Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of technological advancement that authors within the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these innovations are striving to safeguard their written work.
DRM relates to protecting creative output in digital media formats (CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc.). This 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.
The eBook business is different from the music industry though as eBooks are a result of the software sector rather than the book publishing sector. Consequently, written eBooks have incorporated innovation in DRM from the early days to protect the eBook’s contents.
Previously, software vendors such as Adobe pioneered the PDF format for writing eBooks. Their software can inhibit the functionality of PDF readers. Most notably, a protected PDF can be configured to disallow copying of the eBook text or even disallow printing the file. 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 securing the ebook industry? 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/).
Software developers are now also including the ability to disable eBooks remotely. Some vendors can render a PDF unreadable using remote notifications if the customer uses a stolen credit card or is looking for a refund (2 widely used means of acquiring PDFs freely). For most authors protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF export/creation software is a simple solution that most will welcome.
These improvements in the eBook business may be arriving too late for the existing files available online (these do have copyright protection on their content; Just no technological way to safeguard them). Over the coming years, developments in copy protection via hardware and software solutions should make it even more convenient for eBook authors to get writing eBooks and securely selling them online.
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