Does anyone have experience creating a copy protected eBook?

January 2, 2006 9:26 AM

I have a client who has written a book that has been moderately successful in her field and she wants to create an eBook to sell online as well. Like any small volume author, she is concerned about sharing of her book in electronic format and is looking for a DRM solution. In my mind, Adobe eBooks are the most compatible and easy to distribute, but while they can be password protected, they have no inherent DRM to prevent copying to multiple machines. Microsoft's eReader (.LIT) would be next. It's pretty widely distributed and does have DRM available in the paid version. However, it seems that protection may have been cracked. I'm not super keen on tying something to MS security if I can avoid it but not completely against it, either. The 3rd option I can see are the millions of various 3rd party eBook creators. Most make executables which tend to be pretty bad to use and only available for Windows. None of these solutions seem like an obvious winner. Any thoughts or experience would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I want to make sure this doesn't turn into a DRM/Open debate. As a software engineer who's written copy protected software in the past, I'm well aware of the problems and pitfalls of DRM and copy protection. My suggestion, like I imagine many of yours would be, is to protect the download and not the content, but that's out of my hands at this point.

posted by aaronh to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

In my view, the appropriate DRM solution depends on the cost of the eBook and how well that cost corresponds to the perceived value to the end-user and the overall market.

So, rather than begin a treatise on the many variations involved, I'll simply ask a couple of questions:

1) what is the intended price for the eBook?
2) what did the moderately-successful physical book cost?
3) how big is the potential market?
4) how dedicated is the potential market? Is this topic the sort of thing people get obsessed about, or is it merely a passing-interest sort of thing?
posted by aramaic at 9:49 AM on January 2, 2006

Best answer: I enjoyed the way The Pragmatic Programmers handled the PDF I bought from them. They included "Prepared exclusively for My Full Name" at the bottom of every page, so that if I put it on a P2P network my name would be forever linked as "the guy who was a jerk and gave out the book." It made sure that they didn't have DRM support headaches (because there weren't lost passwords, etc.) while still saying "please don't copy this" pretty strongly.

Not trying to make this a DRM/open debate, but I actually got a copy from a friend (whose name was at the bottom of my copy) and I liked the book so much I bought my own copy. If they hadn't made it so that I could read my friend's copy, I wouldn't have bought that book (and 2 more after that) from them.
posted by revgeorge at 9:55 AM on January 2, 2006

What revgeorge said.

Also, if you do decide to go the DRM route, please keep in mind that no drm is secure. A protected PDF can be easily unprotected by using a non-adobe product to view/save/print the file. Ditto for LIT/others.

Right now, the only method for which there is no known 'workaround' is the Sony BBeB format. But that will only work on a Sony Ebook reader (Librie).
posted by Arthur Dent at 10:07 AM on January 2, 2006

Just incidentally, there is no "may". MS Reader protection was cracked and the application to convert .lit ebooks has been out in the open for a while. There is even a nice GUI for the (originally command-line) converter.

I won't provide links, but anyone can search Google for "convert lit" and look at the first two or three links provided (searching for the program real name probably won't do, you will have to navigate millions upon millions of pages dealing with a particular spot in female anatomy before reaching the correct pages - but then again you may like it). Americans and foreigners in the US should be warned using this software probably violates DCMA.
posted by nkyad at 10:10 AM on January 2, 2006

You can try a little bit, but if anyone wants to distribute it, they will. If anyone can read it, it can be copied and distributed. End of story. Its just text... at the very worst, even if the file couldn't be distributed, and you managed some way to use images for the text, a screenscrape & OCR could make plaintext out of it.

If you're really, really serious about it, you could introduce small changes into the text itself every time you distribute a copy to identify who shares it. Make sure you do the changes randomly though, because if 10-15 people can get together and run a massive diff on it, and change points match up, they'll just change those and be off with it (note this all depends on how much effort people will take to illegally share the book).
posted by devilsbrigade at 10:14 AM on January 2, 2006

I really like revgeorge's "Prepared especially for Jane Doe" solution, even if it's a bit crackable.

One thing to note is that while rampant piracy is a bad thing, casual copying usually isn't. I'd suggest your client pick something low-key, and try to view casual copying as marketing.

Also, keep in mind the type of content, and the expected consumer. If this e-book is a guide to finding the best free porno on the net, then it needs ridicuous protection and will end up on every torrent site anyway. If it's aimed at professionals, or non-computer hobbyists, even minor hurdles will be sufficient.
posted by I Love Tacos at 10:54 AM on January 2, 2006

Best answer: The posters above are correct. If someone comes to you and wants to chop their own head off, your duty as the resident expert is not to facilitate that unthinkingly, but to convince them that they want the wrong thing.

In this case, for a small publisher, it is well established - by actual studies at this point - that the main problem she faces is obscurity, not piracy. No one knows about her book. And if she makes it hard for her own customers to do her advertising for her, she's shooting herself in the head.

Once you reach Stephen King/Danielle Steele level, the equation may shift - they no longer need advertising and may benefit in overall sales from DRM (assuming it works, of course). But for anyone less well known, they lose sales from adding DRM. It is your duty as your client's adviser to advise her the best way to achieve what she REALLY wants (maximize sales) as opposed to what she SAYS she wants (DRM).

Authors who have made their books FREELY downloadable - free PDF, no payment at all - have seen substantial sales increases of their dead-tree books. (Again, this probably doesn't work for J.K. Rowling, but for everyone else, it works.) The electronic version serves as advertising for the paper version. See for example the Baen free library, which has universally increased the sales of every book they post there. (Read the Prime Palaver columns on that site for a discussion from the author's point of view of how sales increased due to free electronic versions being published.)
posted by jellicle at 12:01 PM on January 2, 2006

Why is your friend convinced that she needs some type of "strong" DRM?

An e-book with no restrictions on copying could promote the physical book (particularly if its either the sort of book that one reads through, rather than uses as a quick reference, or has an audience who isn't given to spending lots of time looking at the computer screen). Perhaps more valuable, it could raise the profile of the author and increase their desirability (and fee) for speaking and consulting engagements or other paid work.
posted by Good Brain at 12:17 PM on January 2, 2006

I know some folks that are using LockLizard and are pretty happy about it.
posted by edmo at 12:23 PM on January 2, 2006

I know this isn't what you're after, but jellicle hit it on the nose. You are doing your client a disservice if you move forward with DRM. It would be better in nearly every sense for your client to forget trying to protect their ebook from copying and simply rely on word-of-mouth and other benefits of digital dissemination.
posted by griffey at 12:45 PM on January 2, 2006

edmo : "I know some folks that are using LockLizard and are pretty happy about it."

They may be happy but I know I wouldn't (in any side of the problem). Have you checked their How-To?
a) Manual Secure Document generation
b) Manual license generation
c) Proprietary format (your paying consumers have to download and install a viewer)

If you going to generate ten secure documents a month to be viewed by the Board of Directors, fine. If you are trying to sell hundreds or thousands of documents, this process will kill you pretty fast.
posted by nkyad at 2:09 PM on January 2, 2006

Two things to consider: First, any DRM on the printed word will be broken. Some will be harder than others, but at some point someone will reduce the work down to plain text if someone feels the need. The other thing is this: does it matter? Unless the author is expecting lots of demand from the general public, I can't imagine piracy putting a significant dent in online sales.

In order for online copying to hurt your bottom line, you're assuming that your possible readers will be technically savvy enough to copy the book and that they know someone who can provide it to them. If I cracked a copy of "The Da Vinci Code," I'd probably find a number of people who want it due to it being a popular bestseller. If I crack a copy of a good book on how to cook Chilean sea bass, less demand.
posted by mikeh at 7:21 AM on January 3, 2006

Response by poster: The book would be most akin to a text book. The primary purchasers are schools (either teachers individually or departments) and some parents.

I agree with all the posters here about the ridiculousness of copy protecting the item. Your responses have given me some good ideas of how to explain the problem to my client. So, while only the suggestion by revgeorge about the name at the bottom is my favorite one answering the question, there are many that have been very helpful.

Thanks again, AskMeFi-ers.
posted by aaronh at 1:38 PM on January 3, 2006