What is it about DRM that makes us so crazy?

Michael Jensen | 03/19/2009 | Numérisation

Because really, it’s so 20th century.

Digital Rights Management systems (on ebook files) is not unlike printing our books in non-photo-blue, so that nobody can photocopy them. Or having unrippable shrinkwraps on our books in bookstores. Or having some RFID system on every page that prevents skipping ahead….

It’s asking for misery—misery with customer service, misery because it angers our customers, misery because it relegates our publications to a previous mindset, treating a book as an isolated object that only exists in the form we control.

Publishing is much more than just producing a book, as we all know; and today, it’s much more than just producing a static object. As publishers, we have been conditioned to think about a book as being that static object that will be just as “fresh” in 2020 as it is now.

But the reality is that our marketplaces are increasingly fragile, and angering our customers is no way to build brand or market share. The reality is that our readers increasingly expect to start a book on the laptop, and finish it on the iPhone. The reality is that there *is no DRM that has not been broken by the pirate community.*

And further—for $400 or less, one can buy a scanner that produces a searchable PDF in about an hour, from a printed book.

So we need a new paradigm of thought, in which we recognize that our job is to distinguish our premium content from the welter of mediocre content; it’s to encourage readers (whether pirate or paying) to come buy another book from us, via links, promotion, and encouragement; to develop means of making the “new” or “updated” version available to paying readers for free, and pirate readers for a small fee; to find new and innovative ways to *take advantage* of superdistribution and viral distribution, rather than try to put tin-can roadblocks into the path of our readers’ 4x4s.

It’s hard, making this shift. But if publishers don’t, we may well ensure that we will find ourselves without a buying public at all.

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Against Orthodoxy

Michael Jensen | 03/18/2009 | Numérisation

I’ve been playing with an idea that runs counter to existing orthodoxy,that I’ve been trying to find the downside to: crosspromotion.

We have these potentially potent devices—the Web pages that we build for each book, the blog entries about the book that we put on our sites—that we unfortunately think of as billboards, *not as networks.*

Today, publishers are competing for a billion people’s time. And we are asking people to pay a lot of money for the privilege of committing *more* time, to long-form works, when the world of free abundance is a click away.

I’m fearful of the survival of long-form works, and I think publishing needs to *promote long-form works in general* in order to maintain a long-term niche in society.

We need to be defensively strengthening ourselves by promoting our kind of publishing—whatever kind that is. The best way to do that in the digital world is to promote ourselves through muscular crosspromotion.

Google (and all Web search engine) weigh “relevance” in part by paying attention to the *quality* and *quantity of* links to a page and to a site. It is not just the words upon the page that are indexed—the networked context is also analyzed, to determine what to display on the first page of Google’s search results.

Given this algorithmic reality, we need to compete in networked terms.

Canadian crosspromotion can start simple: simply include, at the bottom of Book X’s Web page, a list of “Related Links” that are to your own *and other Canadian publishers’ related books.* These could be easily suggested by our authors and our editors.

In doing this as a group, you could:

a) strengthen Canadian publisher sites in the algorithmic eyes of Google,
b) strengthen the value of each linked-to publisher’s page,
c) build stronger readership of long-form work,
d) increase customer satisfaction,
e) increase the interested readers who can find you,
f) increase the overall chances of finding buyers and readers for your ebooks.

What’s the downside?

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