I read a lot. I buy most of the books I read. Yesterday, I decided to partcipate in the ongoing experiment of commercial e-books. The book industry should love me.

But they don’t. Evidently HarperCollins hates me and wants to make me mad.

The book I bought, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, is wrapped in “DRM”, so-called Digital Rights Management. The publisher ostensibly wants to prevent unlimited use of its books, and to do so they wrap the text in cryptographic mumbo-jumbo so that only some devices can decipher them and show the contents to a reader.

What do I get for my money? Something I couldn’t use. I use my Nokia 770 to read when traveling and space is precious. My portable book-device can’t read the book I bought because the file they sold me is locked with DRM that my book-device doesn’t understand.

DRM doesn’t stop people who are insistent on breaking off the locks and then copying and redistributing the contents. Those people can never be defeated. DRM only affects people like me—honest people who didn’t get their book/music/movie from a dark alley, but walked into a bright, official store and slapped money down on the counter and walked away with an approved version of the book. If I had downloaded a cracked book, I wouldn’t have a problem.

Essentially, the publisher thinks annoying a significant fraction of its customers is the best way to prop up their business model. It’s worth it to frustrate some of us, in order to prevent everyday people from loaning books like we could do with physical books, they think. Well, I’m never buying another e-book until I know the DRM fad is dead.

I want to read this book on my trip, and I’ve already bought it, and I’m smarter than the average bear, so I spent some time late last night and I broke the locks off the file HarperCollins sold me. If you bought Anathem also and want unencumbered text to read on any device, let me know.

11 Sep 2008, 08:55 #