HANDebooks

DRM is an inconvenience plain and simple. This is becoming even more evident as more and more devices hit the market and more people are having to deal with it. I have especially noticed it lately with media I borrow from the library. As more people have discovered ebooks and audiobooks, libraries have taken notice by trying to provide new services to their customers. While they still offer books and CDs in the library, many also offer the ability to download electronic books and audiobooks from the web.
This is where the problem of DRM comes in. For a long time, owners of the Kindle couldn’t check out most of the ebooks available from the overdrive media service that many libraries use. The reason, DRM. Similarly, many of the audiobooks available for borrowing are only available in wma format, which means they can not be used with many of the devices people are going to want to use to listen to them with. People are not trying to steal the content, they are obtaining it through legal means, but they are not allowed to consume it on the device of their choice even though the devices they want to use are more convenient than the devices that can play it.
The worst part about it is the DRM isn’t really protecting anything. Anyone who wants to steal the content can; the DRM only makes it difficult and inconvenient for the honest consumers who want to use electronic devices that don’t happen to support wma. Most audiobooks are already available on CD, which have no DRM at all, so what is the DRM protecting? The DRM makes what should be non platform specific media not only platform specific, but reliant on a single application for playback. I think the use of DRM in this way has the opposite effect as to what is intended. I think rather than discouraging piracy, it actually encourages it. A consumer who would happily borrow DRM content from their local library, but discovers they can’t play it on their device of choice may, instead, simply find a pirated version, or figure out how to bypass the DRM. This circumvents the libraries and other legitimate sources who are paying royalties to the publishers. Once a user has taken the effort to figure out how to work around the DRM they have little incentive to bother with going through the hassle of dealing with content locked up with DRM in the future.
I think it would be better for everyone, even the publishers themselves, if they just did away with this type of DRM. I don’t have any issue with them trying to protect their intellectual property but DRM doesn’t work, certainly not in the case of an audiobook where audio quality is not as crucial as perhaps with music and an audio book can simply be rerecorded during playback. Since DRM doesn’t work, won’t work, can’t work, it does little more than inconvenience everyone who has to deal with it.
It seems some publishers have already figured this out. Some books, for example I recently borrowed The Gunslinger by Stephen King, don’t bother with DRM. It was just a series of mp3 files in a zip file. Stephen King isn’t some two bit writer and if there was ever an author that had to worry about piracy, he would qualify. Instead, it was presented in a format playable on virtually any device and they simply asked that you delete the files when the lending period was over. How simple.