E-Book Lending: The Serpent in the Garden of Eden March 3, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, DRM, Law, Publishing, Services, United States.22 comments
I wrote my previous article about e-books and libraries in response to an article by my colleague Thad McIlroy on his Future of Publishing site. The news that HarperCollins had put restrictions into its e-book licenses for lending library services so that each “acquired” title could only be loaned out 26 times was fresh and appeared as a side note in my article. HarperCollins (a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) is one of the world’s largest trade book publishers. So, what about this major development?
First, let’s quickly review the technical and legal backdrop to what HarperCollins is doing. Libraries normally buy (acquire) books to lend to library patrons. This is made possible through the copyright law, specifically section 109, which is known as First Sale. Section 109 says that anyone who legitimately obtains a copy of a copyrighted work (e.g., a book) can do whatever she wants with it, including resell it, lend it, or give it away. Eventually physical books in lending libraries become worn and damaged; libraries may repair them or dispose of them. Libraries control lending abuses by collecting fines from patrons who return books late or not at all.
In the world of e-books, libraries don’t buy titles; they license e-books in order to license them to patrons. A license is a contract, the terms of which are ultimately up to the publisher. Copyright law allows libraries to lend digital works to their members, but DRM-packaged e-books are governed by licenses, and thus contract law, not copyright law.
Of course, it takes no effort to make a copy of an e-book. That’s why library services use DRM to ensure that e-books are loaned only to properly credentialed users (i.e. members of the library) and that those users can’t make copies for their million best friends. Service providers like Overdrive and NetLibrary have arisen to make it possible for libraries to “lend” e-books in a way that is very similar to the way they lend hardcopy books: you get access to the e-book for the library’s lending period (perhaps a couple of weeks, or for a reference work, a few hours), and then it “disappears” from your device and becomes available to another library member. Libraries can license multiple copies of popular works so that more than one patron at a time can borrow them.
The noted library technologist Eric Hellman calls this the “Pretend It’s Print” model — a characterization I don’t quite agree with, but leave that aside for the moment. Hellman characterizes “Pretend It’s Print” as a reasonable model, at least for the time being. But HarperCollins appears to be taking “Pretend It’s Print” quite literally: they seem to be trying to emulate physical wear and tear on a book that leads some libraries to discard books after a while. Still, Hellman’s blog post on the subject drips with contempt for HarperCollins.
I also believe that HarperCollins has done the wrong thing, but for a different set of reasons. Let me preface my reasons with a couple of caveats: I have no access to statistics on the expected lifespans of library books, though I found a couple of data points that expect between 20 and 35 loans until a book must be either discarded or repaired at a cost that may exceed its value — thus making HarperCollins’s 26 seem like an appropriate number (or did they find the same two articles I did?). I also have no insight into a library book’s promotional value to a publisher, but I suspect it’s not very high.
HarperCollins’s 26- loan limit is just a bad decision. It is bound to please absolutely no one. It is a lose-lose-lose proposition. The library community is up in arms on Twitter and elsewhere about the decision. Many are calling for libraries to boycott HarperCollins material in hardcopy as well as e-book format.
Yet at the same time, two other major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, never licensed e-books for library lending in the first place. Librarians complain about this, but not very much.
As I said previously, I had heretofore considered e-book lending to be one of the real success stories of DRM. Libraries get to lend e-books, publishers get paid for those e-books, and library patrons can read them on a wide range of devices (pretty much anything but a Kindle) without leaving their homes or offices. Everybody wins.
Furthermore, let me be clear that some form of content protection is absolutely necessary for library e-book lending. To allow library patrons to make additional copies of “borrowed” digital materials with even relative impunity is just plain unfair to publishers and authors. (Yes, DRMs can be hacked; people can make digital scans of hardcopy books too.)
Yet HarperCollins is making two serious mistakes in DRM implementation. One is to try – too literally – to use DRM emulate a physical product in the digital domain. This has never worked, because a digital emulation will always contain one or more shortcomings with respect to the original physical model that will not meet user expectations. ”Pretend It’s Print” may be a convenient point of reference for consumers, but it is more effective to focus on the content access model rather than the physical product in designing digital content services. (As far as I know, record labels aren’t experimenting with DRMs that gradually introduce clicks, pops, and skips into digital music files.)
In this case, the HarperCollins model will fail to meet “user expectations” by angering librarians, who don’t like DRM in principle. Either the e-book will suddenly become unlendable without warning or the DRM system will warn librarians that they will soon have to pay for another license to keep lending the e-book. How many libraries will re-up? Not many, I suspect.
Furthermore, this move defies logic regarding publishers’ strategies for their backlists (catalogs of older content). Publishers believe that their backlist titles have less value than frontlist titles, and they constantly seek ways to invigorate sales of their backlists. By making it unlikely that e-books will be available for library lending after a year or so, HarperCollins is both cutting off access to products that it presumably does not value highly in the first place and hurting its ability to invigorate its backlist. This makes no sense at all.
The other mistake that HarperCollins has made is to introduce complexity into a DRM implementation in a way that adds no value for users. Many early digital music services failed to gain user acceptance because they were too complex for users to understand. Some, for example, had Byzantine pricing plans – X permanent downloads, Y timed downloads, and Z streams per month – that resembled the bad old days of confusing cell phone plans. iTunes won because it kept things simple. Nowadays, as music services take on more and more new features in their attempts to unseat the iTunes juggernaut, they risk similar user confusion and alienation (most egregious current example: the feature-overloaded MOG).
If HarperCollins wanted to try something different with licensing terms, it should have done something that offered value or choice. It could, for example, have offered a choice of limited-loan titles for less money or unlimited-loan for full price. (Eric Hellman tried polling this question; the responses he got prove little more than how emotional everyone is over this issue — which is exactly my point.)
If HarperCollins does not get value from e-book lending, then why not just pull its catalog entirely and join Simon & Schuster and Macmillan as library holdouts? If they do that instead, librarians need not bother boycotting HarperCollins’s e-books; and any threats to boycott the publisher’s hardcopy releases will surely ring hollow.
The end result of a move like this can only be the slow and painful death of library e-book lending. HarperCollins may hope that other publishers will follow its model – though not so closely as to invite antitrust scrutiny. This will only lead to further confusion for librarians and users alike: HarperCollins allows 26 loans, Random House allows 35, Penguin allows 20, etc. There is no way that a model like this can lead to the growth in library e-book lending that libraries need to survive as e-reading grows in popularity. `
Libraries are highly unlikely to reverse the tide in the market alone. Boycotts may be emotionally satisfying but will have no practical impact. Instead, the library community’s best hopes lie in the legal system.
The most likely route would be to try to get the Copyright Office, at its next DMCA rulemaking in 2013, to approve an exemption that would allow libraries to circumvent (hack) DRMs in order to lend e-books as long as they re-package them for the library patron with the same type or strength of DRM. This would be a more elaborate exception than any that the Copyright Office has granted in its four DMCA rulemakings to date. It also has various disadvantages: it could only last three years under the DMCA rulemaking rules (every exception only lasts until the next triennial rulemaking); it could cost libraries more money to support than they pay Overdrive or NetLibrary, which benefit from scale economies; and it could induce publishers to demand (and perhaps even pay for!) DRM that is more difficult to hack.
But perhaps it’s worth a try. Unlike the Section 108 Study Group — a body that recommends changes to the part of copyright law that covers libraries, which ironically has little bearing on the issue at hand — it is possible for anyone to submit a request for a DMCA exemption to the Copyright Office without first having to run a gauntlet of copyright industry lobbyists.
If the Copyright Office were to grant such an exemption, it would mean that a library could be free to purchase any e-book — not just those that the publisher decides to license — and lend it to its members on its own terms while respecting copyright. The result would be a better version of “Pretend It’s Print” — in the business model sense, where it counts.
Are Libraries Locked Out of the E-book World? February 27, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in DRM, Law, Publishing, Uncategorized, United States.8 comments
Publishing guru Thad McIlroy was kind enough to link to one of my stories on the e-book DRM scene in an article on his excellent Future of Publishing site. (I have had the pleasure of working with Thad on various projects over the years. Especially when it comes to production and output issues for publishers, he is The Man.) So it’s incumbent on me to return the favor.
In his piece, Thad accuses book publishers and Amazon of effectively colluding to shut out libraries from access to e-books. You can borrow e-books from many public libraries in the United States, but the process is clunky – because it entails using a system provided by a third party, Overdrive – and you can’t read them on a Kindle device or any of the Kindle apps.
On the one hand, de facto (if not necessarily explicit) collusions of this type are far from uncommon; in fact the history of copyright law is littered with such arrangements (read Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright
First of all, Amazon is not the only company with a popular e-book platform. Adobe’s e-book platform works on just about every e-reader except the Kindles (including the Barnes & Noble Nooks and Sony Readers) as well as on PCs, Macs, Android, and so on. The Adobe platform supports library lending and in fact is at the heart of Overdrive’s public library e-book lending service. Moreover, a very recent study indicates that the Kindle’s market share among the e-book reading public has dropped below 50%, mainly thanks to the Apple iPad… and regarding iOS devices’ compatibility with the Adobe e-book platform, yes, there’s an app for that. So, if you want to borrow e-books from your public library, just don’t use a Kindle; you have plenty of other choices.
In addition, there is a legal as well as technological or market-based angle to the problem of libraries in the era of digital content that’s worth discussing. Section 108 of the U.S. copyright law grants libraries and archives rights to content that exceed those granted to people under normal conditions. Among other things, it allows libraries to make copies of copyrighted works for noncommercial lending, as long as those copies are limited in number and afforded adequate protections against infringement.
There are various subtleties to Section 108 and its interplay with other areas of copyright law, not to mention moving-target implications of digital technologies. Accordingl, the law requires a group of interested parties to revisit Section 108 every five years and recommend any changes they deem necessary. The Section 108 Study Group is an analog to the better-known rulemaking on Section 1201, which the U.S. Copyright Office conducts every three years. Section 1201 — enacted as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — is the law against circumventing (hacking) DRM on copyrighted works.
The Section 108 Study Group (in its 2008 incarnation, at least) has 19 members, which are well balanced between copyright-owner and library/archive interests: nine from each side and a neutral “legal advisor” from Columbia Law School.
Section 108 allows a library to make a copy of an e-book and lend it out to the library’s members. Under this law, a library could presumably buy an e-book and lend it out. But if the e-book is packaged with DRM, there are two problems. First, the library is not actually buying a copyrighted work, it is licensing the work; see below. Second, Section 108 doesn’t allow the library to hack the DRM in order to make the copy – not even if the library agrees to re-package the copy in a DRM scheme that lets a specific library patron read the e-book. Such hacking would have to be allowed as an exception to Section 1201, which is the province of the Section 1201 rulemaking, and thus of the Copyright Office, not the Section 108 Study Group. (See, I told you this stuff is subtle and complex.)
Because major publishers require DRM on their e-book releases, this means that libraries aren’t able to exercise rights under Section 108 just as a matter of law. This has given rise to services like Overdrive, which facilitate the licensing of e-books from publishers for library lending purposes.
A license is a contract. The licensing of digital content exists in a legal realm that is separate from copyright law – at least for the moment. The upshot is that publishers are free to choose whether to license their material in e-book form for library lending and to dictate some of the terms of those uses, such as the number of devices on which a given user can read the material, period of lending, or number of times an e-book can be loaned. For example, Simon & Schuster doesn’t license for e-book lending at all, and HarperCollins just introduced a policy to limit the number of loans per licensed e-book to 26, in an apparent move to mimic the lifespan of a physical book in library circulation.
Because libraries and publishers will perpetually disagree on these terms, it helps to have a third party like Overdrive or NetLibrary to act as a buffer or intermediary. Some publishers may also agree to license their content through these services because of the risk that their refusal to do so will cause the Section 108 Study Group to recommend changes in the copyright law that give libraries more latitude in lending digital works. As it is now, the copyright-owner contingent in the Study Group can point to services like Overdrive and NetLibrary as evidence that the market is providing solutions so no changes in the law are necessary.
The last Section 108 Study Group Report (for which I consulted to the Study Group) came out in 2008, which means that the activity in preparation for the next one will take place next year. The next Copyright Office 1201 rulemaking also takes place in 2013. If the members of the 108 Study Group who are on the “library side” want greater flexibility for libraries to lend digital works, they may want to try to get exemptions to the 1201 anti-hacking law for library lending proposed and approved.
If that happens, then Amazon and book publishers definitely will no longer have the “library lock-out” that Thad McIlroy described in his article.
Taking Pictures of Magazine Articles in a Bookstore: A Conundrum January 17, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Images, Law, Publishing.7 comments
An article in last Sunday’s New York Times asked whether people who use their camera phones in bookstores to make copies of copyrighted material — in author Nick Bilton’s case, pages from books on home interior designs — are “pirates.”
To get an answer, Bilton turned to three academic experts. The two lawyers (the third was an economist) were Julie Ahrens, the director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School, and Charles Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who tried to argue that his pro bono client Joel Tenenbaum was engaging in Fair Use when downloading music files from a P2P sharing network (Tenenbaum lost). Nesson’s views on Fair Use have been considered far-out even by the likes of Lawrence Lessig.
Fair and balanced? Draw your own conclusions, but here’s how the two legal academics cleverly finessed their well-known positions on matters like this: They allowed that the question of whether or not Bilton acted legally falls under the Fair Use factors that a court must consider under US copyright law. But they conveniently omitted the salient fact that of the four Fair Use tests, the one considered most important is this: does the use of the content negatively affect the market for the work? Bilton admits in his article that he and his wife sat on the floor of their local Barnes & Noble, took pictures of selected home designs with their iPhones, and left the bookstore without buying anything.
If that’s not an effect on the market for the work (albeit a very small one), I don’ t know what is.
The point here is not to try to finger Nick Bilton for copyright infringement due to his actions, which by themselves are rather inconsequential. Instead, the point is to explore the more interesting effects of his article. Bilton can be said to have published a recipe that others can use to perform actions that publishers may construe as copyright infringement, and to have done so in a very prominent publication.
Publishers and content licensors have been concerned with this for years. They already use technologies — not mentioned in Bilton’s article — to find copies of content online, such as image tracking from PicScout and text fingerprinting from Attributor. Of course, those technologies couldn’t be used in a personal device such as an iPhone if the resulting images are only used personally, unless hardware makers were compelled to build them into their devices.
But some may liken Bilton’s article to the code for cracking DVD encryption that a few people posted on public web pages — a legal matter that reached a United States Appeals Court. Publishers may grumble. But would they have a case against the New York Times?
I’m not a lawyer, so I invite others to comment with their opinions. Yet here are some factors that may be relevant:
- The analogy to DVD cases like Corley and Remeirdes fails because the latter people publicized ways of circumventing DRM, which is illegal under the DMCA (17 USC 1201). There is no DRM on printed books and magazines.
- What Bilton did is also doable with a pencil and paper, albeit with more time and effort (not to mention conspicuousness to store personnel).
- Neither Bilton nor the Times makes the tools; they’re just telling people about them, and the tools in question — digital cameras — have far more noninfringing than infringing uses.
- There is this little thing called the First Amendment.
On the other hand:
- It could be argued that the Times sought to gain from publishing this “infringement recipe,” since their editors choose articles to publish based on what will sell copies of the paper (or bring traffic to their website). That would introduce factors related to the “inducing infringement” theory behind the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision of 2005, which caused Grokster’s non-liability to be revisited.
- This behavior could be lumped under the heading of photocopying — as if the bookstore had a photocopier on the premises. For example, the Copyright Clearance Center charges corporations license fees for presumed photocopying of periodical articles and other content.
Otherwise, analogous legal precedents and cases in other forms of media are hard to find. Going to a record store and asking the manager to play something on the stereo, then surreptitiously recording it and going home, maybe? Perhaps this is uncharted legal territory.
What do you think?
Paying Publishers to Set their Content Free November 9, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Publishing.2 comments
There has been some discussion of content business models in which an artist solicits contributions from fans, and when she accumulates enough money, she writes a new book, records a new album, etc. Some have even suggested that this model should replace copyright — that the resulting works should be made available to the world for free.
This is essentially a crowdsourced, democratized version of the patronage system, which existed hundreds of years ago among the rich (the Archduke of so-and-so commissions a composer; a Medici commissions a painter) and persists today in academia (professor gets grant money, does research and publishes papers) and elsewhere (TV network commissions musical artist to write theme song for new prime time series).
Those of you who have been following my writings for a while will know that I think this is a terrible model. Nowadays it suffers from a fundamental oxymoron: it only works for artists that have already built up a fan base (Jill Sobule, Nine Inch Nails), but at the same time, it does nothing to reward those artists for the works they have already created. In other words, an artist would have to have come up through the traditional system of selling copies of their works and then eschew the system that made them successful. (Of course it is possible that the system isn’t providing enough value to such artists and therefore deserves to be eschewed, but the fundamental disconnect remains.)
For example, I would never participate in a system like that, for the simple reason that there are virtually no artists (writers or musicians) whose next work I anticipate eagerly. I’m happy to pay for access to a large library, but I have no interest in being an artist patron.
At the same time, many media companies don’t exactly bend over backwards to make their “long tail” or “backlist” content available. I do projects for publishers that involve conversion and management of their content to XML to facilitate repurposing, and it’s always the frontlist content that ends up being converted and managed while backlist content languishes. Music companies make their back catalog available (to some extent) but do virtually nothing to market it. (One exception that proves the rule is UMG’s great LostTunes.com site, which is unfortunately down for a redesign right now.)
The main reason why content businesses don’t market their backlists is transaction costs. Even in the digital age, it still costs money to reformat, manage, distribute, and market content. If there were a way to compensate artists for their backlists, I might be slightly less skeptical of the neo-patronage system as a way forward. Which brings me (finally) to the subject of this week’s article: a new business model that purports to do just that.
Eric Hellman is a denizen of the library world and an advocate of “open” content. He created a business called Openly Informatics, whose primary piece of technology was OpenURL, a special type of URL that carries bibliographic information. OpenURLs are most useful to the library community, which can use them to exchange information about what works are available where. Hellman sold Openly Informatics to OCLC, the library technology company, in 2006.
Hellman’s new model is something he calls GlueJar. He proposes to “unglue” e-books from their publishers so that they can be available to the world, DRM-free and under Creative Commons license. Here’s the model: publishers sign on with works that they want to “unglue.” They determine what they are willing to be paid for ungluing each work. Users contribute money towards the ungluing. When the threshold amount is reached for a given title, that title is unglued: it appears in all contributors’ e-book reader libraries and in repositories used for online public library access. The publisher is paid, and GlueJar takes a commission.
In other words, publishers just need to determine a price for content being taken off their hands, and if the public is willing to pay that price, it happens. (Users aren’t charged until works they want to unglue are unglued.) No more transaction costs; anyone can distribute the content to anyone else. Publishers could possibly retain subsidiary rights to the content, such as print on demand or derivative work rights.
EMI and Warner Music Group are highly unlikely to pounce on this model for their Beatles and Led Zeppelin back catalogs (if they even had the rights to, which we’ll get to momentarily); nor would Scholastic be interested in it for the Harry Potter series. But for a certain slice of back catalog that content business don’t find it worth the bother to make available, it makes sense. Eliminate the problem of distribution and hosting; just take the money and go away, and as Captain Kirk says, name your own price.
There are several roadblocks to this business model, including the fact that it would require renegotiating artists’ contracts and acquiring copyrights from book authors. It also strikes me as something that’s easy to build but more challenging to market. An entity that already attracts a large audience of book lovers and has the wherewithal to spread the word could make this happen; Scribd comes to mind.
In any case, it’s refreshing to hear about a model for “freeing” content that actually fits into the realities of authors and publishers instead of being an ideological construct or thought experiment. GlueJar is in its early days, and its model could unfold into something even more practical. I’m looking forward to watching as it does.
Reminder: Free Workshop on Content Monetization May 11, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Events, Publishing.add a comment
I will be leading an interactive workshop on Content Monetization on May 19, 2010, at the Manhattan Theatre Source in New York City’s Greenwich Village, at 1pm. Registration is free.
The workshop will feature a presentation on Content Monetization, based on my new whitepaper, a moderated discussion on attendees’ requirements and possibilities for monetizing content, and a demonstration of content monetization tools from Atypon. The workshop will be followed by a reception.
The location is 177 MacDougal Street between West 8th and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. May 19 is the day before the Henry Stewart DAM conference. I will be moderating a panel there on rights information management (including case studies from advertising and publishing) on May 20 in the afternoon.
Please register today — the workshops are free, but space is limited. You’ll enjoy an informative presentation and a chance to discuss monetization strategies with your peers.
Content Monetization and Screen Culture April 29, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Events, Publishing, White Papers.add a comment
On Tuesday I had the pleasure of being a guest of the Copyright Clearance Center’s Chris Kenneally on his interview series on BlogTalkRadio, a live streaming audio platform. His topic was “More Screens, More Content, More Questions.” The audio is available here.
The discussion generally fell into two categories: how can publishers best take advantage of the proliferation of devices and platforms, particularly mobile ones; and how they can monetize content.
Which reminds me to remind you of the workshops I’m leading on content monetization on May 19 in New York, at the Manhattan Theatre Source in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The workshops will be held at 1pm and 4pm.
The workshops will feature a presentation on Content Monetization, based on my new whitepaper, a moderated discussion on attendees’ requirements and possibilities for monetizing content, and a demonstration of content monetization tools from Atypon. Each workshop will be followed by a reception.
The location is 177 MacDougal Street between West 8th and Waverly Place. May 19 is the day before the Henry Stewart DAM conference. I will be moderating a panel on rights information management (the subject of another whitepaper I wrote in 2006), including case studies from advertising and publishing, on May 20 in the afternoon.
Please register today — the workshops are free, but space is limited. You’ll enjoy an informative presentation and a chance to discuss monetization strategies with your peers.
Japan Is an Island (in Online News) April 9, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Japan, Law, Publishing, White Papers.2 comments
An interesting article in today’s New York Times discusses the decision of Nikkei, Japan’s leading financial newspaper, to forbid external links to its new website, which requires paid subscription to access. Apparently anyone who puts links to Nikkei online articles on their own websites without permission could face legal action.
This restriction is not limited to “deep links” to individual articles; it also includes the Nikkei’s home page.
Nikkei has huge circulation — 3 million, compared to the Wall Street Journal’s 2 million.
This decision has provoked some outrage in Japan (a country not particularly noted for public outrage), though not as much as many outside Japan might feel.
Unfortunately, the article missed a critical point about this: Japanese copyright law. The law does not automatically give one the right to link to a copyrighted web page. In the UK, so-called deep links are illegal without permission, though links to home pages are allowed. Deep links are legal in the United States.
Japan is supposedly “behind the times” when it comes to online news content, meaning that not every major news publisher casts their content freely upon the waters in hopes that some revenue (from ads, or whatever else) may wash ashore. Of course, its copyright law enables publishers like Nikkei to construct their own islands within the Internet — in ways that may make some American or European news publishers jealous.
The law gives Japanese publishers a significant economic advantage online, even if they decide to give their content away. An interesting whitepaper by Daniel and David Marburger, respectively an economist and a lawyer for the newspaper industry, analyzes how legal deep linking has crippled US news publishers’ ability to make money from ads online.
The Marburgers say that the many news aggregator sites have appeared with headlines, links to stories on publishers’ websites, and lots of advertising; this results in a vast oversupply of inventory which lowers ad rates while shrinking the proportion of ad revenues that go to the actual publishers. Japanese news publishers, with their ability to quash external links, do not have this problem.
Still, the news publishing industry is finding out that there are many ways to monetize news content, as I explain in my new whitepaper on online content monetization. Japan will be an interesting place for the rest of the world to watch in this regard.
New White Paper on Content Monetization April 5, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Events, Publishing, White Papers.add a comment
I have written a new whitepaper, The New Content Monetization Opportunities for Publishers: Best Practices, Strategy and Architecture. This whitepaper is sponsored by Atypon and reflects our mutual interest in making the industry aware of the resurgence of interest in consumer-paid business models for content. It’s a free PDF download.
The online ad market has dropped precipitously; many say it will not recover to pre-2008 levels in the foreseeable future. The New York Times has announced that it will adopt a metered-access model in which users who access more than a certain level of content will be asked to pay. Hulu is known to be considering adding a paid subscription service. The momentum is clear.
This whitepaper examines trends and best practices in content monetization models. It focuses on newspapers, consumer magazines, B-to-B publications, and professional information, but it draws examples from music and video content as well. The final section on monetization architecture introduces the concept of Offer Management, a set of capabilities that tie together components like content management, e-commerce, and user authentication to enable content providers to launch monetization models with flexibility and scalability.
I’ll be leading a series of workshops on content monetization on May 19 here in New York, in partnership with Atypon; registration is free.
The release of this whitepaper is also the occasion to launch a new page on the Copyright and Technology website containing several whitepapers, presentations, and other documents that may be of interest to C&T readers. More on this soon.
Microsoft Re-enters E-Book Market (sort of) February 7, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in DRM, Publishing.5 comments
I saw a cavalcade of new e-book devices and platforms demonstrated during a session called “Hardware and Platforms and Software, Oh My!” at last week’s AAP Professional and Scholarly Publishing conference in Washington, DC. (By the way, can someone please tell me where the “Oh My!” cliché originated?) Among these was the Blio eReader software platform, which was demonstrated by an executive from the major book distributor Baker and Taylor. It’s a product of K-NFB Technologies, a joint venture of Kurzweil Technologies and the National Federation of the Blind.
The Blio eReader is a software platform that intends to be interoperable across multiple devices and operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. Currently only Windows is supported. Baker & Taylor is supplying the e-books to the Blio’s online store. Despite the name and the affiliation, this software does not appear to have any application for visually impaired people.
The DRM for the Blio platform is Microsoft’s PlayReady. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer demoed the Blio briefly during his CES keynote last month. In other words, this is the closest thing there is to a new Microsoft e-book platform. Microsoft abandoned its previous Microsoft Reader platform several years ago, a fact noted by the product’s former chief Dick Brass in a New York Times op-ed piece from last week that laments Microsoft’s lack of innovation.
Apart from the fact that the Blio accepts the open standard ePub format (as well as PDF and XPS, Microsoft’s XML-based PDF competitor), this is yet another proprietary e-book platform. It’s not even the only purportedly device-agnostic one either: Zinio presented something similar at the Mark Logic Publishing Summit in New York last November. In fact, the feature set of the Blio Reader resembles so-called digital edition platforms like Zinio more than it does e-readers like the Kindle, Nook, or Sony Reader.
I’m sorry; I don’t get it. What is the point here? Does Baker & Taylor want to get into digital publishing niches that its arch-rival Ingram doesn’t already dominate? Does K-NFB want to reach a wider market than the roughly 15 million visually impaired people in the United States (perhaps in order to subsidize NFB’s important work for the visually impaired)? Does Microsoft want to dip a toe into the e-book water without the expense and exposure of a Zune-like foray? Or is someone’s market timing just off?
Or, does the world need yet another incompatible e-book reading platform? The answer to that one is definitely no.
This e-book platform proliferation situation is analogous to the overcaffeinated digital music platform scene of the early 2000s before the market consolidated around Apple’s iTunes/FairPlay and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player/DRM.
Note to e-reader platform vendors: look up RealNetworks’ Helix, Liquid Audio, and Sony’s ATRAC/Open Magic Gate, just to name three.
Note to publishers: if you want to hold onto DRM and grow e-book sales, you need to put a stop to this mess and insist on interoperability. Otherwise you will fail to do one, the other, or both.
P.S. another new device demonstrated at the AAP PSP conference was the spiffy Skiff Reader, backed by the consumer publishing giant Hearst and LG Electronics. No word on its DRM; stay tuned.
Apple Joins E-Book Reader Competition January 27, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Devices, DRM, Publishing, Standards.1 comment so far
Apple’s new iPad tablet device will include a proprietary e-book reader application called iBook, available for free from the App Store. iBook will use the International Digital Publishing Forum’s standard ePub format. But that does not mean that iBook e-books will be readable on other ePub-compliant devices such as the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook. Each of these devices uses its own DRM, which is not part of the ePub standard.
The “openness” of Apple’s e-book format is, thus, no more “open” than its music format was before iTunes went DRM-free: it was based on a standard codec — MPEG-4 AAC, the same as RealNetworks has used — but the files were protected by FairPlay DRM. In all likelihood, Apple will be using a variant of FairPlay to encrypt e-books from publishers that require DRM, just as it uses a variant of FairPlay for video content on iTunes.
In other words, Apple has opted to go head-to-head with Amazon, B&N, Sony, and others in the e-book reader sweepstakes — with a device that costs two to three times the prices of the others.
Apple had other choices for its iPad publishing strategy. It could have used Adobe’s Digital Editions/Content Server DRM, which is used by Sony, B&N, and most other platforms besides Amazon’s Kindle and Mobipocket — thereby providing some degree of interoperability with other readers and helping to compete with Amazon. But Apple doesn’t like getting too close to Adobe — witness the (continued) lack of Flash support on the iPad, just like on iPhones.
Apple could also have adopted an entire e-reader ecosystem that works on multiple devices in addition to its own, by acquiring one of the existing players such as Zinio or Texterity. But that would be even more out of character.
Or, Apple could have not bothered with an e-reader strategy and simply said, “We have a great SDK, and we look forward to working with publishers to develop breakthrough apps for their content.” That would have been a reasonable choice, if an underwhelming one amid all the hype.
No one doubts that Apple will be a serious contender in e-books with the iPad, especially assuming that it adapts its iBook app for iPhones and Macs (and PCs?).
So what has happened here? From this perspective, the e-book DRM mess just got messier today.
Bill Rosenblatt
Azita Arvani
Bill Jones
Niels Thorwirth
