I received an email today from an author who has been networking a little among fledgling backlist self-publishers, and she mentioned a question had come up about DRM. She had made a comment about how most readers hate it, and the question came up: why? Was there a post or blog or article, she wondered, that succinctly explained just what it was about DRM that most readers find so onerous?
Well, there is now! Here are my top six reasons; feel free to add your own in the comments. As you will see, it is not about fleecing authors or getting away with taking advantage of them. It’s about readers simply wanting to be able to enjoy in appropriate ways the books they legally and legitimately purchase. DRM, as it is currently implemented, does nothing to stop ‘piracy’ and it punishes the paying customer with onerous restrictions, and with both complexity—and cost—in usage.
So, what are my top six reasons why readers hate DRM?
1) DRM removes rights that users have with paper books, so they resent paying the same price and getting less. For example, if I have a paper book, I can loan it to someone and if I have an ebook I cannot; I can re-sell the book if I am finished with it and want to get it out of my house; I can read the book as many times as I want and in as many places. With ebooks some of these uses may be limited.
2) DRM creates artificial restrictions that limit the ability of users to exercise their fair, legal enjoyment of content they legally purchase. For example, Adobe DRM limits the user to five devices. If they have more than five devices they have legally bought and paid for, it can be difficult or impossible for them to enjoy the also legally paid for content on them. For example, I have a computer at home, an iPod Touch for on the go, an iPad for work, a Kindle for listening to books via text to speech at the gym and a Kobo for library books and for my mother’s use. That is five devices right there! If I upgrade to a new device, or another technology comes along that I want to benefit from, I might not be able to use my Adobe ebooks on it.
3) DRM can make users pay multiple times for the same content. For example, if I buy an Amazon book and then later buy a Sony, I cannot use the same book on the Sony and have to re-buy it. I had a device once whose on-board store limited the user to using books they purchased only on the device on which is was bought—so if I lost the device, or it got stolen, or if I bought another device—even from them—I would have to re-buy all the books! That is just absurd. If you want the book to be only a rental, you need to charge rental prices, not full hardback ones!
4) DRM can leave users reliant on outside agencies in order to enjoy their books. For example, if using my ebook is reliant on having it validated through an Adobe server and that server is ever down, I cannot use my book. This happened once with mobipocket books—users were locked out of their purchased books for about a week when a downed server prevented them from validating new purchases. I also had a problem earlier in the year where I lost some books in a hard drive crash (most were backed up, but a few had escaped the time machine backup process) and because of new publisher-imposed restrictions which had not been in effect when I had purchased them, the vendor would not let me re-download them and I basically lost the books. This is completely unacceptable.
5) DRM forces users to rely on buggy or difficult software they may not need or want. For example, if my mother wants to read a library book on her Kobo, she cannot use the Kobo software to download it but must use the Adobe Digital Editions software instead. This software is a large download which takes up a lot of space on her computer. Similarly, this software is not available for all operating systems, so Linux users (for example) are simply out of luck and cannot use these books.
6) DRM is an extra cost to the book—there are development and implementation costs to it that are incorporated into the cost of the book and are passed on to the end user. Plus it is not even effective, as every major DRM scheme can be bypassed. So all it does is add cost, complexity and hassle for the legitimate, paying customer while not affecting at all the ‘pirate’ who was not going to pay anyway, or who will pay and then simply bypass the protections in order to use the book as they wish to.
Did I miss anything? Leave a comment! I’ll pass along the link to this article to the author in question so her author friends can read it. Let’s make sure that authors entering into the e-publishing market for the first time have all the information they need to make good choices to help reach their potential readers in the best way.
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