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.
In the early days, Adobe championed the PDF file format. Their software can constrict what PDF readers are permitted to do with a protected file. In particular, a PDF can disallow copying of the eBook text (a simple copy and paste of text to another document) and also stop the user from printing hard copies of the PDF file. This is DRM technology in action.
Most PDF creation applications now have this functionality (for example, Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader). Microsoft added the options of imprinting PDF files with the purchaser’s meta-data (information) to discourage the customer from sharing their PDF purchase and facilitate hunting down file sharers.
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.
And it now seems that even software houses are putting similar functionality into their PDF creation/publishing applications including password protection on PDF files combined with the ability to disable the eBook from a remote computer in the event that a customer has provided a false credit-card or is seeking a refund. For a lot of authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through a simple configuration of their publishing software is an optimum solution.
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 & sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your ebook ecommerce business online today.
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