Time for ebook publishers to turn over a new leaf

WIRED:It's a nice dream, but you cannot keep the content of ebooks locked down with restrictions

I’M OBSESSING (as regular readers will note) about ebooks right now. In my defence, I’m not alone: Google this week announced that it is joining Amazon in opening an electronic book-publishing wing or building “a digital book ecosystem”, as its representative describes it.

The search engine’s plans are a little different to those of Amazon or Sony, the other player in digital versions of published books.

Rather than create dedicated hardware to read the books, Google will let you read previews of the book’s text on its website: if you want the rest of the book you pay a fee.

However, the text stays on Google’s site. You can’t download it or transfer it to non-net connected devices.

Would you pay for a book that stays in Google’s hands and can’t leave your computer’s screen?

Google would argue that you already trust the site with your e-mail, and perhaps your blog, so why wouldn’t your book collection be any different?

And while Amazon’s dedicated Kindle book-reading hardware definitely provides a better reading experience than a laptop or PC right now, it’s only a matter of time before our general purpose computers catch up. After all, it’s not as if we don’t use them to squint at endless virtual reams of text already.

But perhaps there’s a bigger problem for Google than comparisons with Kindle.

The real problem is users comparing what they can do with one of Google’s ebooks and what they can do with any other piece of text on a PC.

I’m sure publishers won’t let you hit a key and “select all” the text in a book.

When you cut and paste quotes to a friend, you’ll be limited in what you can send them. If you try to print more than a few pages, Google will no doubt complain.

And if – as I wrote last week – you’re a visually disabled person who needs the text read to them, or transformed into more readable fonts, I’m sure you’ll be out of luck.

You won’t even be able to do what you can normally do with a plain old, real-world book.

I’ve already been caught several times offering to lend my friends books that I’ve bought and enjoyed, only to realise that I bought them in electronic form on the iPhone’s Kindle application, so I can’t lend them to anyone.

Neither can I resell them to a second-hand bookseller or even pass my library on as a gift.

And while I don’t expect Google to disappear tomorrow, I fully expect authors and publishers to be in a constant battle with the company over their contractual agreements.

If the authors walked away tomorrow, would Google still have the right to show you the text that you’d bought from them?

These were the kinds of problems that niggled at music lovers when they bought authors’ works, riddled with digital rights management, from the earliest versions of Apple’s iTunes store.

They’re all limitations that publishers – music or print – demand from these new technologies, because they’re terrified that their works will end up in the hands of pirates.

The lesson the music industry learnt was that their works did end up in the hands of pirates – and they also sent their paying customers to the pirates because the public discovered they could do more and have an easier time with pirated free content that had DRM removed than they ever could with the crippled products that legitimate outlets sold.

Right now book publishers think that they can hold back that problem with DRM, just as the music industry did.

If we lock our books up with restrictions on the Google website, and embed them in dedicated devices like the Kindle and Sony eReader, they think they’ll never escape into the rest of the digital world.

It’s a nice dream, but it’s a fantasy. You can never keep content locked down in DRM, because only one DRM-unlocked copy needs to be made available for it to be copied an infinite number of times.

These days, making a legitimate DRM-unlocked copy of a musical track is as easy as popping a CD into a computer (a process that’s known as “ripping”) or recording a track from a radio.

Very soon, making a legitimate copy of an ebook will be just as easy. Too many smart people want digital – and legal – copies of their current book collection.

So they’re designing “book rippers”: a simple construction of plexiglass and off-the-shelf digital cameras that you can build for less than $100 (€70).

These systems can already digitise a book collection at a respectable rate. And if you want the same features for a book you’ve bought as an ebook, it’s even easier. Just drop your Kindle where you’d place the real book and rig a small automatically-operated lever to the “next page” button. The current version can “scan” in 750 ebook pages in an hour, and uses optical character recognition to turn that into any text format you might want.

There’s no DRM in the world that can prevent such copying; I imagine that converting Google’s web-placed texts will be just as easy if not easier.

If only publishers could skip these first few chapters of their digital adventure as quickly as that machine can and realise that DRM isn’t going to slow down their customers – it’s just going to impede the publishers’ understanding and exploitation of this new market.