Why O'Reilly Media doesn't use DRM

The ebook revenue is nearly 100% profit; the marginal cost of selling ebooks has got to be near zero. So if more people buy ebook "upgrades" by falsely claiming they bought the book, that's better for O'Reilly than making them prove it.

I agree. I wrote a book for O'Reilly and it has sold well, but I know that there are people out there with pirate copies of the eBook (perhaps there are lots), and although I'm happy to receive money from people two factors play together: I make hardly anything from the book (author royalties are small and compared to the effort, 6 months full time work, insignificant) and I'm much happier when someone reads it and likes the book then when I receive money for the book.

Initially, I was freaked out by all these copies on file sharing sites. Now, I just ignore it.

There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about a guy who was selling something I don't remember. But he used to sell books. And when talking about piracy he asked the audience who did not agree with him "how many of you are fanboys/fangirls of an author and will buy everything that person makes" which was followed by "how many of you bought the anything made by that author as your very first introduction to him/her as opposed to borrowing it from someone, reading it in a library, pirating it and reading it, etc...?"

People understand the value of things. If you give people something they value and want more of, they will gladly pay for it (the value that they see it's worth) because they want you to keep producing. They know if they stop there will be nothing new. So the end-goal is to make people see the value you produce (even if its giving them that thing for free) because instead of instant-value you will get long-term customers.

It appears that musician Martin Atkins had the same opinion. "It's not a problem if 20,000 people 'illegally' download your music. It's a problem if they don't."

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2011/03/sx...

Agreed nice to see someone walked the talk. Its interesting whether DRM is broken as a concept or just implementation. For books and songs I can see where people like Tim will accept that the people who were going to pay for his books will pay rather than go mucking through the torrent heap to find the free version. Quote on Techcrunch last month: "Most adults do not want to steal intellectual property if there’s an affordable alternative to doing so" http://tcrn.ch/eywL2E

Still though from a security perspective moving security from the network and infrastructure and to the information is highly desiarable. In this, DRM as a concept is not flawed but the implementation. I wrote some ways this could be fixed last year: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/08/making-drm-practical.html

Which is the right way to discourage large-scale piracy.

If I put my copy of an O'Reilly ebook online for anyone to grab, it's obvious the copy floating around is mine and I'm a jerk. But I can still give a copy of the PDF to a few friends and encourage them to buy a copy if they like it.

And, there's absolutely no way this is going to somehow bone me in the future. The authentication server isn't going to go down, it's not going to mistakenly think I lent out my "last copy" or lock me out of my purchase because I don't have internet access.

The digital versions of the German c't magazine (archives and iPad version) have similar visible and possibly some invisible watermarking features. Music downloaded from iTunes has your name in the Metadata. Personally, I'm fine with this, but then I was never going to offer the files on Bittorrent or whatever. I don't think you could have any serious moral qualms with this kind of soft DRM.

I certainly do share music with my girlfriend, which presumably is considered piracy by the RIAA, etc., along with ripping the CDs I bought before DRM-free music was widely available.

O'Reilly doesn't seem to do that, unless it's embedded in the PDF in a way which doesn't show up in simple viewers.

Pragmatic Bookshelf, Manning and Packt (out of the e-books I have handy for quick checking) do put your name/address on the bottom of every page to discourage piracy.

Edit: Specifics for each publisher, for anyone who's curious:

  Manning - Name and email address on each page
  Pragmatic Bookshelf - Name on each page
  Packt - Name, physical address and purchase date on each page

Maybe there is a misunderstanding in the services proposed by O'Reilley Media. On their eBooks offer (available via their main website - oreilly.com), They don't put your name or any other info on the purchased eBooks. There are no DRMs and you can get the books in many format. That's the services mentioned in the Forbes article.

The "Safari Books Online" is another services with many DRM-like techniques but this was a previous services where O'Reilley Media is member along with other book editors. I used it in the past but that was a pain to use it.

I suppose O'Reilly now focus on the first service only as this is the one generating revenue without DRMs or watermarking techniques or additional limitations. I buy much more from their non-DRM offer (it's convenient, low-cost and many formats are available).

No DRM on ebooks, that is.

I agree that Safari's usefulness is severely hampered by the copy-protection methods (I used to use it as a free service through my university library). Unfortunately, as a subscription service O'Reilly has stronger incentives to use DRM because if it was easy to copy content from books, you could sign up for one month, copy everything you wanted, and then cancel your subscription.

I still can't get over how bad Safari is when O'Reilly are so great in everything else they do. Does O'Reilly proper run the site?

Keep in mind that 1)Safari Books is a separate operating unit from the main O'Reilly publishing and that 2) a majority of th books on Safari aren't owned/published by O'Reilly. I'm sure some of the security measures are a result of Microsoft, Addison-Wesley, etc. allowing their books to be in Safari.

I think you may be underestimating the number of poor students in the First World.

Yes, this version is significantly better.

Of course, but this is printed in Forbes. The more that the non-tech crowed sees that publishers can succeed without customer-screwing DRM, the better chance other publishers will follow suit.

Tim is an absolute straight-shooter. He's not pandering and he's not playing games. That's the way they think. (An old co-worker of mine is his right-hand man, running the book publishing business.)