When it comes to DRM, Amazon is a bottom feeding Hell Beast | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to DRM, Amazon is a bottom feeding Hell Beast

attendly.com

82 pointsshandsaker37 comments

Apple was in a position where they could make demands on publishers, so they demanded to strip off DRM and away they went. It was nice gesture, although you're still using iTunes media files but still, they exerted their power for The Greater Good (we can argue about why Apple would do that, but it was good for us all).

If anyone can exert pressure on book publishers to ditch DRM, it's Amazon, but why would they? Aside from The Greater Good they've got themselves a nice little vendor lock in, and unlike Apple who was making money hand over fist with the iPod and using the iTunes store to help get consumers to start building digital libraries, Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle and they really need people to stick on the platform.

Seems like a few publishers have seen sense regarding DRM (Tor and Angry Robot are the first two who spring to mind), so maybe they'll eventually wise up and start dropping the DRM requirement.

> Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle

Amazon sells more ebooks than print books (hard and soft back combined). I guess there's a lot of shovel-ware 99p dross in there, but still, it'd odd to say that Amazon is not making much money on Kindle.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19148146)

I believe the point was that Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle hardware itself (vs. Apple, where there was definitely money being made on the iPod hardware alone).

Yeah, should have been more clear on Kindle as hardware vs Kindle as ebook.

Based on the last quarter's filing Amazon isn't making any money at all, they are losing money.

That was due to a writedown due to bad acquisitions. The rest of their business made them heaps of money.

Apparently Apple doesn't require DRM in their iBook store either, it's up to the publisher:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/52245/are-all-ebook...

Nice find, hadn't come across that which I think helps reinforce the point I was making. Apple seems pretty chilled about avoiding content DRM in many areas.

Apparently, neither does Amazon, it's up to the publisher:

From http://www.tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?article2693 (a publisher against DRM): "avec ou sans DRM, ce n’est pas Amazon, c’est l’éditeur qui prescrit si oui ou non, comme il prescrit le prix" Which means It is not Amazon but the publisher that choses whether or not to put DRM, as it choses the price. Maybe it is a local policy however (as is the fixed price).

AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices).

To go back to a comparison to Apple: iPods do play WAV and MP3 out of the box, and so does iTunes. The only non-standard media format Apple pushed (Apple lossless) it has mad free and open. Apple's book reader supports ePub out of the box. (Apple does push its own enhancements to ePub for interactive textbooks, but it has done these in the "correct" way.)

> AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Both AAC & MP3 are patent encumbered and require licenses for implementation.

You are of course correct, but (a) that's not what the GP was implying since most non iTunes music players and all significant non-iTunes stores support MP3, (b) it doesn't matter to most users, and (c) Ogg Vorbis is only unencumbered to the extent that is too insignificant to represent a useful lawsuit target.

As for (c), AOL did legal research before publishing the Vorbis decoder for WinAmp, and Microsoft used Vorbis for various game titles (I'd guess they also did some legal research).

Of course, anyone can sue over anything, and keep you engaged in court for a long time, even without a good reason. MP3licensing (or MPEG-LA for the newer stuff) doesn't indemnify licensees, as can be seen every year when Sisvel lets German customs confiscate media players on Cebit over MP3 patents not part of the pool.

Note: not ragging on AAC, I think it's a very nice format, but it still is the primary iTunes media format and whilst many others do support it its got a lower level of support than mp3 across the board, but I can see how what I wrote might seem like I'm implying vendor lock in. For all the stick Apple gets about walled gardens they're surprisingly open on many other fronts.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices

Amazon uses the MobiPocket format, which was the standard eBook format before ebooks became popular. The Topaz and Azul formats are only used for books which are converted by publishers to ebook by scanning them and OCR'ing the text. These formats appear to be based on the PDF format but the DRM mechanism is non-standard.

Amazon Kindle hardware does support ePub. The software does not. That is a major difference--if the hardware did nto support ePub, it would not be meaningfully possible to add support in via hardware.

Define "standard eBook format". Because, AFAIK, MobiPocket was never standardized. It may have been the popular eBook format, but that's not the same thing as standard.

I feel it's worth mentioning that the Amazon mp3 store was DRM free from the get-go, and long before Apple started providing DRM free music. In fact, it was probably on the example of Amazon that Apple was able to make such a demand ("look, the music industry hasn't imploded yet").

Also, while Apple does sell DRM-free files, access to their store requires iTunes - not exactly DRM, but a vendor tie-in that limits your access to the store and your purchased music. Contrast with Amazon, whereas you can buy/download tracks from your browser.

Amazon may have been DRM free because the music companies wanted to hedge on a competitor to test the waters. Just FYI.

Amazon didn't insist on having DRM, although it worked out to their advantage. The publishers did: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/01364817725/how-pu...

Yeah, as Charlie Stross pointed out on his blog some time ago, the publishers effectively demanded that Amazon have a monopoly on the eBook reading public & only now are they (slowly) realising that this might not have been a great idea. Bezos must have been laughing all the way home from those meetings...

It's worth noting that some of the publishers have woken up and taken corrective action.

Holtzbrinck, a giant German family owned publishing conglomerate you probably haven't heard of, actually owns Macmillan, who you might have heard of, who own Tor, who you probably have heard of if you're part of the regular HN demographic. A few months ago they came to the same conclusion, and have dropped mandatory DRM on genre fiction titles. I believe they're also open to arguments both for and against DRM on other publishing categories, rather than maintaining the doctrinaire "DRM on everything" policy of some of the other Big Six.

The long term effect of this policy is ... well, it remains to be seen. Because publishers traditionally sold to wholesalers who sold to bookstores, they don't routinely sell direct to the public. A move by any of the big publishers to set up a direct-sales channel for ebooks, rivaling Amazon or Barnes and Noble, would probably be seen as hostile or monopolistic by the bookseller trade, and might even generate anti-trust lawsuits! But I'd be unsurprised to see one of the Big Six (now Five) follow the example of smaller direct-sales publishers sooner rather than later -- like http://www.webscription.net/ for example.

It would certainly be seen as hostile by Amazon!

But this does seem like the sort of role that the Internet tends to disintermediate. If I can get ebooks straight from the publisher in standardized formats that aren't DRM-encumbered, thus allowing me to use any reader I choose, what value is Amazon bringing me that Google is not already bringing me? Nonzero, I think, but not enough to sustain their business on.

Heck, even the publisher stands in risk of being disintermediated here, let alone Amazon functioning as essentially a fourth party in the relationship.

Whereas I find they bring me a lot of value as an intermediary of physical goods. Sometimes I try to order something straight from, say, a food vendor, but always end up choking on the fact the food vendor wants to charge me $15 shipping on my $30 order, because the food vendor's idea of shipping is the local Fedex drop point and Amazon's idea of shipping appears to involve some sort of teleportation technology.

Heck, even the publisher stands in risk of being disintermediated here

Only if you don't know what a publisher does. See also:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

That's why I said only "at risk of" and not that it was certain. But, as is the way of the internet, it's not hard to imagine in ten years that the many things you say go into the publisher's set of responsibilities could themselves be dispersed to more than one entity. Publishers previously had an effectively-physical moat around that set of tasks, because they had control over the book and essentially force you to consume all the services from them to get to the physical book. Now they're going to have to ensure they are bringing value throughout the process.

Which in your domain, they probably will. But this is one way of viewing the ever-growing academic revolt against Elsevier. They do a couple of their duties OK, but the whole bundle they are providing is increasingly less compelling vs. what they are trying to charge.

Alas, "publishing" is actually about a dozen different business models flying in loose formation. Generalizing from, say, trade fiction publishing to peer-reviewed academic journals to text books to newspapers is, shall we say, not going to work terribly well.

I didn't. If you find it not unlikely that some publishers may themselves be disintermediated in whole or in part, that's all the support I need for the point I made. I never said that all publishers are doomed. I only said that given that publishers are themselves going to be facing this sort of pressure, even if some survive it quite well, how much more so would Amazon, trying to be a fourth party in the already-pressured three-way reader/publisher/author relationship.

Dude, just drop it already.

And if you look at the Amazon music store, which was DRM free from the get-go (and probably paved the way for Apple to negotiate with its own content providers for DRM free music), it's hard to think of Amazon as being on the side of DRM.

Currently, of the two DRM-laden e-mediums Amazon sells (books and videos), both have DRM because the publishers insist on it.

Is it possible to have the DRM discussion without becoming hyperbolic? I mean, I'm not thrilled about DRM, but "Bottom feeding hell beast" is probably a little over the top.

Furthermore, it seems weird that his primary stated use case (copying a section of a book and sharing with his friends) is totally supported on the kindle. There are all sorts of social features built into the device.

Yes, we get it, DRM is a non-starter for most technical people, but we need to have a constructive dialog around the issue.

I would observe the hyperbole is usually coming from the consumer side, where it is histrionic. The consumer always has the option to simply not consume, one I use quite frequently when the DRM deal is not in my favor.

This is an author, realizing he's being enticed into the car trunk with pretty candy, and that he got taken awfully far in before he noticed. I think a bit of hyperbole is a bit more justified, so as to warn the others.

the problem isn't just the inconvenience for customers. the bigger threat for authors is that amazon isn't just a quasi-monopoly, but also a monopsony (meaning publishers have to publish through amazon; it's a monopoly for suppliers instead of customers).

as an author or publisher you can't get away from amazon anymore because you would invaliate your whole library. if you want to switch, your customers can't read your books anymore, because they're bound by the kindles DRM.

so for us the question is if we can or cannot read a book - for the author it's an entirely different question; it's about being dependent on amazon without alternatives. so of course he's got to be a lot more to lose.

ah, and why not use strong language - he's an author, he knows what he does :)

i don't completely get it though, because the kindle is able to handle unprotected mobi files, plain text and html. i had several of those (creative commons or public domain) on mine and it worked flawlessly. do the mobi devs charge a licensing fee or why are those formats not accepted as a free format? ok - plain text really isn't an alternative for most, but html or mobi?

Definitely over the top. Revoking licensing aside, the Amazon ecosystem is pretty open- apps for every almost every OS, no requirement for online access to read books, copy and paste (up to a limit), multiple licenses per customer.

It seems everything the author is concerned about would be solved it there were a centrally/open-source managed, non-profit, DRM out there. The DRM which would be analogous to SSH.

So one thing I've never understood: Is this really not technically possible or is the problem that the people who have the knowhow to create that are ideologically opposed?

There is open DRM (e.g. OMA) but companies that are using DRM as an excuse for lock-in will never adopt it.

One place Amazon appears to be noticing the benefit to reduced or eliminating DRM is in game sales. On Reddit in the /r/gamedeals subreddit, we often discuss if a game has DRM before concluding if it's a good purchase or not. The Amazon rep Tony often hangs around there to answer questions or posts deals himself, and he sees that DRM-free games do sell more. He now says if a game is DRM free or not when posting deals.

I understand they have also had a few experiments into working with publishers to sell games without DRM to measure the effect.

So, just an anecdote from a small part of Amazon, but that information may propagate to the books section eventually. We can only hope, because nothing puts me off purchasing media like digital rights management.

Seen a few posts of this nature from John Birmingham. So how does he explain all his books being available on Amazon then, for download to Kindle?

He even has his own Author's page: http://www.amazon.com/John-Birmingham/e/B001IOBFQA/ref=sr_tc...

His latest book, "Angels of Vengeance", published in April 2012, is available for Kindle, paperback, hardcover and audiobook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com