DRM Advancements In The EBook Business

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is one area of publishing and the eBook business that should be of particular interest to any author who wishes to protect their written work when using digital formats.

DRM is a field of software and hardware technology that attempts to protect creative works in multiple formats (C.D.s, D.V.D.s, eBooks, etc.). DRM tries to block eBooks being shared or copied without your knowledge. Famously, music publishers were slow to protect their songs from online copying (e.g. from Napster) without the publishers benefiting financially.

In the case of the eBook business, rights management was built in from the early days of computer engineering as eBooks are a product of the computing industry, rather than having started out of the regular hard-copy book publishing industry. This key differentiator means eBooks have used technological innovation from an early stage to protect the text and content of eBooks.

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 creation software now has this functionality (e.g. Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader). Microsoft went a little further by stamping PDF files with the purchaser’s information in order to facilitate tracking 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 or software and want to publish and sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your software or ebook business online today.

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