Although the title of this post puts me in jeopardy of having Betteridge’s Law applied, two recent posts by prominent writers lead me to believe that the end of DRM is near. A couple of weeks ago, Publishers Weekly posted an interesting article by Cory Doctorow entitled A Whip to Beat Us With. The article argues that by insisting on DRM, publishers have given retailers like Amazon a whip to beat them with. The idea is that DRM leads to device lockin, which means that a retailer with a large number of ebook customers can demand concessions from the publishers because the readers can’t leave without losing their current libraries and so the publishers’ customers become the retailer’s customers.
All that’s pretty standard stuff and well known to the type of people who read Irreal. Yesterday, Charlie Stross published a post in which he said the meaning of the DOJ suit against Apple and the publishers is that the publishers’ plan B for preventing Amazon from destroying them has failed and that they now have no other option but to open up the market by selling ebooks without DRM. Stross points out that with the current situation, Amazon has the best of both worlds: an (effective) monopoly at the retail level and a monopsony at the wholesale level.
That’s not good for readers in the long run, of course, but it’s deadly for the publishers. If Amazon controls access to a large part of the ebook reader base it can demand crippling concessions from the publishers.
Both articles are interesting and I urge you to spend a few minutes reading them. For the first time I have hope that the publishers will finally abandon DRM. They better; their continued existence depends on it.