books are like zombies. They don't die easily.

When I told my wife Lesleyann I was considering titling this post, "Why Print Books Must Die," she flashed me an icy stare that said, "Don't you dare!" In deference to Mrs. Smashwords, I changed the title.

Don't get me wrong. I love print books. Lesleyann and I collect them. Every Friday, we do date night at the book store. Books form narrow hallways in our house. I'd say I'm cursed by print books except it's really more of a blessing, as anyone sharing our affliction will tell you.

I don't want print books to go away. The real purpose of this post is to make a point about DRM. More about that in a second.

From an early age, we're taught to respect books. We know and love them as receptacles of knowledge and entertainment, and as artifacts and souvenirs. They're expressions of personal identity and personal desire. It's quite amazing, really, how books can envelop our lives like, uh, mossy green zombie goo.

There's a dark side to these zombies of the printed page. We never throw them out, so they're difficult to kill. We pass them on to friends who read them, and then they pass them on again. We sell them, or trade them in for credits at a used bookstore, or we donate them to a library and they change hands again and again and again. Each time they pass from the previous owner to the next, the author and publisher who invested so much effort to create the book don't see a cent. I'm not the first person to raise this point, and I won't be the last.

What do book Zombies and DRM have to do with one another? Quite a lot, actually. DRM, or digital rights management, is a scheme designed to prevent ebook customers from illegally copying and sharing ebooks (most ebooks are licensed like software - you're not legally allowed to share them with friends, or resell them). There's a big debate in publishing circles about whether or not books should be protected (afflicted?) with DRM.

I, and many other progressive book people, think DRM is a bad thing. It treats law abiding customers like criminals by limiting their ability to enjoy their book their way. Others, like a concerned author who emailed me the other day, fear that without copy protection, customers will pirate their books and soon, millions of unpaid copies will be in the hands of ungrateful readers.

Lost in this debate about whether publishers can trust their customers to do the right thing is the zombie elephant in the room. Each time a print book passes to a new owner, the author and publisher earn nothing. It's not piracy, but it has the same effect.

While I think piracy is a bad thing, and chronically under-compensated authors and their publishers deserve more money for their work, it bears remembering that book piracy pre-dated ebooks.

Ebooks, even DRM-free ebooks, could help mitigate the book piracy problem.

Here's how:

Assuming publishers continue producing zombie print books, the incremental cost to create an ebook is infinitesimally small. Smashwords, for example, will convert a finished Microsoft Word manuscript into nine ebook formats at no cost. Many free conversion tools to do the same.

Once in ebook form, ebooks cost virtually nothing for the publisher to print (duplicate) and ship. Unlike Zombie books, ebooks have no inventory, no returns and theoretically (if customers for the most part are trustworthy, as I think they are), no sharing or reselling.

Ebooks are cheap to make, so the publisher can offer them to customers at a lower price. By lowering the price, publishers expand the affordability of the book to a wider potential audience, including folks who can now purchase the book as opposed to seeking out a pirated copy. Bigger market, bigger profits, cheaper books, no zombies. It's a win/win/win for author/publisher/customer.

Want more zombies? Click here for Smashwords ebooks about zombies.