Tor goes DRM free
This one is fascinating news!
Tor books
that all of its e-books (both in the USA and the UK) will be DRM (Digital Rights Management) free by July of 2012.
It’s a bold move by a major publisher (Tor is part of Macmillan) and this will be watched closely by the industry.
Let’s start out with what it means.
DRM is typically accomplished by inserting code into a book file (in this case) to control its use.
For example, DRM might prevent someone from copying a file, or converting it to another format, or accessing it through text-to-speech.
Many people on the internet have expressed distaste (and that’s putting it mildly) for the concept.
Releasing a book DRM free means that purchasers can buy it from the Kindle store and convert it for use on a NOOK.
However…
It doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want with the file. You are still bound by laws and your license agreement.
Here is what I think people may not see as the unintended consequence of this: more legal prosecution of pirates (even unintentional ones).
That’s what I have liked about DRM (although there are things I don’t like). It’s a preventative measure, not a punitive one.
It doesn’t stop serious pirates, we know that.
Suppose you buy a book file, and your license agreement says you can’t copy it for anybody else. Of course, you haven’t read that. 
If there is an electronic prohibition, when you send it to your grandparent, you get a call: “It says I can’t use it.” You say, “Oh, well…sorry about that.”
If there is no electronic prohibition, your grandparent opens it.
The publisher could, hypothetically, go after you for that violation…and that might not be pretty.
Those are the choices: prevention or prosecution, basically.
Amazon gives publishers using their Kindle Direct Publishing the choice to include DRM or not. I don’t know what the statistics are as to how many do. It’s odd to me that it doesn’t say it explicitly on the product page…I’d like to see a lot more things on the product page, but that’s a different issue.
So, are you likely to care about what Tor books does?
I think so.
They do mostly science fiction and fantasy…and well known ones, at that.
There is a major movie being made of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, for release November 1st of next year. That’s a Tor book…and a widely-read one. I’d be willing to say it is some young people’s favorite book.
Here is a search for
Other imprints of theirs are included
Oh, and they do say that the books “…will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books”. That certainly suggests you’ll still be able to get them at Amazon.
There is some interesting back story on this, since I think Macmillan formerly cracked down on Tor releasing some books without DRM. Does this signal a shift? If it works for Macmillan, will other big publishers follow?
It will be interesting to watch.
What do you think? Will these books get a sales boost? Will there be a crackdown on infringement? Is this the beginning of open e-books being the norm? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
April 26, 2012 at 3:18 am |
If publishers are worried about an Amazon monopsony (single buyer controlling the market), ditching DRM is an obvious solution. That’s how the music industry avoided the same problem with iTunes. I prefer to buy my music from Amazon, and can do so and still use it in iTunes, thanks to its being DRM-free.
April 26, 2012 at 5:20 am |
While the lack of DRM does enable conversion from 1 ebook format to another, I don’t think we will see a lot of that going forward. On my KF I can have an app that reads epub (in addition to the built in app that reads .mobi, .azw, .kf8, etc), and in theory other apps could be developed for other formats. Without DRM I can now buy a DRM free book in epub from the BN estore (or the ibook store), and read it on my KF using the appropriate app — so why do the conversion? Long term (if DRM free becomes the norm) the tight binding between ebook stores and EBRs will be loosened (maybe even eliminated). We are getting close to the situation we have with music and movies where I can buy CD/DVD/BLRAY from any retailer and play it on any device from any MFR.
While the DMCA says that copying is illegal, if I buy an ebook legally, and place it on a cloud storage service, and then give my grandmother the access codes to the book in the cloud, I haven’t copied it — I’m just letting her read my copy — somewhat analogous to me giving her my copy of a paperback. Of course the EULA might have something in it that says what I bought was the right to read it, and that’s all I’m legally allowed to do.
Laws can say what they want, but if they are viewed as unreasonable by most people, then what they say won’t matter — the laws will be ignored (as in music copying) or changed. A few well-publicized legal actions against a few grannies and kids will focus attentions smartly.
DMCA and copyright laws in general are hopelessly out of touch with where technology is taking us, and that’s before we even begin to examine what technological change is doing to media business models, and how effective use of new technologies might in fact give a better deal to both content creators and consumers without the need for things such as DRM, DMCA, SOPA, etc. There are lots of middlemen in the mix today (like publishers
) that these laws seem to protrect more than the lowly creative — I’m of the opinion that these intermediaries not be necessary in the future. New business models could mean fewer players between authors and their customers with larger slices of the economic pie to be divvied up among those remaining.
April 26, 2012 at 5:41 am |
Coincidentally, I was buying some new reads for my KT; I was following Amazon’s “recommended for me” list — most everything on the list were kindle titles. There were a few print titles. I checked — they were mostly scifi titles from Baen. In the Amazon store only print versions of Baen titles are for sale. Baen does sell DRM-free ebooks in a variety of formats directly on their site — at a fairly attractive price of $6.00. You can download/sideload these to your kindle, but they also offer the option of emailing them directly to your kindle. This is somewhat simpler, and has the very big advantage that emailed titles will appear on the Amazon website as personal documents, whereas downloaded/sideloaded titles do not. Having Baen titles as personal documents simplifies keeping track of whether you’ve already bought an ebook or not down the road.
It’s curious that they seem so open to ebooks, but the ebook versions are not for sale in the Amazon store. I wonder if that’s Amazon’s or Baen’s choice?
I wonder if there’s any easy way to get the non-Amazon sideloaded titles on my kindle sent from my kindle to Amazon as personal documents? It would be nice if there were some way to sync “all” the contents on a kindle to the “manage my kindle” or “your media library” web pages.
April 26, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Thanks for writing, Edward!
Oh, it drives me crazy that the Baen books aren’t in the Kindle store!
I’ve always presumed that is Baen’s choice…I think they may actually say that somewhere. I can’t see any reason that Amazon would do it, unless they couldn’t come together on terms.
April 26, 2012 at 7:31 pm |
I believe that Baen isn’t in the Amazon store because of some issue with pricing – not sure, exactly.
I’ll be more enthusiastic at Tor’s going drm-free if they lower their prices to Baen levels.