The Kindle DRM Kerfuffle: A Case Book Author's Perspective

Ashby Jones:

Do we as consumers ever really own the digital stuff — books, music, etc. — that we think we’re buying?

It’s a provocative question explored in an article Thursday by the WSJ’s Geoffrey Fowler. The issue came up last week when Amazon.com reached into customers’ Kindle e-readers and deleted some e-books written — ironically — by George Orwell. Amazon, which returned the cost of the e-books, said it made the move when it realized that the publisher didn’t have the proper rights to sell the books in the U.S. ...

... according to Fowler, the incident raises some difficult questions about what it means to “own” books in the digital age. Some experts are saying that these matters might best be remedied by passing new laws that clearly define digital ownership.

“What this incident shows is that the law gives radically more control to the company than the system ought to,” says Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig.

Thing is, writes Fowler, owning an e-book is more akin to licensing a piece of software than it is to owning a bound volume: access comes with fine-print terms of service, and often digital rights management software to ensure that you abide by the rules. ...

Another difference: Real books can be shared with a friend or sold, but e-books with digital rights management software cannot. The number of devices that can play a single e-book license varies from one publisher to the next, and often confuses consumers.

Looking at the problem from the perspective of an author who royalties are a very large percentage of his annual income and an avid Kindle user, I'm totally okay with the the differences between real books and e-books. As it is, the used book market takes a huge chunk out of my annual royalties. The drop off from the first year of a new edition to the second can be as high as 30%, for example.

I can't imagine the hit my royalties would take if e-books of my texts were available without strong DRM. But it seems safe to assume that anything remotely resembling an e-book Napster would be a disaster from my perspective. My assumption is that it would make the hit we currently take from the used book market look like chicken feed. The enormous amount of time and effort put into writing and updating the books simply would no longer be worth it.

From an author's perspective, the differences between an e-book and real book thus are very large and very real. Contra Lessig, I worry that Kindle and its forthcoming ilk don't give copyright holders enough control.

Comments

[Tom O'Rourke]

Most texts I used were mandated by the instructor.
They become expensive door stops after the class was graded. If I can recover any of my cost in a used book store I can better afford the next newly revised edition needed.

[jimmy]

this is a funny post from a law professor who writes a blog. Almost all legal blogs exist because they ifringe on others' copyrighted work. Blogs love to repost news stories, albeit in snippets, but blog authors are usually up in arms when anyone suggests that they should have to pay to repost an news piece.

Now that law profs will feel the pain of lax copyright laws, maybe they will be more thoughtful.

[michael webster]

I wrote about Kindle displacing the second hand text market here:

http://www.bizop.ca/blog2/due-diligence/can-kindle-replace-text-books.html