Do you believe in the unintentional coalescence of ideas? Have you ever found yourself thinking of someone, only to have that person call you or bump into you on the street?

 

It happened to me early last week. Because I wrote about intellectual property and the importance of retaining your rights, I got to thinking about DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management, a software means of protecting our content from unauthorized use, i.e., theft. 

 

Then I received an email from a former student in the “Successful Self-Publishing” class I teach at Flathead Valley Community College. He wanted to know if he should apply DRM to his ebook or not. I advised not to do it, for good reasons, although some people would strongly disagree with me for equally good reasons.

 

Here’s why I don’t recommend it.

 

Julia Layton, writing for the website, Howstuffworks.com, offers a technical explanation:

 

“… The answer comes down to copyright. The digital revolution that has empowered consumers to use digital content in new and innovative ways has also made it nearly impossible for copyright holders to control the distribution of their property. It's not just music, but film, video games and any other media that can be digitized and passed around. Digital rights management, or DRM, is a general term used to describe any type of technology that aims to stop, or at least ease, the practice of piracy. In this article, we'll find out what DRM is, how copyright holders are implementing the concept and what the future holds for digital content control.”(1)

 

She continues by saying that some DRM software can actually harm people’s computers by placing “rootkit” software at a level so deep in the computer’s layers of software that other programs can be seriously damaged. Invariably, when my husband (who owns Byte Savvy Computing Services) finds a rootkit virus, he has to rebuild the entire software structure of the computer, including the operating system.

 

Interestingly, Mike Shatzkin, who writes the highly informative newsletter, “The Shatzkin Reports,” cites one study that might seem to indicate DRM might actually stifle ebook sales. His newsletter for Jan. 16, 2012, included a study from All Romance EBooks:

 

“We decided to take an intensive look at the romance genre because it is often considered to be the consumer segment that has moved most rapidly into the digital future. We were fortunate to enlist the help of the ebook retailer AllRomanceEbooks.com in our investigation. They circulated a survey that got responses from almost six thousand of their customers. …

 

“What caught my eye from the preliminary results was that only 4% of the ebooks All Romance sells have DRM. Since they carry the ebooks of all the major publishers, and all of those have DRM, what this statistic tells us is what a vast business exists in romance publishing outside the realm of the biggest players in the industry. I’ll leave the analysis to the experts we’ll have on stage for this discussion, but I personally wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that DRM-free is the only reason that 96% of the sales were of that category. Those books are undoubtedly cheaper as well. They may score higher on All Romance’s unique “flame” scoring system (which is all about how frequent and explicit the sex scenes are). But I would imagine that any big publisher hearing that statistic would, at the very least, have its curiosity piqued.” (2)

 

It suggests to me, if not to Mr. Shatzkin, that the possibility does exist that we can lose sales by using DRM.

 

Cory Doctorow has long been an activist against DRM, and his reasons make sense to me. He writes,

 

“The reality is that any readers who care to can get any books they want without paying, if they choose to. There will always be someone out there technologically adept enough to break any DRM scheme—and even if one of those wizards can’t be stirred to break it, the cost of a book scanner has dropped to about $300, and there have never been more fast typists alive than there are today.

 

“What’s more, we know that customers hate DRM. They rail against it, they actively seek out non-DRM versions, and they boycott products with DRM platforms. In publishing, there’s the dawning realization that allowing, say, Amazon, to lock up your books with its DRM means that Amazon essentially owns your customers. That is the reality of DRM. This is incredibly bad for publishing’s future.” (3)

Exactly how the logic works between a bookseller like Amazon putting DRM on my ebooks “means Amazon essentially owns my customers,” I don’t know.

 

However, indie writers and publishers have a choice to make. For me, the answer is clear. I prefer to accept that piracy exists, that I may be losing money because someone pirates my books or blog posts or ideas. On the other hand, most people are decent and honest. I’d rather not penalize them because of a dishonest minority.

 

 1. Julia Layton, “How Digital Rights Management Works,” http://computer.howstuffworks.com/drm.htm  

2.  Mike Shatzkin, “The Shatzkin Files,” http://www.idealog.com/blog/one-takeaway-from-digital-book-world-that-is-not-to-be-missed

3.  Cory Doctorow, “With A Little Help: Digital Lysenkoism: DRM, “social DRM,” and the madness of publishers” By Cory Doctorow. Jan 27, 2012 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/50413-with-a-little-help-digital-lysenkoism.html

 

I hope this helps you make the best decisions for your independent writing career. If you have any questions about trends in self-publishing, please ask. Or feel free to share your experience via the comments!

 

Carol A Buchanan, Writer. Works include Gold Under Ice and God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, the winner of 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel. Carol writes from the Flathead and can be found at her website and blog, The Swan Range. Be sure to read Carol’s most recent work, The Devil in a Bottle.