Pioneering DRM Innovation In The EBook Business

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of technological advancement that authors within the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these innovations are striving to safeguard their written work.

What DRM boils down to is working out a way to stop your eBook being sold-on, copied or distributed without your knowledge (and without you benefiting). Technological innovation in the music industry was slow to catch up on providing DRM, resulting in songs being widely distributed on the Internet. Music publishers were slow to act (and react) in that instance.

In the eBook business, intellectual asset management was built in from the onset as eBooks are a product of the software industry rather than having grown out of regular book publishing sector. As a result, eBooks have used innovation from an early stage to protect the intellectual property within eBooks.

Previously, software vendors such as Adobe pioneered the PDF format for writing eBooks. Their software can inhibit the functionality of PDF readers. Most notably, a protected PDF can be configured to disallow copying of the eBook text or even disallow printing the file. This is DRM in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

In recent times, the Kindle Reader can notify their home servers over an internet connection if eBooks are being illegally shared. The vendor can then decide how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through the courts). They could infact take the option of remotely removing the file off of the player (as they have already done http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). The ramifications of this to device owner’s privacy are yet to be fully understood but it is certain to be a hot topic over the coming years.

And it now seems that even software houses are putting similar functionality into their PDF creation/publishing applications including password protection on PDF files combined with the ability to disable the eBook from a remote computer in the event that a customer has provided a false credit-card or is seeking a refund. For a lot of authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through a simple configuration of their publishing software is an optimum solution.

These developments in the eBook business may be too late arriving for the millions of written eBooks that are already available online (these still have copyright protection on their intellectual content; Just no technological means to protect them). Future developments in PDF copy protection should make it even more practical for authors to start writing eBooks and begin profiting from selling eBooks online.

Writing ebooks and want to publish & sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your ebook ecommerce business online today.

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