Supporting Multiple Types of DRM Is Not The Same As Being Open.
Google launched their eBook store yesterday. As a die-hard Kindle fan and avid read I’m quite disappointed. As an author I’m excited. It’s as if I have split personalities fighting over the last drumstick at Thanksgiving, and either way I both win and lose.
The promise behind Google Books, it was rumored, was that you could read the books everywhere. As Google themselves said “We designed Google eBooks to be open.” Unfortunately what that means is they’ll run on any device that plays nicely with their DRM. Supporting many forms of DRM on many locked-down devices is not the same as being open.
In fact, I can’t tell what’s “open” about it at all. In my browser I can’t seem to select text or right click, so I can’t copy and paste the book. (I haven’t had time yet to open up Firebug and figure out what’s going on, it might just be something simple.) I don’t see any way to get a DRM-free document that I could convert to run on my Kindle.
I’m sure the closed nature of the system is not Google’s choice, that’s probably demanded by the publishers. But as Judge Judy would say, Google is peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. I know open when I see it, and Google Books is not open.
I can see why publishers wouldn’t allow a truly open book store. Scott Adams says that in the near future there will be no such thing as a professional writer, which would mean that there would be no such thing as a professional publisher either. Publishers aren’t stupid, they want to remain in business. There’s a lot of money in remaining in business.
And to be honest, I think they’ve got a real shot of pulling it off. The reason DRM can’t work in music is that record companies still sell the same exact songs on CD. It only takes one unlocked copy of the file to propagate, and then all people who want to download the music illegally for free can do so. Books, by contrast, are usually not sold in any DRM-free digital format, and book scanners are out of reach for most people. As long as publishers can maintain the upper hand in the cat and mouse game of DRM vs .circumvention they can avoid the fate of the music industry.
Right now I can trivially find any song or disc you can find on iTunes, plus many more, in seconds. I have yet to have the experience of searching for some music I know to exist and not finding it. I can find a decent number of books too, but far from all of them. And a lot of the ones I can find are in a PDF format without text reflow, meaning converting them requires using OCR which is ugly.
So perhaps it’s my own wishful thinking, as a past and potential future author, but I think DRM is here to stay in books. And I think Google’s new product is evidence of that.
