DRM or no DRM, that is the question - Part 2
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 | Labels: DRM, publishing | |Social is a big word on the internet these days; most notably around the rise, alleged fall, then rise again of social networks. There is also social commerce, this is the kind of commerce practiced by amazon, where you are invited to leave reviews for the benefit of other consumers. And all the other sites and services rushing to embrace the "Web 2.0 revolution" (as James Goldsmith said "if you see a bandwagon, it's too late").
There is another use for "social" in todays world and one that is very pertinent to the DRM discussion, let me introduce you to Social DRM.
In my last post I wrote about how restrictive DRM will have a negative impact on publishing as all you will do is negatively impact your customers. There is no DRM system that is hacker proof so what you are doing when you implement one of these systems is to prevent casual theft and have no impact on commercial piracy. And the price way are paying to prevent casual theft is to force our customers to work harder to spend their money with us.
This is where I start to hear alarm bells, my experience is in e-commerce rather than publishing, and usability is the key to increasing sales on an e-commerce site. My own mantra has always been that ordering off a website should be easier than phoning your order in, because we all know how to pick up the phone, if a system is to complicated to buy from then that system will bleed customers and ultimately revenue. So as I see these DRM systems that require you to register devices, jump through hoops when you buy a new device to read on and limit the number of devices you can use as a barrier to sales and just adding cost to both the publisher and the reader.
The best DRM they say is invisible to the consumer, so the examples from my last post are not examples of good DRM, Social DRM while highly visible in a literal sense does not affect usability and so in that sense is invisible to the consumer.
Here's how it works:
- I visit a website to order a book
- The website requires me to register (not perfect in terms of web usability but a fair compromise and fairly universal these days)
- I order an e-book from the site in my choice of format.
- The site back-end takes the XML source of the book and starts the process to create my copy of the book in the format I chose.
- While creating the copy of my book it pulls information from the membership database to add to selected areas in the book and to create a custom header (This copy of RUINAIR has been personalised for XXXXXX).
- The customised e-book is placed in a digital library linked to my member ship account for me to download at any time.
- An email is automatically sent to me letting me know that my book is ready for download.
The data we pull from the membership system can be your name, billing address, email address, phone number, order number or any combination of these. Its not a device locked DRM but how many people will be willing to share files that have their email address or phone number in them.
Social DRM is as usable as a real book to the consumer, and provides piece of mind to those in the industry who want the safety net of some form of DRM.
This is not a new concept, and I know that people involved in digital publishing have been talking about it for a while but there is always pressure to lock everything down. If you are one of those people applying pressure to lock everything down, please stop and think about it, it will work out more cost effective and drive better sales in the long term.
Posts
Now that is smart!
I especially like the concept because where you can add DRM in such a fashion you can add value that is specific to the consumer.
Think of it, if you can pull their membership preferences you can slip in ads for their pre-selected genres and topics, extra info on authors they like and other stuff they would see as enhancing the e-book/digital product!
Very nice,
Eoin
Interesting post. That's not really DRM you're describing, though - it's digital watermarking. But I agree that it would be much better than the terrible mess that is DRM.
Paul,
The process is applying a digital watermark, but when we apply it in this fashion, I would consider it to be a form of DRM. After all, it is designed to fight illegal copying and sharing of files by inducing a social stigma and providing traceability.
Perhaps more importantly, by calling it 'Social DRM' we able to explain it to authors/agents in a way that they should be able to come to grips with easily.
Hi Hedro,
I take your point - but considering the incredibly bad press and customer feeling towards DRM (and rightly so, in many cases) I think that calling this technique "DRM" would be a very poor way to promote it.
Cheers
Paul
... and if the device is stolen that I have downloaded the file to, the thief will then have access to the identifying info present in the header file.
Dennis McDonald
http://www.ddmcd.com