Apple to wrap digital books in FairPlay copy protection | Hacker News Reader

Apple to wrap digital books in FairPlay copy protection

latimesblogs.latimes.com

27 pointsmjfern10 comments

Okay - is anyone actually surprised by this?

Publishers clearly gave Apple a lot of leeway in order to generate some competition for the Kindle - but I doubt dropping DRM would be one of them.

What I'm curious about is if they'll be labeling DRM/DRM-Free book downloads like they started doing with songs.

I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

Contrast with Audible, for example. Cory Doctorow has had public arguments about the fact that they will not let him sell audio versions of his books without DRM.

> I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

RPG (not "computer RPG") publishing has been in a post-DRM era for several years now.

Has the book publishing industry failed to learn from the music publishing industry?

Perhaps, this is a last ditch effort at extracting as much revenue as they can by retaining their illusion of control over something that fundamentally needs to be easy to share so that it becomes viral and generates a lot more revenue...

I don't think the two situations are entirely comparable.

The decision to purchase music is squarely on an individual, whereas in colleges I think there's plenty of politics involved in bribing committees to keep on using the newest editions of books, thereby practically forcing students to purchase certain books.

I thought FairPlay was alive and well on video files sold through iTunes?

Most, not all. Movie downloads have it, but not all music videos do.

Yep, it is.

"according to sources in the publishing industry."

Who?

Of course, we'll never find out who, whether or not this is true.

Yes, it sort of depends on the professionalism of the LA Times reporting, but Jobs has been making the rounds of enough different publishers (and presumably had to share something of how "protection" is going to be handled). Certainly likely that some of those publishers loosened their lips to a LAT reporter.

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