I noticed something strange when I bought the e-book of "The Jesus Incident" on Kobo. They offer additional download options, which I normally use as backup in case the Kobo app or service is not working well (an option sadly missing from Amazon). Normally, the format is ePub protected by Adobe Digital Editions DRM, which works in a myriad of devices and their desktop application.
To my surprise, the book was DRM-free. The price was reasonable too. True, Science-Fiction books are not as popular, so those publishers tend to be more aggressive in terms of distribution costs. Still, DRM-free? Book publishers are second to the movie industry about copy-protecting in annoying ways their intellectual property. And it's even somewhat understandable: An electronic book is spectacularly small and easy to copy in electronic form, so in theory piracy should be so much greater.
And yet, dare browse a bit piracy sites, and the only books you'll find in high piracy "demand" are overpriced textbooks and censored books. Unlike the nearly catastrophic decline of music sales, it seems like electronic books increased market demand. I've met many that didn't bother going through the trouble of going to the bookstore to buy another object to store in a cramped apartment, but with electronic books started reading again, myself included.
The battle, though, is the huge fight that book publishers will have to keep control over distribution, something that will be more and more into the hands of electronic stores. The same misinformation we've seen about music piracy will be repeated, though this times, in light of DRM-free and streaming music, the public will be wiser about those claims.
Published on November 17, 2012 at 19:40 EST
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