Pioneering DRM Innovation In The EBook Business

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area that authors in the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these technological advancements are determined to safeguard the written word.

DRM relates to protecting creative output in digital media formats (CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc.). DRM technology attempts to stop your written eBook being resold or duplicated without your permission. The music industry was slow to react in protecting their music in digital formats, meaning tunes were widely available on the net without the music publishers profiting.

In the eBook business, intellectual asset management was built in from the onset as eBooks are a product of the software industry rather than having grown out of regular book publishing sector. As a result, eBooks have used innovation from an early stage to protect the intellectual property within eBooks.

Historically, it has been software producers such as Adobe who pioneered the PDF file format for writing eBooks. Their software can be configured to constrain/restrict certain functionality of PDF readers. You may have seen this before where you receive a PDF book but are perhaps unable to copy/paste any of the text. It is possible to even restrict the user from printing out hard-copies of the document. This is DRM in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

What does the future hold for DRM? Perhaps the future is already here! Devices such as the Kindle Reader can communicate back to servers if eBooks are being illegally shared. It is then up to the publishers/vendors (e.g. Amazon) to decide what to do. Could they remove the PDF? Yes, apparently, as detailed in one recent case (2009), Amazon remotely removed PDFs from customers’ Kindle Readers (http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/).

In parallel with the hardware producers firming up the DRM security, software publishers are also including functionality into their PDF publishing tools to include the ability to disable an eBook remotely if a customer uses fraudulent credit card details or is seeking a refund (two traditional means of obtaining PDFs at no cost). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF creation software is an ideal solution.

These technological advancements in the eBook business may be too late in coming for the existing published PDFs. These still have copyright protection on their intellectual property once it is written. The new advancements in PDF security and copy protection should however make it even more secure and viable for the average person to start writing eBooks and start profiting from selling eBooks online.

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