My DRM dilemma, to publish or not to publish.

I don't know. We released our book under a creative commons license with Irwin Law and the publisher believes it was a commercial success. I therefore think it makes sense to release in electronic form without DRM. If that isn't an option, it is your call as to what to do.

I've long been a fan of the "all copyright is theft" position, but given your more moderate views, might I just direct you to O'Reilly's stance on this very issue wrt their release of "The Linux Network Administration Guide":

http://tldp.org/LDP/nag2/x453.html

As the saying goes, "human knowledge belongs to the world" and what better way to share that knowledge than through a Free licence? The paper that binds the book should cost money, but the knowledge within the pages belongs to everyone as it is at its core, a derivative work of the collective.

Therefore, given your options, my inner anarchist says: "go with the DRM option, then crack it and release a Free version through Bittorrent".

I should mention that I own both the paper version of the Network Administration Guide as well as the PDF and find both very useful. Here's a link to the PDF:

http://tldp.org/LDP/nag2/nag2.pdf

"So without the DRM, the book will be copied and theoretically reduce sales"

This is fiction, not science. No study can prove this is true as "DRM" really has nothing to do with stopping people from making unauthorized copies. If anything, I would fully expect an unbiased study to prove that reducing interoperability via using a by-definition non-standard "DRM" wrapper can only reduce sales.

I try to make distinctions between different types of technical measures in a recent article http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/02/04/technical-protection-measures-tpms-and-educational-use-of-the-internet/
. Part of the problem with any discussion of "DRM" is that there is no agreed upon meaning for that acronym, so pretty much every conversation that uses the term tends to be nonsense.

In my case I would say 'no' to the e-Book as any interoperability problems would harm my own reputation. It is quite possible this non-standard file will reduce physical book sales.

Sorry. This is bugging me. How did you get into a publishing "deal" that only allows you a binary yes/no on such an important question? This question isn't a yes/no type of thing,and requires discussion. And if they are unwilling to talk with their authors, I'm curious why shopping for a better publisher isn't an option? Have they already forced you to transfer them your copyright, in which case this isn't really up to you any more?

Russell, there's a lot of reasons someone picks a publisher; and e-books and drm are like the last thing to one ones mind. I wanted to, (and got to) work with some of the best technical editors in the industry and partner with a marketing team that had a proven track record in getting these types of publications to the widest possible audience.

In the aggregate, this issue is really small compared to all the positives -- and I'd not change publishers over it.

Maybe by the 2nd edition there will be better data, but it's clear right now that no one really knows for sure what the effect of having an easily copied copy of your IP in the public sphere is. I tend to think that piracy is cheap marketing -- but others seem to think that a downloaded file is a lost sale.

I can't presume to say which argument is right, or at what ratio the middle ground is found.

The question is, is an e-book+drm > no e-book at all?

Steve Woodrow sent me an email on this thread (1000 character limit issue). For the sake of the debate, I'm going to quote a small portion of that mail.

"...

Maybe some market research is required to see if people find DRM'd PDF ebooks valuable/satisfying?

Anyway, given that a non-DRM'd ebook is not an option, I'm not sure what I would do. The DRM'd book would allow for additional sales AND could be very valuable for certain users (people who only want part of it, and/or want to search it). But, it could also be frustrating for those users (closed-source reader, etc.), reduce physical book sales as Russell mentioned, and involves the privacy issues of the embedded email address.

If you decide not to go with the ebook, you have a great opportunity to include a statement explaining to your publisher why you made that decision.."

If I do decide not to do the ebook, I'll make sure they know why. If i decide to do it, I'll of course ask [almost certainly futilely] that it be drm free.

For what it's worth, here is the entire comment: http://www.utools.ca/files/drm_ebook_facebook_comment.txt

"no one really knows for sure what the effect of having an easily copied copy of your IP in the public sphere is."

They do, given all creativity is currently easily copyable. DRM doesn't make a work any less easy to infringe. DRM really only affects people who were trying to do lawful things with the creativity. In fact, it drives people who would otherwise never break the law to learn how to circumvent the DRM in order to do lawful things.

How I would evaluate "e-book+drm > no e-book" is going to include different variables than it will for you. I would never want any work that I did to be used in any statistics to convince a government that copyright holders want legal protection for their DRM. Then again, about the only book I could write that anyone would want to read (IE: something that I've thought about more than other people might have) is on Digital Copyright. A book with a few chapters against DRM being infected by a DRM would be different than your situation.

I don't consider the embedded email address or other serial number/watermark to be a privacy issue. I am not opposed to DRM because it falsely claims to stop unlawful things, but gets in the way of things that are or should be lawful. Manufacturers and retailers retaining records of serial numbers of products we have purchased is very common in the sale of tangible goods, so I see no problem with the same applying to intangibles.

It would only leak to third parties in situations where either you or someone else were breaking the law. If someone broke into your computer and copied your files, e-books are going to be the least interesting source of personal information they would be able to obtain.

BTW: I am sent Acrobat files all the time (The fact that they end in .pdf does not make them PDF files). I use one of the many programs that can decrypt and access these files so that I can print them to a standard PDF file. I do most of my reading with my OLPC http://laptop.org

Russell, thanks for the input. I've also done some research and found that many PHP publications like PHP|A have previously used password protected PDFs but have since abandoned it in the last few months.

In that light, and seeing as there are some real restrictions (bookmarking, annotating, 3rd party readers) that can be a pita, I wont be publishing one with DRM.

I'm fairly sure my publisher wont change their standard distribution model for me, but I'll do what I can to add to the chorus of authors asking for change to this model.

Thanks everyone for your input and help with this complicated issue.

If you ask your publisher, you might be surprised. It is only a flag difference to generate a standard PDF file (with or without password) which is a "TIM" (Technological Information Mechanism) and a non-standard Acrobat file which is a "TCM" (Technological Control Mechanism). They may not see it as a change to their distribution model at all.

http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/02/04/technical-protection-measures-tpms-and-educational-use-of-the-internet/

Like most people in this debate, they may not even know that there are entirely different types of technical measures being discussed, with only a tiny subset of them being controversial. I even mention PDF files in that article.

Adobe has done a good job in confusing people between the PDF standard they sponsored and the proprietary superset which ties the various Adobe products together and creates artificial dependencies.

It's probably a bit late, but I thought that this might be relevant:

http://craphound.com/DRMLetter22108.pdf

Random House has discontinued the use of it's DRM'd PDFs... because DRM apparently promotes piracy :-)

Daniel,

Why the smiley -- DRM does not itself promote piracy, but legal protection for DRM does. If it is illegal for you to device shift things you have legally paid for, then why bother paying for it?

I've won! So, my publisher normally doesn't release DRM free e-books, and well, they're still getting the kinks out of the ordering system (it still tells you that the file is password protected on the order screen etc)... but the book is now available DRM FREE!

Everyone can get an electronic copy from
http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590598191 the file is a plain PDF with no document restrictions.

To my knowledge this is a first for Apress and is really good news for the fair copyright movement.