Protecting Your Ebook – DRM Challenges
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the digital equivalent of protecting your personal property. If you own a home or a vehicle then you understand that having an alarm system or insurance is a necessity. Its necessary because there are other people that might harm your property either intentionally or on accident.
The same holds true for your digital creations (property) and the threats that exist in terms of plagiarism, distribution or other undesirable usage scenarios. This creates the need for proper protection which ensures that your property is being used in the fashion that you intended it to be. DRM is supposed to provide the protection necessary to ensure proper usage and authorized distribution of digital content.
So, smart people get together and create protections and integrate these DRM protections with the distribution platforms, devices or the media itself. Unfortunately the “bad guys” know how to circumvent DRM just like the car thieves that understand how to bypass your car alarm. An unseen and unheard loser in the battle between good and evil ends up being the consumer of digital information.
DRM Evolution
As the methods of protection evolve so do the devices, reading software and proposed formats. This constant evolution of DRM, digital platforms and usability is an endless race without a finish line. Consumers end up by multiple and different devices, repurchasing media and suffering from a lack of portability. This struggle is the greatest inhibitor and limits the ability for information, movies, games and music to be truly portable. This lack of portability is really a struggle between DRM creators and DRM crackers, individuals that try to bypass DRM, and results in poor compatibility across differing devices.
Some individuals argue that this lack of portability and compatibility is the exact reason that they want to crack the protection schemes because after they by the media it is their right to do so in order to ensure long term usability. This argument is valid but it does not solve the problems associated with theft and illegal distribution.
The Solution
There might not be a good solution in the near term. Ultimately consumers want easy to use, portable and compatible media across all the devices that they own and publishers want to protect their right to sell and distribute the media. As a user I am unconcerned with DRM and more concerned about portability but this does not mean that I am unwilling to pay for media. You cant stop the thieves so why try? What do you think the solution is?
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This is a tough subject. There are plenty of people out there who will try to scare you into locking the heck out of your ebook, but like you stated above - the real thieves can get past any of the current security offerings.
As an ebook purchaser myself, I hate it when I can’t print it out or transfer it to a different computer if I need to. I recently bought an ebook that had no less than 3 security codes to get into it - and you guessed it - I’ve still not read it.
A few things that have worked for me instead of using the security codes/software are:
1) Place a link to your site in the footer so it shows up on each page. (I also put a link to my site on the title page.)
2) Place a couple of relevant affiliate links in the book that your readers will find useful and perhaps click on.
3) Have your author bio include a short description of your backend product with a link to its sales page.
This way if your ebook does get into non-paying hands, you can still get links back to your site and possibly an upgrade to your backend product - or an affiliate sale.