Man Is The Media.
Why The Publishing Industry Needs a DRM-free iTunes for Publications
December 9th, 2008 by Martin
Anyone interested in music and literature – and the impact of technology on both – keep making the digital music analogy: It took a decade for the music industry to learn how to make money in the digital era, and for the most part they were whining about about it and fighting digital formats and distribution, instead of turning the new technology into an advantage. Now the publishing industry needs to get their act together, learn from the music industry and their mistakes and apply all of that to their own world.
But what exactly were the mistakes being made, and how do they apply to digital publishing? I’ve been digging into the current discussions within the publishing industry itself. I came across this post on Medialoper by Kirk Biglione mentioning a DRM presentation he held at O’Reilly’s TOC.
Even though it’s a few months old now, it sums up the myths and facts about DRM, while fleshing out the music industry analogy a bit more. I find it worth posting here, as the DRM discussion is very much alive in the publishing industry today, even though music sales clearly have demonstrated that it’s bad for business. It’s not that I don’t see why: Publishers are par excellence creators of original content and they will take any measure necessary to protect their livelihood.
However, the digital era is ultimately not about copying but about permission (as I’ve mentioned before), and that’s how you should build your business today. I think the presentation below sums that up nicely: Give the consumers what they want, and find a way to make money on that.
Here’s what I took away from the presentation below
- Consumers are not pirates. Give them what they want, and where/how they want it, and they will pay for it. If you fail to do this, consumers will go elsewhere (Mygazines would be a dirty examples of that ‘elsewhere’ in the world of publishing)
- DRM is a plague to consumers and any positive effects on sales and copyright are a complete illusions
- iTunes showed us the way as they focused on the consumers
- iTunes represents a new form of restriction, ‘golden handcuffs’
- The presentation indirectly dubs the Kindle the publishing industry’s savior. I do not agree completely: While the perfect publication-replacement device is definitely essential to the success of digital print (like the iPod was to iTunes), one single device will not cut it alone. I anticipate a more universal approach, where publications becomes more web-friendly, and the web become more mobile-friendly. Already there’s a neat app, TextonPhone, that I enjoy very much on my Google-Phone, and I see no reason this won’t explode in 2009 with more than just free/public domain text-based publications.
While I’m pretty sure that the publishing industry cannot completely copy the model of music, mainly because reading is different that listening, an iTunes for publications is not that hard to imagine: Search and find articles, excerpts or entire works, and pay per view/hour/unlimited access – or get free access sponsored by ads/video/etc.
Now, please enjoy Kirk’s presentation below.
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Maybe one for the guys at Songbird to consider….have been checking out Adobe’s digital editions but must say I am not very impressed with the functionality and the layouts.
We should try to get a group of tech volunteers to build one….one day:)
Yes, I’m confident we could find the tech volunteers. The nut to crack is making everything agreeable with the content owners. It has to be really easy, affordable and hold the promise of a proper revenue share.
Or it could go down as we see with YouTube that basically hijacks the act of publishing, does it better than most labels themselves (while contesting copyright laws) and finally gets away with it by sharing the ad revenue.
Just after my last comment, I saw that Google Book Search announced the inclusion of digital magazines. They are very much an example of a company going for option 2, ‘hijacking but still sharing the wealth’. A lengthy post here http://www.ferrogate.com/2008/12/how-google-book-search-turns.html