I haven’t written about the publishing industry for some time but a recent post by hoakley over at The Eclectic Light Company has reignited my rage. Publishers have been doing things the same way for hundreds of years and don’t seem able to adapt to the changing landscape. This isn’t just about ebooks—although that’s a large part of it. Even with physical books they’re letting companies like Amazon eat their lunch.
It gets much worse with ebooks. Amazon convinced them that they must use DRM and as a result Amazon was able at the same time to lock in their customers and effectively corner the ebook market. That, in turn, means that the publishers pretty much have to meet Amazon’s terms. All because of their addiction to DRM.
Hoakley’s post, Publishers determined to kill electronic books, explores the publishers’ most recent chapter in their slow motion suicide. His post was inspired by the publishers’ latest Pyrrhic victory in Europe’s high court, the CJEU. The court ruled that, yes, it is a copyright violation to sell used ebooks. That, as hoakley says, is the publishers proving to their customers that their ebooks are worthless.
Judging from the comments to hoakley’s post, people are not amused. Almost all of them say that they routinely remove DRM from their ebooks to protect themselves from the publisher going out of business or deciding that they don’t want to maintain their authorization servers anymore. Some of them said that they won’t buy ebooks with DRM and that the problem would be solved if everyone followed suit.
Everyone will not follow suit, of course, and even if they did it’s not clear the publishers would care. I suspect that they would be happier if ebooks would just go away and they could get back to the way things have always been. The publishers’ rank and file apparently understand all this but the bean counters in charge simply can’t get over the notion that everybody would just steal their books if they weren’t protected with DRM. They don’t seem to know or care that everyone who would do that is already doing it by downloading a copy from which someone has removed the DRM. As usual, the honest people suffer while the dishonest are not deterred in the least.