Looking for social drm solutions providers for epubs?

September 24, 2012 3:27 AM

Looking for Social DRM solutions/prorgram providers for epubs.

I am looking for companies/professionals providing softwares/solutions for embedding a Social DRM in epubs. Could you direct me to some providers?

posted by elpapacito to computers & internet (12 answers total)

What is a "Social DRM"?
posted by b1tr0t at 6:40 AM on September 24, 2012

Social DRM = digital watermarking for books according to my Google-fu.
posted by bswinburn at 8:01 AM on September 24, 2012

epubs are just zipped html. It would be extremely trivial to strip your watermark out.
posted by wongcorgi at 9:31 AM on September 24, 2012

I guess my question would be WHY do you want it DRM'd?
It could be a pain in the ass solution to a relatively unremarkable concern.
posted by THAT William Mize at 9:51 AM on September 24, 2012

Well, the short answer is ..pure dissuasion, but there's some creative idea I have in mind (who will not prevent copying, nothing really can't prevent t1hat 00% of the times), but I would like to have some more information on existing providers first.
posted by elpapacito at 12:44 PM on September 24, 2012

I understand what DRM is, I have no idea what "social DRM" is. An answer from elpapacito is more useful than some googled stuff.

Is the goal to track who shares your creative work, or to create some barrier to sharing the work?

DRM is generally vendor-specific. If you want to distribute an ePub that can be used everywhere, then you don't want DRM. If you want to support a specific eReader, then you use that vendor's DRM scheme. And if you want to deploy to Kindle, you use Amazon's DRM on Mobi files.
posted by b1tr0t at 5:18 PM on September 24, 2012

b1tr0t: social drm is pure applied dissuasion with a hint of lemon and bytes here and there...what i'd like to avoid is being tied to a specific drm scheme and/or be forced to adopt almost any drm scheme in existance, in an attempt to deal with a very diverse customer base..
posted by elpapacito at 5:40 PM on September 24, 2012

The metaphors are extremely unhelpful.

What do you want to do? Can you be specific?
posted by b1tr0t at 6:29 PM on September 24, 2012

As someone who's published on Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Smashwords and others, I can say that @b1tr0t pretty much has it correct.
Each publisher or vendor has their own version of DRM that prevents the ebook in question to be shared or copied or read with another reader.
I've never heard of any type of global DRM that goes across all readers, vendors and platforms.
The only thing I can vaguely think of would be a password protected PDF.
No password, no open.
Maybe there are programs that allow you to assign a user specific password, perhaps computer generated, to a specific PDF. That would be similar to a watermark with the buyer's name, but perhaps again, overkill.
posted by THAT William Mize at 4:50 AM on September 25, 2012

b1tr0t/William Mize: to answer to bitroot, what i need is a prepared script that will fetch data passed by a merchant servers, embed the data into the epub as I please and that could manipulate epub as i please as well..basically, a regex + perl. But, as I am still not competent enough with perl to di itmyself in a resonably short time.

As for DRM, we all know DRM aren't that effective...or do we? Imho, to say the DRM isn't effective because it's "easily" circumvented is an overstatement..it's plenty effective if you don't want/don't know how to go around it.
posted by elpapacito at 6:08 AM on September 25, 2012

Do you just want to embed the customer name / purchasing details in the ebook?

That's something that a reasonably competent web developer could do.
posted by b1tr0t at 2:31 PM on September 25, 2012

b1tr0t: yes, you are absolutely correct b1tr0t, in itself it's not as difficult, for instance, as developing a crypto algo from scratch.
posted by elpapacito at 3:28 AM on September 26, 2012