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Tech

New DRM Still Won't Solve the E-Book Sharing Problem

Readers are being blocked from the time-honored ritual that comes with reading and sharing physical, printed books.
Photo via alienratt/Flickr

Digital rights management has so far proven far better at making purchased media harder to use for legitimate consumers than it's been at stopping piracy. Now e-book readers are the latest to feel the frustration. With publishers trotting out new versions of e-book DRM, readers are being blocked from the time-honored ritual that comes with reading physical, printed books: the subsequent sharing, swapping, lending, and discussing of those books with your friends.

In search of the sweet spot between not stealing and freely sharing, publishers and e-book retailers are increasingly looking to “social DRM” —embedding a mark in the file so it can be traced back to the original owner. The idea is the owner has more freedom with the file once it's bought, but still won't illicitly copy it for fear of getting caught.

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Watermarking is nothing new, but it's seriously flawed, because the marks are just as easy to strip out as traditional digital locks. Researchers in Germany think they have the answer. They're developing a technology called “SiDiM,” which changes the text and punctuation of the book slightly for each e-book sold, Wired reported. It essentially creates a unique copy of each file that can be traced back to the original owner.

Right off the bat this isn’t going to sit well with lovers of literature. Even if the changes are minimal—a contraction here, a word swap here—it's off-putting to think you're reading a version of a book that isn't 100 percent exactly how the author intended it be written. But will it solve the e-book sharing problem?

As it stands now, some publishers and e-book companies allow owners to lend their e-books out—but the policies are strict. Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow certain books to be lent (only books from publishing companies that allow lending), and only once per book, for 14 days. Third-party websites have sprung up in the e-book sharing space, like Lendle and Book Lending Club, but these sites stay within the confines of companies' lending policies, so aren't much help.

J.K. Rowling took a crack at it the DRM puzzle by self-publishing the Harry Potter e-books and selling them online with digital watermarks but not traditional digital locks. Customers could buy the book on her ecommerce site Pottermore and download it up to eight times in various formats. It was a step in the right direction, but didn’t stop people from stripping out the watermark and uploading the Harry Potter books to torrent sites.

Libraries are facing a similar conundrum. Even though libraries aren’t likely going to be pirates' top targets (why pirate books through a library system, which has to feel about as awesome as stealing from your grandma, when you can just download them at any number of torrent sites?), publishers have their claws in libraries pretty deep to make sure e-books aren’t being lent unprotected. As a result, the process for lending e-books at libraries is a mess. It’s difficult, overly complicated and confusing, and various depending on which e-reader you use.

It's reasonable that publishers wouldn’t want libraries to lend out totally DRM-free digital files of their bestsellers; no one would ever buy a book again. (British publisher Tor Books, which delighted the world by dropping DRM, doesn't allow for library lending at all.) But finding new ways to discourage the few people that still love to read can’t possibly be a good thing.

Haven't the Big Six publishers learned anything from the music industry? Consumers aren't going to stand for companies telling us how, when, where and with whom to enjoy our digital media. Anything that restricts this will be met with total disregard for the system, as evidenced by the explosion of illicit file-sharing and torrenting of DRM-free e-books.

The line between protecting revenue for rights holders and distrusting and alienating consumers is too easy to cross. If e-books really want to stake their claim as the future of books, they need to embrace the social traditions of reading, not take away paying customers' right to pass along the books they buy for others to enjoy.