c|net Australia has just put up an article “Tor Books: piracy not an issue despite lacking ebook DRM” that state what I and others have been preaching for years.
From the article:
“One year after Tor launched its DRM-free store, the publisher has said that there has been “no discernible increase” in piracy.”
On April 25, 2012, Tor Books UK removed DRM from all of their ebooks. According to a blog post by Julie Crisp on the Tor Books site, “We made this decision in conjunction with our sister company in the US, for our shared brand imprint. It was something that we’d been exploring for quite a while and a move that we felt committed to for our particular area.”
DRM is copy protection added to ebooks and other media by publishers and retailers supposedly to prevent piracy. It assumes that the person legitimately buying the media from the retailer is a thief. As a purchaser, I find this kinda insulting; if I was a thief, I wouldn’t be buying the work in the first place. Duh!
What DRM does is hamper buyers who – like me, for instance, who reads on more than one device – want to have the ability to read on my iPhone, my iPad, my Kindle, my Fire, my Nook or any of my computers (it’d be nice to sync across all those devices, too!).
Does DRM work? Pirates broke DRM before it was born; there are plug-ins for programs like Calibre, hijacks and crackz for OSX, Windows, and other operating systems that allow users to strip the DRM off of their books. To answer the question: yes … and no; ‘Yes,’ if DRM’s principle purpose was to piss off buyers who when through proper channels and did the right thing, but ‘No’ if the purpose was to stop piracy – or even slow it down.
I applaud Tor Books for the steps they took to improve their reader’s experiences with their books. I’m glad they came back and provided some useful data. Let’s see how the REST of the publishing industry reacts to this news.
You can read the original c|net article HERE.
You can read Julie Crisp’s blog post HERE.