O'Reilly's Decision and Its DRM Implication

Martin Kleppmann‏ @martinkl

I am not happy about this. I believe readers should be able to get DRM-free eBook files to download to their own devices.

1:07 AM - 29 Jun 2017

This is actually what I'm most interested in, but don't really see analyzed or talked about anywhere. Online distribution of general digital media (beyond glorified text documents and images) at a serious, mass scale, is barely 20 years old. We are only just now, like in the last decade or less, seeing people enter the economy (i.e. having their own income streams) who grew up with most media in general available on the web.

Hand-in-hand with that is the ability to "pirate" media easily, freely, and without consequence. Even in the last decade, piracy was sorta vaguely "niche". I mean, yes, millions of people did it regularly, but even though I spent my life around very technical people, I was often a sort of "go-to" to acquire things or explain how to actually be a "pirate". People were comfortable with it, but as far as I could tell, even in my "pirate" heavy demographic, it wasn't like some sort of ubiquitous, default thing. People were comfortable with it, and did it regularly either directly or indirectly, but I suspect that I am/was part of a fairly tiny but still rapidly growing minority that would automatically transition from "I want something" to "I'll just pirate that thing". For most people there was a decent amount of friction, not because of technology, but because of their own attitudes and knowledge, so it happened far less than it could have.

All of this is a preface to what I started off trying to say, which is that as a society and culture, we really haven't figured out the social norms and expectations around digital distribution and piracy. They exist, as do the legal ones, but it is so new that the rising demographics and future trends are going to rapidly and significantly change them, and have been changing them.

Patterns of marketing and distribution have already somewhat adapted to the expectation of large-scale piracy, but that is only the beginning. Who knows how this stuff will be viewed or treated in another decade.

FWIW, I don't think that piracy is ethical, I do it anyway (though far less nowadays that I have a paycheck and with all the subscription services available), and I suspect (opposite of the author of this article, but still without evidence) that piracy is actually a benefit to creators. The quote you lead with is a great way to phrase the idea in a way that I'd never thought to articulate it.

The discounts you mention are a big controversy for downloadable sales. Go tell a game developer that "I get a lot of great free games with my PlayStation Plus subscription and usually buy games when they are deeply discounted" and often they will go berserk because they believe eroded pricing power takes a chunk out of their paycheck.

Another factor is that O'Reilly is not the company it was 20 years ago. The animal books were great (and are great sometimes today), but the books they've made on other topics (say graphic design) are not up to same standard. Those books aren't bad, but the animal books are hard to measure up to.

In recent years O'Reilly has been capitalizing on the strength of their brand, so you see Neo4J giving away a free O'Reilly book to promote their product, O'Reilly promotes their own conferences, etc.

Perhaps it was expensive because it was a platform for other publishers (and print) as well, but I doubt this would be true if they focused on their own selection of eBooks.

"As our books have Adobe DRM applied to them your device must state that it is compatible with Adobe DRM or Adobe Digital Editions"

Some time ago, there was a big fiasco with Adobe (3,4) "On 6 October 2014, Nate Hoffelder reported in The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 ("ADE4") was sending extensive information about eBooks back to Adobe, including ebooks read by a user as well as eBooks stored on the same machine but not opened in ADE4."

I tried Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) a while back and considered it very poor experience. Originally it was based on Adobe Flex, and the font rendering was grey scale anti-aliased and looked terrible. I won't try it again to find out if they improved it.

There was another fiasco, but Adobe backed down (5). A contact from Datalogics confirmed that Adobe was going to force everyone (publishers, users) to upgrade to the new version of DRM (ADEPT) and that your old titles would be unusable if not!

I avoid ADE like the plague.

(1) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide...

(2) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Readi...

(3) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users...

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions

(5) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-...

What if I'm out of work and cannot afford the rental (Safari) fee?

What about account problems? Because of technical reasons or political (say revenge because of public criticisms), there's a risk to lose access to the material. This happened to somebody with their Amazon account and their ereader.

Sad day.

In fact any initial advance is often calculated on this basis. A book has to sell exceptionally and unexpectedly well to start paying extra royalties.

So... authors can make a little extra money by selling their five or ten free copies direct to the public. Even at a knock-down price, it's still money they wouldn't get otherwise.

The piracy argument is nonsense. Most technology book authors either have a brand/platform because they're already notable, or they remain unknown, because it's almost impossible to build a brand solely by writing specialist technology books. (This wasn't always true, but it's become more and more true over time.)

Piracy for "exposure" changes nothing. Given the royalty issue, it doesn't even affect most authors' earnings - although of course it does affect publisher income.

If I had a tech book in me I'd be trying to steal from Wes Bos's playbook, not get on a call with an O'Reilly editor.

The reasons they give for discontinuing their e-commerce efforts are that book sales have been dwindling since 2000, and that they simply make too much money on new interactive media and don't want to pay for their own e-commerce infrastructure and staff anymore. I would imagine the publishers they are now relying on can also help them market their titles (which I suggest speculatively would help significantly).

The article I want to link from Laura Baldwin is unfortunately only directly linkable via social media, but for now it's the only article at this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...

Anectdotally, I bought a lot of DRM free books from O'Reilly directly. While I did share them due to convenience (coworker doesn't understand SSL! No problem), I also shared them with friends who couldn't afford them. I think this was actually good for O'Reilly, and that Tim was right and still is on this score.

I say this because I personally spent many thousands of dollars through their web store. My friends without cash who went on to become computer professionals started paying for the new books they wanted as well. The vast majority of people I shared books with who could afford them would go out and buy several more after seeing the quality and value of particular titles.

It's obviously a culture and economic mechanism that subsidizes certain kinds of customers and use, but I believe it subsidized the "right things". Because much of the content builds value in real marketable skills, free-riders can eventually become wealthy enough that the price to convenience ratio tips correctly and they become paying customers. It helps that they now have very strong brand loyalty. This is how I became an O'Reilly customer in the first place, so many year ago.

O'Reilly direct e-book sales was a positive example of business that creates huge uncaptured value for the domain (technical knowledge), but by virtue of that generates more customers. This is the kind of business we actually need. In some ways I think it was their own success that killed their book business, because ultimately digital books were replaced by more compelling media formats, and those exist largely due to advances in design and technology, and their books are raw fuel for those advances.

I say this many words only because I loved them so much, and am sad to see them go. I have to sadly admit it's been probably two years since I either read or bought a lot of titles from them. I haven't been reading or buying technical books at all. I don't know if this says something about my current level of specialization, perhaps my current level of laziness, my subconscious desire for new media formats, the quality of the titles they've been publishing, their business model, or perhaps the nature of the industry they serve.

I'd personally like to hear more from O'Reilly about this eventually. I know they need to spin everything to look good, but I am incredibly curious if their non-book media is actually increasingly popular as they suggest. Do people just not want technical books anymore? Do people want them but increasingly pirate them and never pay? Are people willing to pay for technical knowledge in different media? Did their business model cost them their business, or is this the result of unavoidable change in the market for technical knowledge?

I am not a fan of DRM. Less because of its restrictions, but more because of its low level of user experience (merely consequence of its restrictions, sure, but still), with publishers not making content available for this or that device, and with lack of smart features like lending/borrowing/transferring material.

That said, and being from Latin America myself (Brazil), as well with connections in Asia (friends), I've heard many stories already that give an idea of thousands of developers that are consuming "paid" content downloaded through torrents/forums/dropboxes/etc, and never made the "honorable" payment.

I am afraid you are underestimating the amount of developers in developing countries that consume books from O'Reilly and other publishers and are not paying at all for that, ultimately damaging investments on new material, both by publishers and authors. It is hardly the case of not being able to afford, but simply a cultural thing.

For any author that thinks their content should be DRM-free and available to anyone, I don't understand why they don't publish on GitHub, and drop a link to their PayPal account for contributions. If they did, my bet would be on repositories with huge traffic (easy to monitor), but low pay-rate.

My personal experience doesn't really support this. I used to work for a publisher of fiction books. Our business model was that we'd sell them exclusively on our website as eBooks for some time before putting out physical copies. One result of that was we were able to track all sales of the books in realtime.

The vast majority of eBooks were sold with DRM. But it would only be a matter of time before the DRM would be cracked and we'd see the books pop up on pirate sites. By tracking our sales figures, we noticed a very steep decline in sales as soon as a pirate version of a book became available. This was very consistent across our range of products.

I'm personally not a fan of DRM, however I don't think we would have been able to survive without it. We would always hope the DRM wouldn't be cracked quite so soon, as we'd receive very few sales afterwards.

Of course, the types of books we published were different to O'Reilly's, and our target audiences were different. The effect of piracy might not necessarily be so bad for them as it was for us. I'm sure it's still a challenge, though.

yes, i also agree. The content just needs to be made slightly difficult to pirate, to keep the honest people honest - but there's no need to invest in any expensive and difficult to maintain DRM (like an online check).

Also, if content is easier to consume when pirated, then whose fault is it that more people would rather pirate than go though the official channel?

I tried Safari when I was still in university, but found it terrible (but that was a few years back). I won't pay $400/year for a service like it. I could see maybe half that being reasonable. But, there are so many subscription services now.