DRM for digital music cannot succeed.

This idea is slowly getting taken seriously, partly due to overwhelming evidence and partly due to the efforts of activists like Cory Doctorow. Doctorow has a nice analogy, which you can read here, showing why DRM is a basically broken idea. Stripped of its rhetorics (which are the point, by the way; if you’re unconvinced by my exposition I definitely recommend his) the idea is this: DRM provider Alice tries to hide a piece of content from Carol (who isn’t supposed to get access to it) while revealing it to Bob (who is). Only no DRM system can prevent Bob and Carol being the same person (a criminal intending to sell copies of Your Band’s Latest Album buys it legitimately; now the DRM has to let him get it on his Bob days but not let him get it on his Carol days).

There’s more subtlety to this idea than Doctorow admits, though. There are a bunch of factors that make digital music particularly un-DRM-able (to coin a barbarism). Here’s a list of factors ranging from highly technological to highly social (the middle entries are sort of a mixture of both):

• audio output makes pipelining easy
• cds and the mp3 format are de-facto standards
• digital music gets played on general-purpose computers
• enormous numbers of people listen to music digitally
• there are social assumptions that swapping music is ok
• there’s a general perception of record labels as exploitative

Let’s take them in order.

Pipelining

Doctorow’s analogy assumes that Bob and Carol both want the same thing from their file. For music that’s a pretty safe bet, because there’s basically a single bottom line: Bob (the legit listener) needs to be able to get the music out; for reasons we’ll come back to in a moment, he almost certainly needs to be able to get it out digitally (not just as audio output). But that means Carol can take that output and pipeline it straight back in as the input to something else: a cd burner, her mail client, a file-sharing program, or whatever. (Actually even just having audio output would let her do this to some extent, but she would lose some of the information in the original, even with the best-quality gear.)

De-facto standards

Cds and the mp3 format are de-facto standards for digital music. That means attempts to crack DRM can be pretty tightly focussed: get the music off a protected cd, convert it to mp3, release it. And cds are pretty much impossible to DRM effectively, because the same physical technology (a cd drive) gets used both for data and for music cds, when they get played on …

General-purpose computers

A cd can’t really tell when it spins up in your computer’s drive whether it’s being pipelined into an excellent music program or into an mp3 ripper. I said above that Carol would lose quality in re-recording from audio output, but if she can put the cd into her laptop she doesn’t even have to do this. She just has to trick whatever DRM system is on the CD into believing that she’s only accessing the data for the purposes of playing the music; once she has the data, she can do whatever she likes with it. And on a computer that lets you install your own software (your laptop or pc, that is, but not your iPod — at least not without some serious extra hassle) that’s going to be very easy indeed.

Enormous numbers of users

I said “not without some serious hassle”; in the case of music, that doesn’t actually matter so much. So many people listen to digital music that there’s bound to be someone out there willing to put in the time and effort to rip Your Band’s Latest Album, even if you make it difficult. Having cds and playing-on-your-pc as a de-facto standard makes this a lot easier, of course.

Social attitudes

The last two points are pretty fuzzy. It seems to me, based on the people I know and the stuff I read online, that these are prevalent attitudes; there might be quite some self-selection involved here though. That said, I see two attitudes: the assumption that swapping music among friends is basically ethically ok, and the assumption that little if any of the money we pay for music gets back to the artists. These attitudes are pretty clearly going to make folk more comfortable with sharing music without paying for it, whether that’s ‘technically’ illegal or not. It doesn’t even matter if the perception of record labels as exploitative is true: the assumption that this is the case makes people more comfortable with ripping them off, since it’s only fair turnabout.

I don’t think I’ve said anything surprising so far. But let’s see how these observations carry over to ebooks.

No pipelining

This is the most important point where the analogy between music and ebooks breaks down. There is no equivalent to ‘audio output’ for ebooks. You can always, without anything more complicated than a piece of cable and the right plugs, pipeline your music if you can play it. The equivalent low-tech solution for an ebook would be photographing a screen displaying each page in turn.

There’s another post hidden in that observation, about typographical standards and the differences between pdf and on-the-fly adjustable technologies like html, mobipocket and so on. But the basic point is: what the reader needs to see is not necessarily what the reproducer needs to get at.

That’s partly because there are as yet…

No de-facto standards

That’s not really true: there are too many de-facto standards, which is as good as having none at all. There are a plethora of physical reading devices out there, all with different screen dimensions and technical qualities (e-ink, backlit screens, link-based navigation and what-have-you). Content that is right for one won’t necessarily be right for another — both in the trivial sense that a file for the Amazon Kindle won’t be readable on a Sony Reader, and in the less trivial sense that a pdf carefully formatted for the dimensions of the iLiad won’t be pleasant to read on your netbook or laptop.

The lack of standards also means there isn’t a central clearing-house for DRM-cracking efforts the way there is with music: rip the cd to mp3 and you’re done, but get ahold of a pdf and you have to convert it to half-a-dozen other formats before you’ve satisfied everyone. Tools like calibre are going to change that, eventually, but they haven’t gotten there yet.

Special-purpose devices

Part of that lack of standardisation comes from the variety of physical devices being used to read ebooks. The most important of those devices are dedicated ebook-reading systems like the Kindle or the iLiad. Amazon’s Kindle is a closed device: you’re not supposed to be able to run your own programs on it.¹ And, contra Doctorow, a DRM scheme based on such a device can work. Again, it won’t work for music, because even plain audio output can be pipelined; if you make the output quality too bad to use for re-recording then the device is no good for listening to music any more. But that’s not the case with an ebook reader: the output is an image on the screen, and there’s no way to turn that into something as versatile as the original file was if the device doesn’t let you get access to that file.

Limited numbers of users

If enough people were using ebooks, even this wouldn’t matter. We would have pirated editions consisting entirely of photographs of authorised editions. It happened to Harry Potter, it could happen to everyone!

Well yeah, except that it won’t. There are too many books and too few people who could be bothered to perform this incredibly tedious work. (Unfortunately for DRM, incredibly popular titles like the Harry Potter series will continue to attract this kind of insane effort, and those are exactly the ones that ought otherwise to give the largest returns for the publishers. But it’s not something for them to be worried about in the general case.)

Different attitudes?

Finally, many attitudes to books are rather different at this point to attitudes to music. This is again pretty fuzzy and probably extremly personally biased. It’s also very much based on attitudes to paper books, which might not carry over to ebooks at all. For instance, paper books are for lending; you lend cds too, but the cd you lend can be copied while the paper book can’t.² I doubt this attitude will carry over to ebooks, because by now we’re completely used to the idea that data can be copied: I won’t want to ‘lend’ you my ebook because there’s no non-DRM reason why I should be deprived of it while you’re reading it. Again my personal feeling (which is probably not representative of any significant market) is that publishers don’t get the same assumptions of evildoing that record labels do. Here I don’t see any reason why electronic publishing should change matters; on the other hand if major publishers get DRM-crazy and end up associated with the likes of the RIAA, their credibility is going to take a hit (at least, and to belabour point one final time, among the people who are already writing and reading blog posts about DRM).

What does it all mean?

So I hope you’re convinced that ebooks are not like digital music, and that DRM being completely braindead for the one does not automatically mean it will be braindead for the other. In particular, the fact that you order your Kindle ebook through the Kindle, download it using the Kindle’s own network connection, and view it on the Kindle screen without ever having access to the file itself, means that DRM is technologically feasible on that platform. (Bob gets to read; Carol doesn’t get to copy.)

Yet there is hope! There are so many hardware options, and so many competing standards, that restricting to Kindle-only (or Sony-only, or…) for the sake of DRM will be a bad business move for publishers unless Amazon manages to strangle all the competing alternatives before they get serious market share. So long as you can get the original DRM-locked files onto a general-purpose computer, the DRM is eventually going to collapse: Bob needs access, but Carol can dress up as Bob. So we need to lobby for the ability to share ebooks across multiple devices, to make our own backups, whatever else gives us an excuse to get the file out of that device and onto our own computers. If ebooks are sold under the assumption that this is possible (and if enough people are reading them to make cracking the DRM a fun hobby for someone), these DRM schemes will eventually crumble.

What still has me seriously worried, I have to admit, is that I don’t yet see a sensible alternative to DRM-based restrictions that still gives me high-quality ebooks to read and that will be attractive to publishers. A music junkie who will fill 150G with mp3s is going to carry on beyond 150G. I’m not sure that’s the case with books: one can only read so much in a lifetime, and 150G might be pushing that limit. A swapping session with a new friend might give me a couple of days worth of new music, including a couple of albums that send me looking for more stuff by the same people. The same session with someone with a nice library might mean that I never have to buy anything by Gene Wolfe: not many people have complete album collections for any but their favourite bands; I bet though that everyone who reads beyond the first book of a series will accumulate all the others if they’re easily available. It could keep me reading for the next two or three months. That has to be a scary thought for publishers.

The most obvious alternative to DRM is simply to keep some titles non-digital, or to provide them but in deliberately low-quality versions to give an incentive to buy ‘the real thing’. I don’t like that alternative any more than I like DRM: I want my ebooks to be of high typographic quality. Next ebook post (which almost certainly will be after read-an-ebook week is over, perhaps long over) will be about this issue, and (again rather depressingly) about how often this is not the case: demonstrably so at present, and I think likely also for quite a while to come.

Notes:

1. The iLiad, on the other hand, is largely open-source. I own one and it’s a fun thing to play with, as well as good for reading books on. Go the iLiad! Apart from the name, which is quite frankly embarrassing.
2. Yes, it can, but not easily and the result is not nearly as pleasant an object as the original. It still happens among students for textbooks, though, that’s for sure.

I just read Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, released as a free pdf by suvudu. It’s a clever idea: they’re giving away the first books in a few particularly addictive series, with the expectation that they’ll gain more sales in new addicts (who won’t be able to resist the non-free continuations of the series) than they lose by the free release. And it’s worked for me. I’m hooked on Temeraire, like crack (“first time is free…”).¹

Only trouble is, they’re not selling the rest of the series.

That’s not quite true: if you do a lot of digging about on the site you find links to places you can buy the books from. The suvudu website is not very well put together, so it takes some time to get to grips with the idea that you can’t get anything directly from them.² Ok, then it’s off to the plethora of alternative sites, all selling content that comes originally from one of suvudu’s bit publishing backers (Del Rey, Random House, I’m not clear how they all fit together).

It takes a bit longer to realise that … none of the rest of these folk will take my money and give me a pdf.

Judging by the comments on the announcement of the suvudu free library, I’m the only person left in this post-millenial world who still wants to read pdf. Greg Montague writes

Publishers and authors may believe they are doing readers a service by offering a free PDF, but they may just be keeping an outdated format in the digital ICU ward. Obsolescence is an essential part of technological growth. It’s time to hang the DO NOT RESUSCITATE sign. That means readers need to say no thanks to free offers of a PDF ebook.

Well, there is something to be said for pdf as a distribution format. The main advantage it offers over most of the alternatives folk are asking for in that thread is exactly why they don’t want it: it fixes the dimensions of the page and the layout of the text on that page, so that if the page isn’t the same size as the screen you view it on … tough luck.³ Why is that a good thing? Well, it lets someone with some design skills and typographic sensibilities design the page and know how it’s going to look when you read it.

If you’ve got a device that makes reading a page formatted for any roughly standard-sized paperback comfortable, a pdf that closely replicates the design of the paper-and-ink book is going to look good on it. I’ve got one (an iLiad) and that’s how I want to do my reading. The Amazon Kindle that everyone is buzzing about looks like it has a similar size screen. Now I don’t know what other formats look like on a Kindle, but I would be surprised if anything looks better than a well-designed pdf.⁴

Of course there are other factors beyond looks. A format dedicated to a particular device can have features that target that device. A format that has to be read in a particular piece of software can integrate with that software for, again, extra features. One such feature is managing a library, with search features and tracking of which books you have and haven’t read, and so on. I imagine the Kindle probably does this quite well.⁵

There’s another ‘feature’ which formats locked to one device or piece of reader software offer, though: DRM. And that’s what I find when I try to buy any more of that tasty Temeraire crack: the only formats anyone will sell it in are DRM locked.

That means they’re useless to me. Very few of these locked-down formats can even be read on the relatively marginal iLiad. And those that can are certainly not providing the high-quality typography that I’d like to see. (His Majesty’s Dragon is nicely typeset, admittedly unlike many rough-and-ready pdfs you will find being offered as free tasters.)

I’m not sure that DRM for ebooks is as braindead a proposition as DRM for music was, at least at this moment in technological history.⁶ Unlike in the case of music, many of the people who will be willing to put effort into circumventing DRM technology (and providing the de-DRMed results to the rest of us) will also be content with severely degraded output quality: just plain text, for example, or ragged-right alignment without pagebreaks. There aren’t very many ebook-reader platforms out there yet, and they don’t interoperate; that means no semi-universal format (like mp3 for music) letting the hackers centralise their efforts. And there just aren’t very many people reading (and ripping) ebooks, especially compared to the numbers ripping and listening to cds.

But all that is a little bubble, a breathing space for hidebound traditional publishing models that will collapse within the next twenty years, sure as eggs are eggs.⁷ I don’t know what will take its place. I hope that whatever it is will leave room for high-quality typography, which means something that takes over at least some of the points we’ve learned during umpteen centuries of book design. I’m quite sure that it will involve some sort of format standardisation or interoperability; unless one device gets an improbable stranglehold on the entire ebook market, there is going to come a time when it will be unthinkable that I could be prevented from reading the rest of my series by not having the right format available. (What do you mean, you can’t play that audio file? Convert it to mp3, anything can play that!)

Until then, though, I’m going to have to put up with not having the rest of the Temeraire series. Because there’s no way I’m going to pay good money for software that is deliberately crippled (that’s what DRM is: it’s about limiting the things you can do with the files you’ve got, which means crippling the tools you use to work with them), and which will only give me the text I want to read in a typographically substandard substitute for real quality. It’s like accepting that the music you pay money to download will play with a constant background hum or hiss, which doesn’t need to be there but which the company providing the recording has added to all the files they release.

Why are they doing this? I guess it’s because they’re scared. People who listen to music these days carry around portable hard drives with hundreds of gigs of mp3s on them, none of which they’ve paid for. Hundreds of gigs of ebooks adds up to more words than you will ever read in your lifetime; it’s easy to see why this is a worrying prospect for digital publishing. The problem, however, is not going to go away; loading everything down with DRM is only going to delay its arrival very slightly.

Well, that and make me very irritated.

Notes:

1. This is slightly embarrassing, since it’s not exactly intellectual fiction. I never enjoyed Harry Potter, but now I think I understand how Potter fans with otherwise literary interests must have felt. I don’t think Temeraire is literature for the ages, but dammit I like it. I’ll try to stop being defensive at this point. Also, I’m not suggesting I’m hooked on crack.
2. That might even be false, but it’s held up for the Novik stuff I checked out. Things might work differently by publisher, or by author, or by the phase of the moon and the star sign of the webmaster’s latest girlfriend, for all I know.
3. I believe Adobe has done something about adding reflow; whether that involves changing the pdf format itself or just making their readers more clever I don’t know. Since most –all?– non-Adobe reader software is completely incapable of reflowing a pdf that’s still pretty much irrelevant at the moment.
4. Another bonus to pdf is that you can synchronise things like page numbering across paper and e-publications. That’s obviously more important for non-fiction than for fiction, so I’ll leave it aside for the moment.
5. The iLiad doesn’t do it at all, which is a pain. On the other hand it lets me do geeky things like connect to it over a network and write and run my own programs on it, which is quite some compensation.
6. Why is DRM for music braindead? You have to get audio output to play to your speakers. All you need is audio output to make a fresh copy … in whatever format you prefer. The completion of this argument is left as an exercise for the reader.
7. Time estimate may be based on uninformed grabbing of nice round numbers out of the air.