Thoughts On DRM
First off, a quick explanation. DRM stands for digital rights management, which is encoding placed on a digital file that locks it for use on certain platforms or a certain number of accesses. So for a more specific industry example, a Nook book I buy could probably not be loaded to my Kindle. I can only read it on registered Nook apps and devices. In some cases, I might only be able to access the item on a certain number of devices.
The frustrations and impracticalities of this should be apparent from the start. When you purchase a DRMed ebook, you're not really buying the book in the traditional sense - you're buying the license to use the book. This means you don't actually own that book - the company you purchased it from does. This means you can't take a book you legally purchased and read it on another device. I recently moved from using a Kindle to a Nook, and I was faced with the choice of either breaking the law by stripping the DRM from the Kindle books I'd bought or abandoning my bought-and-paid-for Kindle library. It also means that if your Amazon account gets banned, your Kindle becomes an expensive paperweight. And what about that one time Amazon actually removed books customers had legitimately purchased from their libraries (fortunately, that move was for legitimate reasons and Amazon claims to have learned their lesson, but it doesn't stop the possibility of something similar happening again)? Here's another consideration: what if the company from which you've purchased the ebook goes under, like when Sony closed their (sizable) ebook store? Fortunately, companies realize this and have so far made deals to migrate user libraries to other retailers.
So you're probably thinking, "But I don't want people to pirate my books!" And that's a good point. No author doesn't want to receive payment for his or her work. But here's the problem: DRM only punishes customers. For so long the media industry has counted every illegal download as a lost sale, when in reality many of those downloads were by people who were never going to buy it in the first place. And there are more legitimate ways to combat the try-before-they-buy people, such as offering the first book of a series for free or generous sampling. Indie authors especially have more to worry about from lack of exposure than from digital piracy. Even big publishers, like TOR, have gone DRM-free - and the move has been hailed as a step forward.
But does DRM fight piracy? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Hackers strip DRM from files with relative ease and sometimes just because they can. Unfortunately I can't find a link to it anymore, but I distinctly remember reading about an indie developer who released two versions of their game as an experiment: one with DRM and the other without. Apparently, it was the one locked with DRM that appeared on torrent sites.
As an historian, I also feel for future historians, who might not be able to access certain files because the devices that can read them are long gone. Another reason I think DRM is losing its worth is the continued globalization of our society - it no longer makes much sense to restrict media to one region alone.
So I encourage all of you to think twice before selecting the "Enable DRM" option when publishing your next book on Amazon. Do what you think is best, but I can assure you, all of my works have been and will continue to be published sans DRM.
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